No, but I do get annoyed when a single spell negates an entire planned game session. That's my fault: I forgot to reread the PC spell lists. I was just excited to try out the 5e DMG's chase rules. Stupid Flight spell.

Quote from: S'mon;872824Yeah, I agree. I've occasionally seen "That was too easy - that can't have been the *real* Dracula I staked!", but mostly players are happy with combat-as-war where their planning & tactics give a final easy victory.

This actually reminds me of an in-store demo I played in, can't remember the name of the RPG, but it was gritty sci fi. We were using pre-gens, playing a team of mercenaries going on various missions, and the demo ran weekly for 4 weeks. Rather than spending 3-4 hours fighting our way through the missions, we spent over 2 hours just planning, then wrapped things up in 30 minutes to an hour. The GM had never seen the game approached that way, but he rolled with it, and we all had a lot of fun.

The planning itself was really the fun. Seeing it more or less work was fun in the sense it was kind of the reward. I would imagine that if either our planning or our reward were undermined for the sake of the action being "more dramatic" would have killed a lot of the fun we were having.

Quote from: Necrozius;872833No, but I do get annoyed when a single spell negates an entire planned game session. That's my fault: I forgot to reread the PC spell lists. I was just excited to try out the 5e DMG's chase rules. Stupid Flight spell.

I don't know what kind of chase rules 5e has--I have a visceral negative reaction to the term "chase rules" ever since being disappointed by SpyCraft. I would think that if someone using a flight spell would kill the planned chase rather than make the chase even more interesting than before, I'm pretty justified in my reaction to them.

I developed my own chase rules, not that there's much to them, that are portable from system to system. I've had negative feedback when nerds on a message board read them, positive feedback when they're put into play.

Quote from: Lunamancer;872837I don't know what kind of chase rules 5e has--I have a visceral negative reaction to the term "chase rules" ever since being disappointed by SpyCraft. I would think that if someone using a flight spell would kill the planned chase rather than make the chase even more interesting than before, I'm pretty justified in my reaction to them.

I developed my own chase rules, not that there's much to them, that are portable from system to system. I've had negative feedback when nerds on a message board read them, positive feedback when they're put into play.

The 5e chase rules look good to me on paper. I wanted to try them out. Perhaps they do suck: I won't know until they're used (I'm not a fan of white rooming rules until I try them at least once).

The party had already decided what they were going to to that session: tread through the jungle and find the MacGuffin in the ruin. I had just planned to structure it with a few chases in between rests and exploration.

Using the flight spell was a clever solution, but I wasn't ready to deal with the complete subversion of everything that I had planned, so I didn't have anything for the players to go through.

Yes, after the fact, I came up with dozens of ways to salvage the session and make it cool (the white apes can FLY!!!). But eh...

I don't often get caught off guard in such a disastrous way (I am usually pretty good at improvising and going with the flow). It happens, though.

Quote from: RPGPundit;872813I think mostly that GMs tend to worry much more about having cinematically or literarily 'impressive' final conflicts than players.  Most players I've seen are perfectly happy to bumrush the opponent and kick the shit out of him in two rounds.

I think what often happens is the player who wants the more challenging confrontation or the more cinematic confrontation is louder about it. If I get that kind of reaction, I always ask each player individually. most of the time, the other players are not interested in me planning, stacking or fudging so things are more climactic. Sometimes you will get a whole group of players who do want that but I think it is less common than some GMs realize. Definitely a good idea to probe that kind of feedback more so you don't ruin the game for the 4 who are cool with how things went down.

Quote from: Necrozius;872833No, but I do get annoyed when a single spell negates an entire planned game session. That's my fault: I forgot to reread the PC spell lists. I was just excited to try out the 5e DMG's chase rules. Stupid Flight spell.

I've learned to roll with this. If every thing you throw at the party is negated by a single spell, that is different. But I think most players really enjoy it when they use the right tool and it yields tremendous and fitting results.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;872845I've learned to roll with this. If every thing you throw at the party is negated by a single spell, that is different. But I think most players really enjoy it when they use the right tool and it yields tremendous and fitting results.

Yeah, the key thing (and this may be getting off topic) I've always summed up as "There shall be no formula for success." Meaning, specifically, you can't just default to some automatic procedure and expect consistently good results.

So a dungeon that is supposed to be a difficult labyrinth should have some feature that negates the "follow the left wall" strategy, whether it's literally a trick like one-way doors or teleporters, or if it's just a place where the floor gives way dropping the party to an area where tracing the wall doesn't lead to an exit.

If there's a particularly troublesome spell, flight, invisibility, polymorph, and illusions immediately come to mind as being something GMs commonly find difficult to handle, then there should be some encounter or adventure that makes the use of such powers more of a disadvantage than an advantage. Which isn't to say use these every single time out, thwarting players at every turn. The idea is to just break their pattern. Make them realize there are drawbacks to everything, so that they think twice before using troublesome tactics and make sure they're actually appropriate for the situation and what they're trying to accomplish rather than just an annoying go-to.

Quote from: Lunamancer;872850So a dungeon that is supposed to be a difficult labyrinth should have some feature that negates the "follow the left wall" strategy, whether it's literally a trick like one-way doors or teleporters, or if it's just a place where the floor gives way dropping the party to an area where tracing the wall doesn't lead to an exit.

Or you could simply build a maze that isn't simply connected. Like so...

Quote from: S'mon;872824Yeah, I agree. I've occasionally seen "That was too easy - that can't have been the *real* Dracula I staked!",

In the past 30 years of running games, I've seen more of this in my neck of the woods.  Again, not saying it's right or wrong, just my personal experience.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;872936In the past 30 years of running games, I've seen more of this in my neck of the woods.  Again, not saying it's right or wrong, just my personal experience.

I've seen that and I have seen some let down when an expected big battle was a walk through. It felt like a combination of relief and blue balls, honestly. Sometimes you want that big cinematic punch up on some level, for the excitement, the drama or maybe just catharsis if its a opponents you've come to really want to punch repeatedly.

 I've had some anti climatic disappointment like when a character of mine finally faced off against her rival, a fight that had been built up for the length of game and, due to some optimization on my part but more a spectacular die roll she one shotted him in the opening turn. It was kind of a let down but not the GM's fault. He survived and there may have been a rematch but the game was closing and there wasn't a sequel.

Quote from: S'mon;872824Yeah, I agree. I've occasionally seen "That was too easy - that can't have been the *real* Dracula I staked!",

Ironically, that is EXACTLY what happened in my Dark Albion campaign. As you may know if you've bought Dark Albion, Dracula is in it as a villain (during the later part of the campaign period, coinciding with the second rule of the historical Vlad Tepes). And of course, my PCs were sent by the Pontifex himself to go kill him.

They went through hell to get there, facing huge problems along the way as they crossed the whole (at the time war-torn) Continent, and then getting to Argesz (Dracula's castle), and then going through all kinds of horrific opponents in the castle, only to have a relatively easy fight against Dracula himself at the end.

Believe me, none of them minded.

Quote from: RPGPundit;873245Ironically, that is EXACTLY what happened in my Dark Albion campaign. As you may know if you've bought Dark Albion, Dracula is in it as a villain (during the later part of the campaign period, coinciding with the second rule of the historical Vlad Tepes). And of course, my PCs were sent by the Pontifex himself to go kill him.

They went through hell to get there, facing huge problems along the way as they crossed the whole (at the time war-torn) Continent, and then getting to Argesz (Dracula's castle), and then going through all kinds of horrific opponents in the castle, only to have a relatively easy fight against Dracula himself at the end.

Believe me, none of them minded.

Well for me it was a solo campaign set in the NightLife RPG universe (but using sort-of-AD&D rules) from around 1995-2000. The werewolf PC had spent the campaign with Dracula running rings round him; when he finally located Drac's coffin and staked the critter without a fight it seemed anticlimactic.

Player disbelief at how something was 'too easy' can also be fun and have amusing consequences, though.

Quote from: RPGPundit;873659Player disbelief at how something was 'too easy' can also be fun and have amusing consequences, though.

Personal experience says "Hell yeah!"