DnD/Pf/TTRPG Confessions

Your place to submit confessions about DnD, Pathfinder, and other TTRPGs! Complain about balancing, talk about your character, etc.!

[ttrpgconfessions]

Welcome to my confession blog!

I was surprised to see there were no DnD confession blogs, so I made one myself. This is geared towards DnD and Pathfinder since I know them best, but fans of any tabletop roleplaying game are welcome.

I probably can't offer mechanical advice, but you can talk about whatever you want as long as it relates to TTRPGs. Asks involving serious topics must have a warning (anything found in a typical game is fine). No bigots, including transphobes.

[ttrpgconfessions]

I don’t play DnD, I play a different system. And I just gotta get something out of my head.

For this particular system, we don’t have hard rules like you might have in dnd. All the abilities and attacks are written by the players and DM. They have certain themes that they need to follow, but anything within that theme is plausible. It’s incredibly open ended in what you can do in this system.

Every now and again, we let players have their own NPCs or run their own story arcs within the story. And I think it’s a nice way to let the players expand on their characters in ways they might not be able to.

Right now one of our players is running an arc. They already ran a thing before where we played different characters from our normal ones and we got to experience the backstory of their player character. This time we’re running one with our primary characters. Our main plot characters.

This arc is very combat focused. More so than most of our arcs. We’re typically roleplay focused with one combat per arc. They said that they won’t be holding back and that if we lose we lose. Our main DM is much more lax about that and we usually play by what we think would be most in line for our characters to do in different situations, which sometimes includes pulling our punches. Since this is a combat oriented arc in which we’re expected not to pull any punches, we didn’t.

And for this story, they’ve decided that one person’s player character is overpowered and needs to be reworked.

For some reason they went to the other player characters before going to the main DM or the player who owns that character to get a feel for what we think first. Personally, I said that our party composition is off balance, but that as of late the other party members have started to catch up and that at this point our two primary damage dealers are nearly on equal footing. And as somebody who has DMed the main party on several occasions, I never felt like it was anything I couldn’t balance around or have fun with.

They ended up confronting the person who owns that character on how their character is OP and everybody agrees. Player responded rather passive aggressively on that and brings up some of the insane abilities that everybody else has. Including our temporary DM for this scenario who has created abilities that have nearly erased entire story arcs until the party told them not to do that because we didn’t want to lose out on combat awards, nor invalidate the main DM’s work on that arc.

So now we have problems! And the main DM didn’t even know we had problems until we had problems because they didn’t speak to main DM until this happened.

They want to rework how that person’s character works. That person clearly does not want a rework and is content with their character as is. I feel like they only took what they wanted to hear from me and ignored the rest of what I had to say.

And frankly, I’m not happy with them reworking this person’s character either because they aren’t even the main DM and it’s pretty much turned into a ‘This is happening or we’re going to have a month long conflict’ scenario.

I’m just pissed man. This hobby is supposed to be my break from work stress and shit. Why must they make everything more stressful. Whether this character is OP or not isn’t going to matter in like a month’s time. Cause in a roleplay position, this character’s build makes perfect sense.

They have a lot of means of buffing themself, but the more buffed up they get, the less control they have over themself and the more they lose their identity. So the game rewards them for being super buffed up, but punishes the character in a roleplay sense. They want to change it so it buffs the character when neutral and that’s easier to remain neutral. Which like… is already what the character wants. You are ruining their internal narrative conflict!!!

And that really gets to me as well. Cause the longer this arc goes on, the more I realize how little this temp DM pays attention during other arcs.

Like the NPCs they’ve thrown in have tied to real world gods and locations when we have heavily established that this story doesn’t take place in our world. We have entire documents on the gods that exist in this world, both real ones and ones that are entirely made up. And they have a character from the country that this other person’s character is from. And this character is like the most famous, popular person on that country. Even though we already met a person who should have been filling that position as is, not just because they are pretty and famous, but because that character is fucking king of that country and should therefore be more famous that this random fucker who’s one trait is pretty.

They also certainly have a favorite person, and it’s definitely our second strongest player character. Nobody else has any ties to this story line but that character. Nobody runs into any characters they might know or info they might hear but that character.

It’s just sad. I feel like half of the party is just checked out, waiting for the arc to be over, and then the other half thinks this is the coolest shit in the world, so we can’t complain about it.

Apologies for the late posting of this, but that's annoying. I think so many issues could be prevented or at least made better with communication. Lack of communication at a table can really make or break an issue. The buffing mechanic makes sense, and I get being frustrated by your hobby turning into another source of stress.

[ttrpgconfessions]

Been excited to run my first d&d game in a long time. Gave the players two months to get their sheets done and offered help if people needed it. We're in session two, first combat encounter and I just found out that my partner hasn't even picked his spells yet.

Two months and no spells? I'd be so upset 🙁 I'm sorry to hear that, anon. I know I would be disappointed, especially since you offered help. That really sucks.