The fun thing about D&D, I think, is that it can bring a group together for a fun night of adventuring in a way that video games really can't: namely face to face. The bad thing about D&D is that you have to play it with a group of people, and as everyone knows, people are assholes.
So in my group, there are a couple of types of people: the ones who really really know how to play and expect the game to be played that way, and the ones who are there for the halibut and don't really care so long as fun is had by all. Then there's the DM, who's been valiantly trying to run the game and just kind of wants his campaigns to not be put through the wringer every time he makes one up.
Let's start with that last group, eh? The DM. He's the one that sets everything up and tells the story. He more or less makes the world and the rules and things within. Our group's DM is a veteran DM, but not particularly with this system. He's worked more with systems where combat is not so large a part of the game, and so has had some interesting things for us to see and do within his world other than murdering things.
So back to where I was last post. We were fighting two animated armors each with two flying swords. Now, our DM, knowledgeable as he is with roleplaying systems as he is, calculated this encounter very carefully to be in the "difficult" range. The thing was, he misread the scale and actually had it calculated to be in the "deadly" range. This was the first point of contention. It was the opinion of a few that having a deadly encounter as our first serious encounter (3rd one total) was in poor taste and also the combat was taking quite a while because our attacks kept missing and theirs kept hitting. The thing that really brought up issue was the next bit though.
Now, all we really had to do to end this encounter was grab a gem hovering 8 feet above a circular frictionless plane and then retreat to back behind a magical barrier that the baddies couldn't go through. At first we, as a group, decided to go and murder the monsters and then make off with the gem. Well, then the monsters started evading three out of every four hits and we began to get a little frustrated with the combat. So our fighter leaped through the air to grab the gem...
And missed. And again. And again. Then, more than three quarters of his HP later and down one party member, he finally nat 20'd and grabbed it and ran for the barrier with everyone else following in his wake. There was a fairly large argument over the difficulty class of jumping so you can reach something 8 feet in the air (not actually very hard at all for a normal-sized human) to jumping really far but with enough height to actually grab stuff (the gem was a few feet away as well, so you had to jump with enough air to still be able to reach it after travelling horizontally for 10 feet). In the end, the DM just kind of let it drop and we got the gem and ended the encounter.
I think the largest problem here was that people either were not listening to descriptions well enough or that the scene wasn't quite described well enough for some people and they were expecting something quite different. So lesson learned: communication. As a DM, you always want to not just describe the scene as you want them to see it, but sometimes you need to describe way more than the player will ever need to accomplish what he or she needs to do. As a player, you need to communicate what you want to achieve almost more than what you're doing to achieve it.
There was one worse the next session though, where the group flat out refused to do a puzzle (a maze) because it would be kind of a really silly thing to do in a D&D campaign. I kind of agreed with that one, but still. Our DM was kind of feeling a little put out after that one and it kind of brings up another point: The DM is a player as well, just a different kind of player that can kill you if you upset him enough. The DM is trying to have fun just as much as anyone else is, so sometimes it's good to facilitate that rather than to try to get things to go the way you want them to.
Since learning the system was more my intent in joining this game than anything else, this has really been helpful for me. It looks like a few people may or may not drop out of the campaign shortly, which may kill it or may make it actually run a bit longer than it would have normally. We shall see. At any rate, I believe this to be the last regular entry about D&D for now. I may DM a game and post about that someday. But not now.
Until next time!
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