Fixing a BROKEN D&D Game
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- Опубліковано 11 вер 2024
- Did an overpowered spell, class ability or powerful magic item break your Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition game? It'll be ok. Just use some of these Dungeon Master tips and tricks to fix your D&D campaign, no matter how broken you might think it is.
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I'm currently running my first campaign (Frostmaiden) with two players who have played since 1st edition and a guy who, somehow, probably has more hours than both of them combined. Basically, these guys know what they're doing and, short of a few one-shots, this is my first time. I was stressing out a little about how easily they were handling everything I gave them, from avoiding/overpowering encounters to effectively scouting areas and everything in between, feeling like I was failing. It wasn't until I took a sec to realize they all came in with a smile on their face. They all talked about the next thing they wanted to do or the crazy thing that happened last session and they all were happy when they left. Could they get bored with being strong heroes? Sure. But at this point, I'm just happy they're happy. I'll deal with the rest as it comes.
Besides, obviously it’s good to surprise and challenge players, but they sound like there treating the dangers of the world with respect and using strategy they’re not unkillable goes there just ruthlessly careful adventurers
Truth
Frsitmaiden is a tough module! LMoP it is not! Try not to get too down on players playing well! Remember: if they show up it’s a good sign! And you’ll know when it’s time to challenge them. Have fun!
Yeah, back in the day it was as against the DM. We had to be ultra careful and over prepared, 10 foot poles to poke corpses in the alleyways. This is the era of party wipes and modules like white plume mountain and The tomb of annihilation. As long as they’re smiling it’s all good. Work in some role-play and try to collapse a house on them for good old times 😜
That sounds more like smart and engaged players.
I lean into the limitations of overpowered items but ONLY in a story driven way. The druid in the group used Wind Walk as their fast travel system in an archipelago environment. All day they were hopping around islands. Right around the eight hour mark, the party split up without warning, with half the group (not including the druid) heading over open water. So the spell started to wear off! I had them realize it before it was too late, but now two of the characters were stranded on the beach, while the druid and another character were safe further inland... or so they thought! They were close to one another but had to find creative ways to regroup with most of their spell slots exhauste, all while avoiding dangers they could easily handle if they were together. Ever since then, the druid is more careful about when and how to use the spell, mixing in other modes of transportation both mundane and magical.
As the GM, the "broken" things in your game are an opportunity rather than a liability. A video game analog is how adaptive difficulty raises/lowers to match your abilities & skill level
id say thats a nice way too look at it on the surface, but what can often happen is that the "broken" thing in the game is just one character, and if it is just scaling up the game to match makes it worse for EVERYONE else
i had a character in one of my pathfinder games using a feat line (which i later found out is actually BANNED in pf society games because of how strong it is) which allowed him to fully negate one attack per turn, combine that with a naturally very high AC because he had essentially spent everything on AC boosts and this character was functionall immune to all conventional attacks
any sort of "i swing my axe at you" enemy if it was even remotly a threat to him, was absolutly garenteed to hit everyone else in the party, if the rest of the party had a chance to dodge/block their attacks, he litterally couldnt be hurt by them
i could have set up the party against lots of thigns that dont care about AC, spell casters with saves instead of hits, swarms which autohit, but if i did that repeatedly it would have very quickly become apparent to everyone that i was targeting him, and the thing he had specifically made his character GOOD at would be pointless
people want to feel like their efforts pay off, if i jump through hoops to make my character immune to fire, only for the moment that happens enemies stop using fire against me, why did i bother?
no i could have tried to a better mix of enemies and encounters, have some things which can deal with him and some which cant, but that would turn into a situation where some fights just become trivial and un "lose" able becasue they literally cant be a threat to him
he "broke" the game in a way that wasnt an opportunity, it was only a liability, making my job harder, and the game less fun for everyone (including the guy himself, who either didnt feel challenged at all in fights, or felt directly targeted, neither of which are fun)
the end result was i spoke to him directly between sessions and we ended up "taking it away", we agreed on a way to nerf his featl ine so that it was still good, he was still the BEST at not getting hit by a good margine, but he wasnt immune to it anymore
@@gregsmw A character is a game piece. In an interesting game, the pieces are never balanced. A Bishop isn’t a Rook. The pewter guy on a horse can’t make an attack in the artillery phase. If your King is checkmated, you lose. But, the Queen is your God Wizard.
A poor-sport player can break your game. But, that kind of game can be mechanically sound and still broken-no-fun. Some people aren’t cut out play social improv game…or, maybe they just aren’t mentally prepared at that phase in their life. A balanced *player* ought to be self-limiting enough that they know when to hand over the stage to another player.
If you’ve got someone that seems legit innocent unaware that they’re hogging laurels…well, first, I wouldn’t buy it. People know…but for some people making other players pay envy tax so I can experience more me-fun…it’s fine with them. Its more socially acceptable to act like an absentminded stage hog. But, does it matter what lurks in those labyrinths? I don’t think so. The envy tax the other players must pay to feed a narcissist is too high a cost to ask. A DM isn’t a therapist. A DM is the host. As the host, your first responsibility is get together a party with a good communication and flow. If you’ve got that, the party funs all by itself. If you don’t, rearranging the treasure tables a stat block ain’t going to fix anything.
In D&D, especially as a DM, you’ve also got to keep in mind that the power curve in the game is intentionally bent way out of whack. The authors want the Nth Edition to be a clearly recognizable version of Gary Gygax AD&D…the books my Grandmother wouldn’t let me bring in her house cause…Moral Panic! From AD&D it’s absolutely clear that Gary and his buddies were not the popular crowd in high-school.
A first level Wizard is a XP and Gold suck, a serious physical liability, and pretty useless. According to 1E “filled volume AOE” effects you could, if the DM forgot doors, or forgot to close them, fry every creature in a dungeon to a crisp with one well targeted fireball by 5th level. You would also almost certainly kill yourself with the backflash if the DM didn’t agree with your algebra.
At 17th level? Time Stop. Wish. I’m God. Revenge of the Nerds.
In 4E they did an excellent job of balancing all characters NASCAR-style. Same chassis, engine, tires, fuel, and cup-holders. Same shell…but everyone gets different stickers!
4E was very balanced, and very not D&D. For a game to feel like authentic D&D…it has to have that fundamental acid-trip stream of consciousness that Gygax gave it. the mechanics can’t be too clean. You need to use all the dice, and a lot, and never for any clear reason from one check or test to another. Everything has to have a fake Latin, Greek, or Tounge-in-cheek reference. The names of abilities cannot clearly indicate what the primary use of them is. If you’ve got a sucker-trap or dastardly NPC exclusive spell or ability, it should have a kickass name. The best spells and abilities need to sound mind-numbingly boring. Extra Attack. Sleep. Web. Yawn. That’s D&D. It’s not an iPhone XX…It’s an Apple IIe
As a result the mechanical “chassis” of the game really only works well from levels 5-9. Levels 1-4 can be a blast. But, you might as well be playing Clue, because everyone is just a different shade of helpless, common, and poor. Few 5th level spells or similar abilities are dead-stop gamebreakers. But a 6th or 7th level spell? As a caster you need to actually hold back a smidge so you don’t clearly outshine the martials.
Once characters hit 13th level, they’re Superheroes. 13th level builds have so many rules widgets, magic wildcards, and exceptions to the exception that Jeremy said was an exception…a player that personally leveled it through play is going to forget or inefficiently expend some ability…every single session. The only way to pilot a Level 13 character to the full is method acting. You need to practice convincing yourself it’s life or death…like yours. It’s not LARP it’s just L.
I think it was a long time ago…After 3E but before 3.5 and I read a web article. I forget the author but it said something like D&D Isn’t really designed, by intent, to run straight from levels 1-20. Much more common is 3-12. And I was like “woah, I’m enlightened”. And from that day forward, I had the hard rule…campaigns go to level 13, and then you have the finale. You might see 14th level if it’s a Big Finale…but I don’t do 15 and up except as one shots.
And, like I said…it’s not that you can’t challenge a L15-20 party, because you can. But characters and foes at that level…it’s like trying dogfight in supersonic jets. All you need to do is blink and you’re dead. Oh, would you have ignored that effect if you remembered that bonus action last turn? Yeah, sad. Sorry. Anybody that worries about L1 fights being “swingy” hasn’t run a L15+ boss battle.
@@gregsmw I get where you're coming from, but the "opportunities" im thinking of are less about making encounters more difficult and more about variety. Cody touches on it in the video, with giving flight to PC's so he can start busting out flying monsters. Creating encounters that are balanced with the broken PC's in mind should be about putting "speed bumps" in front of them instead of "brick walls". Meaning, the broken bits dont negate the encounter, but will still be useful for finishing it.
@@JakalTalk again, sometimes the way in which a character is "broken" prevents you from thinking around it, or as you put it "placing speed bump"
And the only way to deal with it is to talk to the player and say "we need to get rid of this or it's not fun for anyone"
In my case, the player was literally immune to conventional attacks (not literally literally, but anything which had a CHANCE to hurt him was a guaranteed hit against every other member of the group, if I set the group up against an enemy with 3 attacks say (at lvl 10 ish this is fairly normal) for that enemy to actually hit this guy with any reliability it would need around a +30 to hit, as to ACTUALLY hit him it would need to land 2 attacks in the round as one would always be negated, the second attack would then be at a +25 to hit (pathfinder BAB) giving it just under a 50/50 to land one attack on him each turn
This hit bonus would mean this creature would land 3 attacks every turn on every other member of the group
What this meant was if an enemy was going to use conventional attacks, it would either have to be vastly to strong for the rest of the party to remotely deal with, or he would be immune to it and trivialise it
Again, I could have put in things which deal with him specifically, stuff which isnt conventional attacks, and I did, often, but it always came back to I couldn't use about half of all the monsters in the game in a fun way, because of this one character
In order to make combats both challenging for the group, and not painfull slogs where 3/4 players can't do anything because the monster will kill them the moment they get close, I needed to use a lot of things which negated his strength, and that obviously made him unhappy because people WANT to feel like their effort paid off
Again, if I spent a huge amount of resources to make my character immune to spells, and then after that we basically never fight another wizard again because the GM knows I will completely trivialise it, it's not fun for me, because j don't get to show off my strength, it's not fun for the party because they don't get to face a huge number of interesting challenges, and it's not fun for the GM because so much of what he could do is just cut off to him because of this one character
And if this theoretical GM DOES still use wizards and spells against us....well it's ONLY fun for me as I get to show off my immune to spells character, while the rest of the party can't do anything because I make the encounter a joke
Now, this wasn't an all combat campaign, so there absolutely were other things to do, intrigues, stealth, persuasion etc, but it wouldn't be fair to that player for them to sit out on these things, so they were still a part of those as well, obviously
But combats and the things I could match them against were completely dictated by this one character, and EVERYONE in the group knew it, everyone knew he was vastly stronger then the rest of them (one of the players had even asked me earlier in the campaign why I had even allowed that feat line to be taken)
There is a certain point when the "broken" thing is ACTUALLY broken
DND and pathfinder are not perfect systems with perfect balance, some things and combinations are legitimately stronger then others, some characters will just out perform others
And sometimes the GM has to be able to say, and is forced to say, we can't keep this it has to go
Not all broken things are opportunities, sometimes they are just broken
The old quote of, "if the players can do it, so can the monsters" comes to mind. If the players are doing some super awesome stuff, the bad guys would likely hear about it and adjust to counter.
Great tips Cody, really liked the "leaning into it part". As a DM the funniest thing to do is to adapt and change your encounters all the time. Another fix I found is having the party realise that the item does not have infinite charges (ex. They use it for the 10th time, and the magic expires in the item; or the more they use it, the effects are less powerful)
Definitly need a lore reason tho so it doesn't feel stolen
Matt Colville has a great example of this. He gave his group a portable hole and they were using it to avoid encounters by having everyone but the rogue hide inside it. The magic item says that anyone trapped inside suffocated after 10 minutes, so he simply added an addendum that the air inside doesn't get refilled just by reopening the hole so they have to wait a long time between uses. It's still useful in a pinch to get past one obstacle, but they could no longer use it as their default strategy.
I actually prefer when my players have more “broken” abilities and items. Because that lets me let loose more with monsters and the environment. The more powerful the players the more powerful challenges I can give them, and I usually find that more fun running that than the low level stuff.
I actually really love low level DND. Because you don’t really have a lot of the failsafes/abilities of high level DND. The idea of death is actually kind of real, instead of a gold sink.
I almost universally prefer low level.
If D&D was still 1-20 but 20 was the power level that level 5 is at now I think it would be awesome.
@@kaseybennett7415 you must only play martial classes. 😭 I’m playing a wizard and there is no way I enjoy level five more than level 16.
@@antuanlemon484 wizard and warlock are my favorite classes....
Though, I was speaking from a DM's perspective. For the players, I find the biggest problem is that their "cool" abilities run out too quickly at low levels, and more importantly that *when* they run out all they can do is sit and do a basic attack once a turn. This is a 5e problem, in my book.
Giving the players more options that last longer is what I meant by having it be 1-20. I just think the maximum power being at 5 would be honestly really nice and refreshing.
Not saying it's how I'd always want to play, of course, but it would be fun.
@@kaseybennett7415 To be clear I’m not even really talking about class level. I can have fun when they’re anywhere between 3 and 20. I’m mostly talking about when the players make choices that have synergy with the rest of the party, and/ or makes them really good at what they want to do.
I love having OP PC's, it means I can throw those High CR monsters that I usually only fantasize about using at them, like a Red Dragon, that might usually result in a TPK for less powerful groups. It also lets me toy around with monsters to make more challenging encounters. At the beginning of my campaign, my party completely dumpstered my first dungeon, a goblin cave with a goblin wizard at the end that summoned a fire elemental to fight them. it was a piece of cake for them, nobody even went down once. So Instead of getting mad about it, I decided I wasn't going to underestimate how strong they were anymore, and started taking references from Matthew Colville's video "Action Oriented Monster's" to create big monster encounters that are way more challenging, and now them being so powerful is just genuinely fun for me. It's fun designing this crazy powerful boss that's going to test my party's skills and abilities. Moral of the story is that Cody is right! Lean into it! You'll have way more fun.
A game fell apart a few years ago because the party became murder hobos (myself included) the "core" reason that I identified, was that all the npcs were assholes.
My suggestion, always double check the ability, spell, and/or magical item. Sometimes the players accidentally misreads it or misunderstands it. For example, if one of your players is constantly casting Greater Invisibility saying that the bad guys don't know where they are, double check the Invisible condition. The condition says the creature is heavily obscured, meaning the bad guys can still know where the player is through sound or foot prints (unless of course that the player is using stealth). The bad guys still get disadvantage and the player still gets advantage.
Specifically regarding a magic item that is too powerful, my recommendation is to start slowly adding drawbacks or complications. Maybe the item is intelligent and slowly awakening (and has its own agenda). Maybe the armor begins to draw life force from its wearer, or causes them to turn into a wolf while resting once a month. Maybe the villain can easily scry on someone wearing the cloak, or the staff causes any town it is brought into to have an outbreak of plague or the amulet was forged by and stolen from a bunch of fire elementals who really want it back.
Either give it a drawback that was not immediately obvious (but ideally not so bad that the PCs HAVE to dump it - give them a choice about whether it is worth mitigating the drawbacks or not) or build a significant plotline around this new feature, so it feels like an in-universe feature and not a metagame nerf. After all, Bilbo thought his invisibility ring was pretty OP before he learned what it really was...
(And if all else fails - other factions will hear of the OP item and try to get it for themselves, one way or another.)
Excellent.
One can also work the other way. If you want to introduce stronger magical items into the game, you could start awakening the powers of something the party already has rather than drop in something new and powerful that might unbalance your game.
I remember a great example of #6 - Talk with your players. I was playing an arcane caster in either 3.0 or 3.5 and the DM initially allowed me a spell from a 3rd party book. He later came back to me and said that a spell out of the book of vile darkness that could re-write the entire memories, alignment, and personality of a person was game breaking and I understood and negotiated for swapping that for two other 9th level spells.
Another more recent example where I am the DM. In my current campaign the first dungeon I ran was "The Sunless Citadel" where the paladin acquired the magic item Shatterspike. I didn't really want a weapon that could destroy the weapons of the BBEG (brute). Luckily in my story weaving the rogue was an agent of the church that sword belonged to. So I put the character through a day long ritual and transformed the sword to a custom item. I created LightBringer; it can cast the light spell on itself at will. And if a creature is hit by the sword they can as a bonus action expend 1 charge to use sacred flame on the creature hit. With the standard wand mechanic, it regains charges, using the last charge could cause it to burn out. At which point it is would be a +1 sword and could cast light on itself for free.
I think you are spot on with the "Roll with the punches" tip I had a amazing Character Background "Turn it on it's head" Reveal planned for weeks and then the player it was focused on couldn't play that week and I just changed it on the spot and it was one of the best sessions of the campaign and then when I revealed what happened to the missing character two weeks later it was probably even more amazing then the original plan. So yeah. Great advice "Roll with the punches" probably the most important thing/skill a DM needs in my opinion.
I had a game I was playing where there was technically 3 DMs as they wanted rotation with this campaign setting. This sounded cool because they could all play on and off as players one week then the next. The results were two of the DMs giving out really powerful gear that altered how strong our PCs were.
This in turn caused one of the DMs to basically kill off one of the other PCs and say the gear some of us had was to powerful and then outright nerf a bunch of stuff. It was really chaotic. Especially because this was a custom campaign setting with not fully realized rules.
I got confused towards the end of the last session and got a bit upset, but I didn't say setting was bad, it wasn't, it was instead all the chaos caused by DMs not talking to each other before they pulled the trigger on items and setting information.
In a friends campaign, for some reason I ended up with the *Rod of Lordly Might... at level one*. As a responsibly player and DM I self-imposed nerfs on the weapon and didn't use parts of the legendary weapon that could break the game until my character leveled up. Sure, I could have easily broke every encounter but I wanted the game to be not only fun for me but for the other players and the DM as well.
Good to see we have people like you exposing those CR's. Keep fighting the good fight.
@@ChiefLibrarianAhriman Thank you! It's been an interesting and fun journey. 😄
Two of my players, that both play sorcerers, came up with a combo move with two of their spells that basically wiped out a group of bandits by the end of the second round of combat. One of the spells being Shatter and the other being a homebrewed one, Icicle Burst. Although the combo move was awesome, it made me realize that Icicle Burst was a bit too strong.
The players and I came to an agreement during session 0 that I may need to buff/debuff any homebrewed stuff as the campaign progresses. Due to this, I talked to the player that had Icicle Burst and worked with them on how we could debuff it, while still keeping it a viable, and fun, option in combat and other situations.
Tip 5 reminds me of when I once gave my party of level 5 players a Cubic Gate.
they were immediately scared of accidentally opening a portal to another plane and facing things they were completely unprepared for, but they also quickly figured out that it was basically fast travel in a box. On the surface this seems small but seeing as no one knew they had it, resulting in them just plain avoiding serious obstacles between them and their destination, and any in-universe timed events being too slow to keep up with their movements. I had to write so many new encounters just to fill the space while I adjusted the wheres and whens of everything else. I eventually had a powerful mage intercept one of their gates and offer a similar power item with less serious consequences attached to it.
My broken story: I'm running an Eberron campaign and characters are now level 15. It's basically campaign #3 in a single storyline, but only one of the current characters has been in it since the beginning. This campaign started at level 13 and so some of the players were coming in with fresh characters at that level. Obviously the backstories are extensive as are the abilities, so there's a steep learning curve for me as they pull out abilities I didn't even know exist. The group was in Sharn trying to track down members of the Daask crime syndicate. The Eberron book provides brief suggestions for a few high-ranking NPCs from Daask but no stat blocks. I wanted to use the Minotaur Kar Bloodhorn as well as tie in a House Cannith stolen technology arc. So I homebrew the stat block based heavily on pieces of different existing things. I equip Kar with a weapon called the Subjugator, basically a massive assault weapon that is both an arcane gun and a battle axe. I base its ranged abilities on the stats for a Brass Crossbow carried by a CR10 Orthon (5e.tools/bestiary/orthon-mtf.html). Knowing this weapon would be broken in the hands of a player, I rig it so it's built for this Large Minotaur and is too heavily for a creature less than Large to wield. What I didn't know is that one of the new characters was a Rune Knight who can become Large quite frequently. No problem, I made the ammunition a complex technological and magical feat to make, so I'm thinking it'll be used for like 20 actions and then the ammo will run out. But of course, one of the other new characters is an Artificer who rolled like a 30 on a tools check to backwards engineer the ammo. So... it's just a thing. My approach for fixing this is Cody's ''roll with it advice''. At this level the CR system breaks down anyway, so I just throw absurd encounters at them without even caring that they're now 5x Deadly. We've only had one character death in 21 sessions and it was quickly reversed with Revivify, so I think we're OK.
Nice job adapting!
@@danielpayne1597 Thanks! It's cool ultimately because the fighter has a shitload of strategic decisions to make. Does she grow Large and use the weapon as a ranged attacker or focusing on the melee buffs instead and go in close? It's fitting because her backstory is a military hero who fought in the Last War, so the player can actually be as tactical and complex with this stuff as he wants.
This is the type of content that got me to subscribe to you. This is info that helps with my Savage Worlds game. I can't do D&D anymore. It's been too many years. I need more variety. But I watched this video twice!
When I was playing with my original group I gave out awesome items that let them do fantastical things. And it always balanced out with the players getting too confident and getting into situations that they normally would have approached cautious and methodically otherwise.
In my experience, the first question a DM needs to ask about a “broken” or OP party is…do the players see their party as broken and OP? More than half of the time, they don’t…and really, why would they? Why shouldn’t everyone be flying, hasted, invisible, and resistant to all damage? D&D is about the loot and the fancy magic macguffins. If the players are having a blast, that game isn’t broken, it’s a winner.
If you’re playing with adolescents, they aren’t going to look down their nose is disrespect at a Monty Haul game. For the GenX neckbeards “Game Balance” is like alignment…it’s really more trouble than it’s worth…but you don’t feel like you properly respected Papa Gygax without it. But, for that generation, D&D is fundamentally a Wargame where everyone just plays with their favorite Leader or Specialist.
For most players I know under 40, D&D is simply the paper tabletop way of being the Hero of their favorite Mass Media franchise. Everybody is a thespian. The Guantlet of Thanatos, the One Ring, the Jedi Holocron…those things are all from Firefly, right? Not if you’re a crotchety old codger, they aren’t. There are no lightsabers in D&D…that is a radiant energy weapon, thank you. It’s always yellow, holy, and not sword with cross guard, for Mordenkainens sake.
The plots of a campaign need to make as much sense as Infinity War to be entertaining. And the game needs to be exactly as balanced. By which I mean, not at all. One player is going to be Ant Man, and the other Iron Man. The players at the table don’t look primarily for a balanced war game - they want their fair share of stage time, good lines, and bright lights. They want the story to react to their improvisation. You can have a perfect balance mechanically, but if you don’t have a social balance in that cooperative storytelling, that game sucks.
As a rule, if the players want something to work, being a DM is a yes-and job. Did all five characters agree to take Devils Sight via feat at level one. Damn, that broke your game. Yes it did. And that means you should let those players tear up a couple of scenarios. And when they get back to town, is anyone bragging in the tavern? When they come back with unbelievable outcomes in these confrontations, powerful potential patrons will want to know how.
Yes, we CAN all see in magical darkness…AND that means the party is PERFECT for recovering the Maltese MacGuffin from Dungeon of Permanent Magical Darkness. You don’t nerf the special forces…you assign them missions that would be near impossible for anyone except their special force. You don’t railroad them into the assignment, you have Crusader Knight Bob Wayoutofyourleague treat them like professionals. Feed the egos. Flatter them. Oh, Obi-wan…you’re my only hope!
Players love that stuff. Their clever trick is acknowledged as clever…not just by you as the DM, but by you through the NPCs. Darn, why didn’t anybody else ever pull together a Devils Sight Crew until now? Oh how we can use you…take our imagination-gold.
Is the party plane jumping chaotically hither and yon, making it impossible to prep ahead of time. Great. Have Bob show up and offer them all Unspeakable Widgets and keys to executive bathroom. It’s just…Bob needs a team that can track down Octomalevent the Illithid Archanist cause that jerk brain jacked the Emperors second cousin and it’s only a matter of time before DocOc gets that Jar Brain to spill secrets that can’t be spilled. Bob had no idea who to turn to, so he just threw out a prayer and wouldn’t you know it but the ol Devils Sight crew came to mind. If anyone can hunt down one lone wolf flayer across all the worlds and planes…it’s you guys.
Don’t railroad…Kite the party. If they’re badass killers, give them something to assassinate. If their mobile, give them someone to chase. If they’re all invisible and telepathic, give them a heist job.
Yes, you guys are magnificent. And, that is awesome because that turns out to be exactly what you need simply to get in the front door of the next adventure. Only clever, devious, broken, OP operators like you guys even have a chance at success.
In a few decades s a DM, I never recall a party turning down the opportunity to nerf themselves - just to get the same brass ring, but the gold plated one with certificate of authenticity signed by Bob himself. One of my players thrust Blackrazor into the Great Green Mouth.
“Gosh, guys, I am so glad you decided to KEEP Blackrazor. Previous owner…that guy was a serious Dbag. I told him point blank…it isn’t actually a weapon. It’s the key to actual Tomb of Horrors! Do you have any idea how much magical happy and gold fun Acererack has horded away after all these years? But that guy…just a straight up thug. You guys? The DevilSight Crew? I’m willing to give you a map and a Templar escort to take care of your horses and such…also on me. The Church is willing to front gold, Magic, and influence if you guys can get in there…and the one thing we need is The Crook of Rao. Anything else is yours, and if it’s nothing else, the Church will pay you for the risk and time. But man, we need that Crook because something unspeakable is going down in Iuz we speak, and that is the only artifact powerful enough stop global warming. And we know for certain the Crook is In he True Vault of the Demilich. God said.
Yes…and. Let them win and then let them win big and then let them even bigger.
And then…of course m’lords, your reputation precedes you.
Why type all of this out when you could’ve just said “I’m a virgin”?
@@themostdiabolicalhater5986 Actually, "trying to make people feel good" and yes...anding gives him way better chances of having sex, if he wants to, than being the douche, trying to bring people down, that you are
I tried something recently, giving 3 of my players brokenly powerful magical items that had a catch to using them. The negatives were small at first, but foreshadowed worse things to come if they kept using them. It took the storyline is a really cool direction, and ultimately resulted in both the coolest part of the campaign so far as well as the other 2 players choosing to get rid of the items on their own.
I'm running my first full campaign (frostmaiden) and of the 6 players I have, 4 are former or current gm/dms. So with my group, and my style, my curtian is very open, 1. to learn and 2. just because it lets us keep an open conversation about the campaign, so we always know where we stand. I quite like it. Of couse they never know whats coming for sure, but we are all constantly improving because of the conversations, both as players and gm/dms.
9:52. Im a grown up man in my 30s, yet i still chuckled at the "Big butt". Lol.
Our game group plays second edition, and the problem will eventually take care of itself. In second if a player fails a saving throw versus an area of effect attack then all of their magic items have to make a save or be destroyed as well. As a game master I actually like this as it allows me to keep a steady flow of magic items to the characters over a very lengthy, multi year campaign without the players feeling like they have a surplus of items that they don’t need.
That's a pretty big distinction between the two editions. Almost everything in the game had charges or was destructible in some way. Having a staff that has finite charges and that dissolves into a stick when depleted really keeps players from spamming items mindlessly.
The first game I ever gm’d was Shadowrun 2e. It got out of hand really quickly but I was too new to panic and kind of just rolled with it. My players learned in the end the #1 rule of Shadowrunning: never ever cut a deal with a dragon.
Going through this rn! Party killed my mid-boss early and took his Really Fancy Sentient Hammer; so I'm working on a system to help the party members that don't have the hammer get some power, meanwhile, the party member with the hammer negotiates with the obstinate construction tool to unlock it's full potential, and then going to ramp up the difficulty and see what fun shenanigans they can get into while I rewrite the middle-end levels of this campaign!
the players in my campaign were in a theives guild i took that as a chance for a npc rouge to steal one of the PCs op magic item i accidentally gave them too early(Amulet of the planes). they went into the thieves guild knowing the fact that there are a bunch of thieves that would take any chance to steal so the PCs completely understood since they were the ones who decided to go into the theives guild.
The party took down a necromancer with a ring of invisibility, and gave it to the Rogue assassin, after not using it for two session, I added that it has charges that require using a soul coin to recharge.
they finally started using it, but only after it became nerfed. We never talked about it, but I think they didn't want to out shine the party constantly. Or they forgot about it until I brought it back up. Later in the campaign soul coins will be fairly common, and the party has 1 at the moment.
Damn, the DM growth he mentioned about not caring for the players anymore hit very close to home, this happened on my current campaign.
The party hit level 9 and they are very powerful! So this exact situation happened, I honestly stopped caring for enemies, flying monster, high damage, action economy and anything. I choose the monsters, do a little homebrew to make stuff more powerful and triple values and just throw at them!
I made an ability that caused 12d8 necrotic damage with no saves in 60ft radius, the artificer died! But at the end of the combat, he was alive and everyone had over half their HP.
I did a Manticore Boss who could take 5 PC alone, and used 3 of them, constantly flying at 35ft with a ranged attack as their main damage, the ranger died in the middle of the combat after rolling a 1 and 7 on death save, but at the end of the fight, she was alive and everyone else was ok, very low HP, but victorious.
So...yeah, screw the power spikes, just send challenge after challenge, the team can handle!
In all honesty, if the party can't handle, so what. The worst that happens is a character dies. The player rolls a new one and the game continues. Both the player and you learned a very valuable lesson in exactly what the party can handle.
As a rookie dm I'm rinn descent into Avernus and wanted my players to be having fun. We bingo method rolled stats and they have a strong array. I've also given a few level appropriate magic items as well. Needless to say they have been steamrolling encounters way above the pay grade of a normal party at their current level. Things I have done to increase the difficulty is targeting NPC's the party is attached to, homebrew abilities on monsters that aren't impossible by any means but play to the party's weaknesses however few there are. I am always asking for feedback this being my first time behind the screen, and I always hear they are having fun. They get to use their stats and features and items to grind devil's and demons and I just plan on how I can make the game harder in other ways.
"Now I don't have to protect you with balanced encounters!" Ha, I love this. My party totally has a flying broom. They are afraid to use it though, since the guy they took it from died very very badly on it.
A character death can also change things up. When my min maxed healbot cleric perished, I agreed with the DM to replace her with a face character, so the party could take on social challenges. The campaign wasn't broken before but it became stellar afterwards: top drawer sessions.
On the subject of "taking things away from characters" I'd like to share this bit. So I was the GM, we were playing Rifts from Palladium Books. We were fairly early in the campaign, and the player group fell apart, several people moved. One player remained. We managed to wrangle a couple more people who wanted to play, but they wanted something more like D&D. Well since Palladium has a wide range of games I was prepared with Palladium Fantasy. Then, because all of Palladium's games use the exact same rule system, I decided to move the remaining original player's character into the new game. I sat down and ran a six hour solo session with him, and we played it out. He lost all of his high tech gear, vehicles, weapons, armor, everything. However, his pure silver Katana enchanted to be indestructible was just fine, since that was forged for him by the son of Hercules, an old friend of his deceased father, the other stuff was mostly just purchased. A good portion of his other belongings were also ok, he had several magic items and stuff, this was especially important for him as a Vampire Hybrid (Blade) so he kept his amulet that could turn a bowl of water into blood once a day.
To replace the mundane gear his solo session ended with him opening a large treasure chest. It contained currency for the world he was going to, coins and ingots, armor, some weapons, etc, and at the bottom a ward to send him to the new world. The new party was matched to his level (only level 4, and to be honest, I prefer starting at that level), and they met up with him 2 years game time after he crossed over, so he had assimilated. For example, his silver Katana was now matched by one forged from the solidified blood of a Dragon (I gave him a few ingots in the chest because I took away millions of credits worth of gear, I thought he would sell them for the cash but he decided a silver sword and a blood red sword were a good look for him, and he already had paired weapons training).
The new setting and party worked out well and the OG character worked really well in the new setting. He never went back to his original world, he did become a fabulously wealthy nobleman.
Guess I should start with, this is my first campaign. I can't say I let the players break my game, but I have intentionally let them be OP for their level due to the stakes and the fact that I knew I wasn't running a campaign to the higher levels. I've found it fun to lean into letting them be OP, because it has let me be more creative with encounters. I can throw in real challenges without being too worried that I create a battle the is too hard for the party. So basically I made the party OP to give myself a cushion for encounter balancing
Dat haircut, lookin clean as fu. Thanks for all the advice it has made me into a great GM. I like to foreshadow the items failure, put the party into a situation where i know they will use it and through the description i give of the item working I will put in a hint the item may break soon. Now the party thinks the next time they use it may be their last (it usually isn't but this always works). If it is a PC that has become too powerful I will just modify the encounters to ensure the rest of the party is having more fun. For example, if I have a minmaxed tank or a rogue dealing insane amounts of damage I will just decrease large monsters in favor of massive amounts of tiny minions so their "big" damage numbers mean less since everyone in the party gets to one-shot enemies while doing considerable less damage (The minmaxed players will eventually get bored with their character since it has become unoptimized for the encounters and ask to change- then we have *the talk)
For the plane shifting amulet I think that I would add random effects that they couldn't know until they used it the first time. So using it might have consequences like teleporting you to the plane that you want but 50ft in the air, or it just might spawn some fey butterflies.
I used to be the forever dm. After a suitable "I miss playing tantrum" my best friend volunteered. He now prefers dming to being a player.
He gave us a cube that absorbs the mind and soul of an enemy. He realized that might have been too much for a level 3 party, and had it stolen in the night. After 2 sessions of not letting it go, he told us he was trying to get rid of it. Instead we had a cool adventure that culminated in a secret society getting it and us offering to help them find more, as they were keys to some ancient gods tomb or some nonsense. The party dissolved due to scheduling, but he fixed it after, and that was cool
The big problem for me (as a DM) about adversarial DMs is the mindset of “winning D&D”.
So yeah, you “won”. Hooray. Pity the campaign’s over and you were so horrible to play the game with nobody wants to start a new campaign. Well done - you won, but lost everything.
"Won" the battle but lost the war
I let my players get pretty OP, so i could play with my 11th level sorcerer, ancient White dragon, with ice glide, in its lair.
They survived, and are now terrified of dragons so win win.
One of the common things I do in my campaign world is Signature Items, personally tailored magic items that level up along with the players (usually whenever they get a Class Feature). These creations can easily become waaay too powerful, so we have an active bargain about retconning the items and modifying them actively to make them effective, useful, and character-defining tools without making them the only tools that should ever be used. Eventually, I hope to become better at the creation process and not having to treat every encounter as a playtest for the items' abilities, but this understanding of actively balancing the items has been a fun thing, especially since my participating players want combat and other activities to not always be handed over because of being overpowered.
For example, one of my player characters has a magic tattoo that evolves and gains new abilities as he gains new Class Features. Several abilities take inspiration from the original Unearthed Arcana on magic tattoos, so the balance was already not great to begin with. He unlocked an ability to spring tendrils from the tattoo to grapple and slam enemies, and the grapple was far too weak and the slam was FAR too powerful, so we nerfed the damage and made the grappling more capable. Now, the ability feels more like a cool cantrip with limited uses rather than a high level spell that doesn't have components.
I homebrew-alter items that could be broken. For example, the Winged Boots in my campaigns can only grant flight for 100ft of movement per day. And if I ever give one of these out to players, I always make sure there are some flying enemies in an encounter, or that there's an enemy that can deal with fliers, like a caster that knows Tasha's Hideous Laughter or an archer battle master with the Trip maneuver, making flying a risk/reward since now it's possible for them to fall for a great amount of damage.
I’ve taken a note out of one of your other videos and attacked their strengths. A Paladin/Warlock that can get max level smites a lot earlier struggles against monsters that are resistant to radiant damage. A Wizard that relies on Fireball to deal with hordes has a much harder time with Fire Elemental hordes. I don’t do this for every encounter, and I sprinkle in encounters that the party can easily dispatch to even it out, but a big boss fight should have defenses against the party’s main go to fighting methods.
I’ve been running a homebrew campaign playing off elder scrolls lore that mixed into Decent into Avernus, and I broke the game by giving my players a Wabbajak item. It transforms a target into a random monster from the MM, MTOF, Volo’s guide, and decent monsters, yes this includes any gods and high level monsters in these books. But there is a caveat, this lasts 1 hour even if they go to zero hit points. If they die as a rat they are dead. It hasn’t really broken anything yet, but about half the time it takes one of the players out of combat cause they got a monster weaker than themselves. This item was pure chaos but it can be so fun.
I Have purposefully "Broken" my campaign by making my party super powerful. i have given them bonus levelup perks specific to their chars. I have given them loads of magic items but tactfully kept their too hit chances average or just above. As a result i have been able to throw theminto the deepend of my Neverwinter campaign. they have 3 healers out of a group of 4 so it helps too. but I have been pushing the danger of my campaigns much higher as a result,And it is so much fun. true high stakes combat where damage can down you and vice versa where hitting matters. My sorcerer made a mistake of flanking himself between two displacer beasts at level 4 in a fight against 4 displacer beasts and died. rolled a nat1 and a 6 on his death saving throw. and the game is better for it. my players respect my combat and fear what could happen. a Fomorian swing dealing 28 damage to a level 5 Char is a big deal.
Same, im letting my players do a god campaign, but they split the party and made even stronger enemies, they are each 60 cr in power and gods get to cr 80.
@@dovahchicken935 mine are definately not that powerful. they are level 5 but 3 of them can take out a cr8 comfortably, the 4 of them took out a cr10 greater basilisk without much hassle. im slowly upping the ante. seeing just how far i can push them. i have a very special nighthag encounter lined up, with the displacer beasts and the "dead" party member. (evil dm, rubbing his hands together in anticipation)
@@alexwagener4677 the problem with mineisthat I have to homebrew every enemy to make a challenge for my players, and pedestrians and kingdoms are below them
I honestly just increase the craziness. I'm currently running for a group of players that have defeated Strahd, accepted a deal with Fekre, Queen of Poxes (that they accidentally freed from Barovia), and are not trying to find and defeat Dyrrn. They are all level 17 and have insane magical items.
Rather than get frustrated and worried, I just lean in...hard. I honestly don't even worry about if/how they might be able to beat the next encounter I just assume they'll come up with something. And if not they have clones, or True Resurrection, or maybe just a side quest to get the bards soul back after he was slain by a champion of Asmodeus and imprisoned in the Halls of Suffering.
That's always my advice, let the players have fun and feel super powerful. Be on their side. And throw insane stuff at them.
The only challenge is if you've got one player that is outshining the rest in everything. This happened once for me, my solution was to give all the other players cool shit and then....see above.
MANY years ago (mid to late 90s, don't tell anyone) I had a lvl 14 wizard and my chum had a lvl 13 necromancer, our DM was really good at just rolling with it in fact he was just really good in general. We had an flying castle in the elemental plain of air, a young black dragon, I built an iron golem and stuck it in a butler suit, we were stupidly powerful and he let us get away with sooooo much. But the thing that sticks out in my brain more than anything else was when he said "you drop your sword of wishes in the swamp" just before it turns out, the black dragon turns up. That sucked sooooo badly, considering that he was the one that rolled it up and gave it to me. AAAAAnnnd I'd used 2 of 5 (yep the +5 one) wishes on NPCs cuz Matius was just an all round good chap, i would have never just wished the dragon out of exsistance. There were plenty of other ways I could have screwed it over without wishes.
So basically what i'm saying is after all the cool stuff we did, its that dissapointment that has led me to never hand out random treasure, cool player exploits are a way of adding even cooler things and celebrate with the players when they find a way that may screw me over but the players have considerable fun doing. I award extra XP if the players come up with solutions I never thought of or cool use of basic stuff for big effects.
There's an old adventure module (I believe from 3e era) called The Apocalypse Stone that is designed to END your campaign. It has multiple plothooks in case your players are the type to intentionally avoid them. Every encounter is a very deadly encounter (d6+2 ancient red dragons for example). If the players survive long enough to finish the campaign, by touching the treasure at the end, the Apocalypse Stone, they basically push a big End the Universe button.
We once got an armor of invulnerability at level 3 but none of our characters could use it. It was probably the most troll thing the DM could've done, but we held it in our bag of holding the entire time because I personally forgot about it...
my players are ALL veteran powergamers. So I just lean into it every time, give them broken magic items (homebrew, I always give each player a custom legendary item which is really more powerful than the legendary items in the DMG), and send hordes of ultra powered homebrew monsters against them to challenge them or stuff that's way above their level (like a froghemoth and a purple worm, both with extra HP at the same time at level 8 for example) to challenge them. And of course the homebrew monsters have power based not only on HP and damage output but also debilitating abilities. And my players absolutely LOVE it, because it makes their characters feel awesome, and despite the superheroic levels of power that happen, i can still keep a coherent level 3-20 campaign going just due to its.multiversal scope.
Here are my solutions to two of the biggest game breakers I have seen - Polymorph spell - Limit it to what the character has seen or encountered, or at least studied somewhere. Jumping straight to them turning into a T-Rex when the character has never even heard of one is a meta-issue. I have never had anyone guff about this solution. The Amulet of the Planes is the other. If the party has acquired one, and has used it, word will get around. You could even have the BBEG, who is seeking a sure fire "Ace-in-the-hole" to secure a victory, make attempts to steal it and use it for connecting to the evils of the Outer Planes. That will ramp up the game a bit...
I actually just intentionally gave one of my players a very strong custom magic item, with the full intent on forcing him to choose between keeping the item’s power and becoming a vessel for a Lich, or destroying it, or something else if he can come up with another idea.
One thing I always ask and make sure I understand is, is what is breaking or OP fun for the party? If it is fun then I want to make sure it stays fun how ever we address it. If it isn't fun, for a simple example someone has armor like you said which just makes then almost impossible to hit. A lot of players I know might actually think that is not interesting or fun, so I might come up with an idea with them about having it be upgraded.
Maybe I wouldn't let them know all the plans but make sure they are okay with it and have an event happen which damages that armor narratively and it needs repaired. When it is repaired I might reduce the AC but now it gains a special property or ability. So now they will be more open to being hit but now might have some new utility that can be mechanically fun or narrativity fun. Off the top of my head I might allow the armor to be infused with some magical ore that allows them to speak a command word and have it change appearance once per day. Allowing them to make it look like nearly any other armor out there.
Then the play might use it infiltrate groups, or maybe they are fighting elmental type creature or caster so they make their armor appear resistant or immune to that type of damage. So the caster doesn't both using that against them or is more hesitant to fight if they are a fire casting wizard but see armor infused with flames (even though it has no resistant or immunity).
I gave a group a shield guardian when they were level 4. While its damage output isn't fantastic, it's hit points and regeneration abilities were making combats too easy. I tried several tactics to rid them of this OP device (in game, not through DM caveat or by being a jerk!) Finally, when the PCs were around level 8 or 9, they encountered a remorhaz near its lair. The monster swallowed the shield guardian then ran way - it was smart enough to realize that with a fully belly, it didn't need to stick around. It burrowed into the ice and escaped. The shield guardian couldn't generate enough damage to get out, and even with its regeneration, it would eventually get destroyed by the acid damage. The players escaped the combat alive and accepted the loss of their toy. The remorhaz had a bad case of indigestion for a while...
I did a bad thing. Party had a butt ton of magic items (Pathfinder 1E). I don't generally do traps in my game, and may have overcompensated. I made a complex trap that flooded the chamber with a magic dispelling fluid. Saving throws for any items submerged, permanently rendering inert MANY of the magic items in their possession. Hardest hit was the cleric. Not proud of it, will never do it again. Not without setting limits on how many are effected. 🤔
My kids “broke” a few encounters with a polymorph spell and a bag of holding. Poor little troll mice. And hill giant mice. And every other kind of mouse. It was fun in the beginning, but became old quickly. Then one of the mice happened to be carrying a portable hole…
In my broken campaign we started a arms race, who would create the more powerful stuff, me and my Monster, or the PCs. Now we have the Ultimate level 20 dungeon, that is legendary in our world, and is a campaign objective of their current characters.
After we had equipment damaged from a black pudding, my DM complained that another character and I, both with smithing and tools, did tandem repairs to get everything fixed.
with an amulet of the planes being used by a party to escape battle, i would keep them in init order for 3 rounds and give the big bad a chance to locate them and plane-shift to them. That way they have a round or two to heal up before they back in the fight.
Great tips! I like adding temporary magic into the setting in a cool way. In a dungeon, I once threw a holy shrine in, with magical water. Players could submerge equipment for a +1 enhancement which lasted one day. If bottled, the +1 bonus wore off at ther end of the day, but they had holy water.
My group=
DM: Scott, can you help me?
Scott: Get good, scrub!
I remember one time, my GM let my character pay to have a carriage enchanted to be able to fly. It became an iconic thing for the character, since she used it so much and took a lot of pride in it.
Eventually the GM asks me if I'd be willing to trade it for a regular carriage, or a carriage with floating disks so it can carry more weight but can only stay a couple feet above the ground.
Long story short, we had a conversation which boiled down to, "I'm having trouble coming up with random travel encounters since you can fly everywhere." Then, "Yeah, that's the point, my character *wants* fewer attacks while traveling, so we can get to places faster and not have to worry about bandits and stuff."
So, he let me keep it, and focused less on us getting attacked in transit and more about developing encounters during major plot points.
I'm DM"ing a PF1e campaign with a MASSIVELY OP character. The AC started in the low 20"s, which is pretty ridiculous for any D&D system, and is currently 10 higher than every other character in the party. Plus she gets 5 attacks per turn, which hit like mack trucks, and can cast Cure Moderate Wounds at will (fortunately its a standard action, so she can't do it more than once per turn, or in addition to attacking). Her only downside is that she doesn't have a ton of hit points, so if the enemies hit, they almost always threaten a critical, which in turn could well kill her outright.
I'm more in the lean into it camp. I usually try to put a monster or two with high attack bonuses, multiple attacks, and lots of HP specifically to get past her AC and flurry of blows, coupled with a few normal monsters for the others.
Hey Cody! I’m a huge fan of your content, you inspired me to start dm’ing my first campaign a little while back.
I have found myself slipping into the shoes of the adversarial DM unintentionally while playing with my friends. They often do things like you describe in your video, (metagame, just build incredibly strong builds with an absolute shell of a character behind them, etc.) and it wouldn’t really that big of an issue if they didn’t also tell me that my combats aren’t fun to play in. What advice would you give me to change mine or my players perspective on the game?
They also don’t really enjoy rp very much, so I’m stuck making combat the primary focus at all times or they check out.
My players were halfway through a dungeon that they were steamrolling they encountered a room of giant frogs (think Naruto) one for each of them. Sure enough they killed the one in the first round easy. So in an effort to up the challenge a little I added two more out of their line of sight. Then the dice turned against them and the encounter became super challenging. They had to use tactics, which really worked for them. And the combat was much more exciting. But afterwards I pulled back the curtain and reveled what I had done they accused me of being adversarial.
Never pull back the curtain, I don't even tell my wife what I'm doing or have done in the campaign shes in.
This has been long overdue for someone to discuss this as a topic. I believe yours is the first I’ve come across. Thank you!
A fitting UA-cam video for this topic is The Goliath with the Big Iron on his hip
I was wondering to myself, how do i avoid becoming an adversarial DM and I think I have to look at my cast of NPCs and ask myself how far they are willing to push back against the players if they take things too far.
Which NPCs are all bluff and will fold quickly, which ones will bring to bear every trick in their arsenal upon the players. I create some nobles that will take offence at the merest slight by players and some nobles that will find a player's bluntness refreshing...
I think a varied but planned response from an NPC is better than a purely random response. It means that the players might be more careful about how they treat the game world if they know there might be some push back against their antics but not so that they will be hunted down for killing a chicken (skyrim reference there)
I gave my players "Expired Health Potions" which work as regular health potions 50% of the time. Other times they give a random effect half of which are bad for them. Now every place they go with potions of any kind, they ask the seller for expired potions, just so they can have a chance to roll on the random table. Even if it risks poisoning,.
I was pretty proud of my recent solution for using an extremely broken magic item in my campaign. I wanted to use a sphere of annihilation but I didn't want it to be readily accessible to my pcs, so I ended up placing it as the centerpiece of a morokoth's collection, tying it to the island and essentially being part of the trap that kept them stuck there. On top of that, if they wanted to revisit it to destroy something (or perhaps rescue the pc stuck there) being on a morkoth's island means finding it again would be a worthy quest in of itself. Once they wrap up the current arc I plan to actually give them some powerful artifact they need to destroy....
It might help that half the players in my campaigns are DMs as well I'm the one that's DMed the longest but that doesn't make me a wise sage it makes me bored I try to think outside of the box, give my players cool stuff, homebrew items and such. My players are pretty understanding when I go "hey I wanted to make an item unique to your Paladin, but I sort of over did it can we work to make this item still give you that cool powerful feeling but you know not have it make you a god?" They're pretty open to it, the few times they've said no to nerfing the item they have said they're open to harder fights to balance it out.
I once gave a helm of brilliance to a player as a reward for a costly puzzle. I thought it fair to roll for the different charges, but the rolls were average, and turns out that was a lot for a 7th level party. I had a conversation with that player saying that i thought he was overshadowing the wizard in combat, and also not using any of his own class abilities due to how much power he had with the helm. It was also trivializing encounters that should have been a challenge to the rest of the party. He agreed with me completely, and we drastically lowered the charges on the helm so that he still had access, but make using it a meaningful choice and more of a finite resource. It worked out perfectly, and he ended up being the last one standing at the BBEG and killed him with dope monk shit instead of a fireball from an OP magic item!
I haven't DM'd a 5E game yet, but when I do, I will do one of the following: Either changing the Druid's ability to transform infinitely with infinite HP and limiting that, or else there will be somewhat common magical abilities in the world that negate that power. This will be explained up-front so nobody is screwed over. And of course there will be enemies using whatever the players have access to on top of that.
*Protip There are other ways to kill PC's rather than decreasing health to zero. If a player pulls some shenanigans like that constantly, have some Shadows appear. www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/shadow
@@BokscarTube Sure, but I don't see any legitimate reason why one of the classes has to be killed by another method. It's a critique I have with the game design.
@@danielpayne1597 I don't recommend killing a pc wasn't my intention, but letting them know that they are not immortal prevents the disease of murder hobo.
Thank you Cody - this type of video is always GREATLY APPRECIATED! I'm sure it's difficult to come up with the content and, as a DM who's been in a few broken games, appreciate the resolutions you're suggesting.
sometimes I make them trade it off to a powerful being in trade for some favor, like healing a very sick child, or stepping in on a war or something. Then reward them with the favor of a family/guild/town/kingdom. otherwise I just beef up the challenge so they use it, but its less of a problem
Oh damn, I didn't know you played AoS. I'm a huge fan of that game.
12:00 Investigation? Trapped somewhere with enemies so far beyond their capabilities and comprehension that they have to shift from fight the problem to death to ‘Holy crap, we’ve got to figure out a way to just survive and escape!’?
Welcome to Call of Cthulhu country.
7:41 is an important lesson I wished a certain D&D 8-part mini-campaign DM remembered heading into their finale last night.
And good lord it was bad.
I was terrified of breaking the game. I had learned from a Pathfinder DM so stingy that one of our characters once jumped down a cliff TWICE trying to get 8 silver, it was worth it. We were offered a 100 gold reward for a quest once, and collectively sprinted out of town, because that was more gold than we'd seen over the course of the past year combined and DID NOT trust it. But one day decided to run HotDQ and RoT. and to me what was broken was not (just) the encounters, it was the balancing! So much gold and loot, it was going to shred my campaign...so might as well double down. I started just throwing even more magic at them, threw more shops, custom items, instead of raising allies they'd sometimes go on quests for more custom stuff. By the end the dracotaur (custom race) could morph into a silver dragon at will, the kalastar had fused with her god-spirit, the paladin was a full Ux Bahamuti, the fighter was a cowboy weretiger with exploding dice on her GUN. Those modules barely had rails to begin with, and we were soon doing donuts around them.
Funnily enough that was my most impactful campaign I've run to date. because once I let loose, I could just let my imagination run wild. We worked together to make them OP in whatever way they dreamed (within reason), and I in turn got to flex my encounter design muscles. because hey, you can take it right? Sure there was a TPK, but they had managed to even collect a few expensive diamonds so thier friend just brought them back. It was honestly magical. Broken? of course. But you know what? those ramped up challenges made them feel truly epic. and having so many options let them get just as creative. They felt as though the world had dangers to be wary of, but no LIMITs. And that finally got thier creative juices pumping. To this day we still laugh about pumping a dozen of Dire Wolves full of potions and storming a mind flayer nest. It ended with 2 dead, a heartfelt revival with reincarnate, the bonding of an estranged father and son, an engagement, dime store romance novels, and some time themed loot they handed over to Amn in exchange for the EK finally being able to return home after all this. When the game breaks...good. most ingredients have to before they're truly useful.
I should probably mention, I don't have any ill will toward that DM, he was and still is a wonderful DM. He simply believed that if we ever actually NEEDED gold, he had failed. Any needs or wants we had should be known by him, and he should have (within reason) given it to us. Or at least presented a means of getting it. Just a design philosophy difference.
I did the "stole the item" storyline. I inserted a mini-BBEG whose henchman stole an uber item, and during the recovery, they had it used against them. I think it made them realize just how broken it can be, and made them pull back a bit once they got it back.
I literally just made my players fight bigger things, and had bigger set piece battles. I made an undead, demon possessed black dragon covered in mushrooms I called a "Spore Dragon" that was loyal to Zuggtmoy, that they had to fight to end a demon invasion. They had to climb a giant mushroom that had sprouted suddenly within a city, where the dragon awaited in the cap, commanding his forces. They had to fight off flying demons harassing them as they climbed the mushroom, using their powerful homebrew bow I gave them to snipe the demons out of the air, as the bow was their most effective tool at dealing with them. I literally built around the bow, and gave them bigger badder enemies.
My players tried the Conjure Woodland Beings (Pixies) and Polymorph into Trexs tactic with me, fortunately I'm already familiar with the combo and my house rule was that it doesn't say they get to pick the creatures, just the CR. So I have them roll and if they do manage to get Pixies, that's fine. Its a 1/3rd chance, and if they gets them it's alright. I do a roll to see if the enemy has seen or knows of this tactic, if they do, they immediately target the druid to force concentration checks before the fey can use polymorph. I don't make it easy on them for such a powerful combo, but if they do get it up, it's fair that the enemy is screwed lol
One can always rule that pixies suffer from incredible ADHD and can get easily distracted by shiny loot, sweets or interesting/gross looking things. They might not to want to attack a target that is too cute or ugly. They might decide to attack it with childish insults instead of sleep darts etc. If your NPC baddie casts a cantrip on your druid Trex, how will the pixies react to a purple dinosaur? Next time your player summons pixies, have the NPC point out how boring and dumb-faced the druid is and they can't even make good fart sounds! (with a suitable demonstration of course)
@@adrianjas284 lmao I never thought of that. The spell does say they are friendly and under your command tho, so unless they really abuse them or let the Pixies die in combat, I wouldn't want to penalized them any more
My DM let me make a revolver before realising how strong that thing is in the hands of an artificer. Of course I agreed and had Garl Glittergold steal it from me, in person. Then at level 15 I found one in the treasure of a demon queen
If you have an item that does something really awesome, and the players are overusing/abusing it, consider HOW the item does what it does. Then, consider the consequences of that mechanism, and use them to present the players with a bill for the horrible damage they've done. For example:
- Someone is overusing an Amulet of the Planes? Some older wizard lets them know that these teleport amulets are tearing a hole in space and time, and things are going to leak in. The horrible armor of tentacle monsters that invades will keep pursuing the amulet, the tool that will let them tear the hole wider, until the players defeat them and patch the holes they have torn. Alternatively, maybe the amulet stalls for 24 hours if used too-frequently. Trap them in the plane of fire for a day. Maybe it gets more inaccurate the more it is used in a short time-period. You want to go to the Sword Coast? Oops, welcome to Sigil.
- Invincible armor? Maybe a set of priests show up at the players' door, and say: "Hey, that armor you're wearing transfers the damage you would have suffered to the Masochistic Angel of Protection, Stay-Zee's Muh'Am. She is being tormented by all of the damage you are sending her way, and needs time to heal. Take the armor off until she is healed." If the players say no, you can send an entire church/a tortured angel who is out for revenge/an entire pantheon after the players. Alternatively, maybe the armor stores all of that kinetic energy, and needs to discharge it, randomly. It does so with the force of a small nuke. Have the players discover this in the middle of a city, for maximum fun. Every month or so, the players have to take the armor out to an empty field and shoot arrows at it until it blasts a 5 km radius into ash, and irradiates the local wildlife.
- Decanter of Endless Water? That water comes from somewhere. People fight wars over water here on Earth all the time. I guarantee you that the farmers of "Sudden Desert-istan" will be willing to hire assassins and wizards to see you dead for stealing all their H20. Alternatively, maybe all of the water you have been stealing from the Plane of Water has created a bubble of nothingness, and you are wreaking havoc in this other plane.
Had me at nuke armor XD
Love it!
Extremely limited experience, second time playing is as DM 5th ed. I wanted my campaign to be full of magic items. Made my players a LITTLE too powerful, but then my fighter player unlocked his echo knight abilities. That's been a struggle, but after coming up with a few creative encounters, i kinda have it at bay. It was easier once they leveled up a bit more and i could send multiple enemies. He definitely has an upper hand, but he's still seating out every encounter. My favorite so far was a pair of displacer beasts.
I like, pseudo breaking items. Cracks start to appear. The magic struggles to work in a critical moment. When investigated it's appears the item is starting to break, and using it furthers the damage. An expert can even give an estimate of the remaining number of uses. That way the party is encouraged to not use it, except when they absolutely need to. Similar to the fishhook in Moana I've also had devils come to claim an item. The item grows hot to the touch. The priest/paladin can't touch it without taking 1d4 damage. The person who possessed the item started having nightmares of a figure. Eventually a high level devil showed up, claiming the item was theirs, but ended up bartering with the party by cursing the item so they could keep it. Allows the party to keep the fun toy, but makes the actual use of it more of a trade off. Plus the party feels like they got away with something.
10:20 You could make the players give up the item willingly to get something else they want like saving the life of a favourite NPC.
In my world there are 5 legendary dragon amulets, each with their own special powers (broken powers as it turns out). The party found the first one fast and then the second one...too fast. So I had a polymorphed dragon come along, see that they had that second one and robbed them blind. Instead of bellyaching about how I stole their item, they tell me constantly "We're going to find that son of a bitch and kill him."
If the party gets broken, adjusting the difficulty to the party is fine (as long as it's not adversarial), but from time to time, just throw in a normal encounter, or an encounter specifically tailored to be actually weak to the players' prefered playstyle, if only to throw them a bone and reward them for their choices
I'm not working in sales, but would still take Cody's 10 h introduction course :D
I'm one of the ones that lean into it, if the party is obliterating everything no issue, it's time to swing bigger sticks, and sticks that might be resistant to specific damage types
on the note of "dont take it away from the players"
if an item IS genuinly breaking your game, or perhaps you are a less experienced GM and simply dont know how to work around it, you absolutly can 100% talk to your players and say "look guys, this thing is way stronger then i thought it was, do you mind if i change it or swap it for something else"
99 times out of 100 the players will be ok with it, DnD is supposed to be fun, its more fun for the players when the DM is also having fun and is able to make fun challenging encounters, if something the player has is making it super difficult or impossible (or extremely difficult) for the DM to do that, and the DM makes that clear to the players, they will WANT to help you
talk to your players, if something is too difficult for you to work around, tell them, talk to them they will be ok if you change it
to use some examples from one of my games, a character i was playing was "chaotic neutral" to the extreme in how they approached things, to the point the GM simply had no idea how to deal with me half the time
this culminated in me trying to do a prison break where i snuck into the prison as i reached the persons room i wanted to dimension door in, so i could then dimenson door out again with him
the DM at this point didnt know how to deal with this, and if i pulled it off it would compeltly change the next several sessions worth of the game, so he simply said "it doesnt work you cant teleport into that room" (again, hes a new DM, hes not railroady he just doesnt know how to deal with a lot of the more bullshit stuff a pathfinder veteran like me can pull off)
i obviously got a bit irritated by this, as this was actually a legitimate case of the DM "taking away from the player"
BUT i spoke to him about it, and he talked about how he just didnt know how to work around my character and the stuff i could do (the other players were MORE new then him, it was their first pathfidner game at all) he spoke about how he couldnt plan around my character and couldnt figure out how to pose genuinly challenging things for my character without directly tailoring the encounters to counter me (which obviously wouldnt have been fun for anyone)
so, because i want to have fun playing DnD, and i want my friends to have fun playing DnD, i stopped playing the character that he didnt have fun DMing for
behind the scenes i came up with an excuse why that character would leave (so the other players wouldnt blame the DM) and made a new character that for a new DM was much more managable in their scope, they can still do stuff i find really fun and enjoyable, i still "break the game" in some ways, but he understands how to deal with me MUCH better then he did before and as a result the game is better for everyone+
I actually encourage my players to abuse game mechanics by adding tactical suggestions and ideas they might not have thought of; increases the fun factor and it shows that I am on the players side. Eventually they start becoming more outlandish in their problem solving techniques and it lends itself towards a more interesting fantasy story which is what we're ultimately building together. Always outside of combat scenarios or right after a scenario where a different approach could have been used, no toot tips in the middle of the problem. Great motto, "lean into it" :)
Gave my Fighter some Adamantine full plate armor, and compensated with him being immune to crits by throwing more spells at him, control and damage.
It might be along the lines of one of your ideas, but if the problem is being op in combat make combat more complex. Make using their simple fix for any combat more difficult to pull off. You could also throw in some intrigue in occasionally by making them question if the opponent is actually their adversary. Even if they are hammers, make it so if they're not careful while only seeing nails they might smash a finger. Though this idea could tread the line of being an adversarial DM. So be careful.
I did not expect an AoS mention alone a sponsor. I know D&D started from wargames but it just seems a lot of people who talk about D&D on the internet talks about the history of the game that far back.
Running a Call of Cthulhu game, it wasn't so much that it was broken, it was more that the players were playing like it was pure action and when I tried to ramp up the horror elements they didn't seem to enjoy it, I talked with each of them individually and the overall feeling was that they preferred action, so I changed the scenario to be instead of being about preventing the cult from summoning eldritch abominations and a God, to be about dealing with the consequences of already summoned monsters in an end of the world scenario where they got to fight against a God, which they enjoyed and they keep asking me to continue, but TBH while it wasn't boring to run that's not what I wanted to run so I don't want to continue that scenario, specially since it already has an ending, it did teach me that's not the group of players for the kind of game I wanted to run though.
Accidentally broke a character with an item I was not expecting to be as powerful as my character turned it into. He became the one man show. So I broke his companions with items of their own. I’ve told them the items are broken. I haven’t told them how. It’s a mystery that can be solved with some mildly out of the box thinking. As such, I just throw waves of wildly OP enemies at them.
I actually once pre-emptively nerfed one of my characters' item after noticing by myself that the DM was really struggling with making challenging encounters with it. I sat down with him and just said "I can see that you struggle a lot with my barbarian's armor, and I admit it's really OP. Here's how I think we should modify it so that it remains a powerful magic item while giving you more room to maneuver with your encounters and plotlines". He really appreciated it and the game remained really fun.
My campaigns usually break coz of player stupidity, examples:
When the CALM AND THOUGHTFUL lawful good monk decided that was a good idea to whack the crazy nutjob but very powerful wizard in the head with his staff as his first action in combat intead of talking. "I guess you die now"
When the player thought it was a very good idea of leaving a mummy lord inside of a vampire lair that was directly below the town. They became friends, vampire started turning everyone in town into vampire spawns and then made an ambush for the players for when they came back from their "adventure". Fast foward and we got ourselves a TPK.
0:10 And yet it is still Age of chainmail space marines.