Well this seems like a good place as any to vent some frustration at last night D&D session.
We arrived at a village, each of the PCs with his own motivation, after our caravan fell down a cliff and we were hunted by vicious evil panthers. The village was apparently in a sorry state, the villagers were antisocial, except for one, which we tried to help. There was no food in the fields, water was bad to drink, etc etc.
For some reason our goals mixed with saving the town from some evil wizard (everyone wanted to get at the wizard for a different reason but ultimately everyone was "good" aligned). Every time players tried to do something or investigate, were told to leave, that the villagers were afraid of us and hated us. Or something. And then something happened like lightning started causing fires, which the players promptly tried to help with, either with rousing speeches or joining the water bucket brigades.
This of course resulted in the villagers seeing us as demons that breathed lightning from our mouths and threw gasoline with our buckets, and again were told to leave. Then a Paladin In Shining Armor(TM) and flying steed came from the skies, told everyone we were so evil and should leave, and turned everything off instantly (lightning, fires). At this point we were pretty sure everything including the knight was an illusion made for the villagers to hate us even more.
Oh yeah and demons were kidnapping random children for months from their own beds.
We decided to hole up in the only friendly house so we could leave and find some clue (so we could get out of the way of the angry/fearful/confused villagers before something BAD happened to them). Then a demon kidnapped the friendly villager's son, said demon was completely unbeatable with us (we had level 6 pregens with zero magical items, just regular weapon and armor and no money). Also did some nasty permanent stat damage and left us a bit damaged, and even burned one of our weapons (for good measure).
So the villager friend asks us to help him retrieve the kid, we tell him we were going to investigate Location X as the more likely one, he led the way outside so we could go and save the day.
Then the DM decided the entire able bodied male population of the town (about 40 people) had us surrounded in a lynching mob with pitchforks and spears. We told them to sod off before something BAD happened to them, but they used their super strength (or something) to keep us from leaving. At this point we were pretty much sold on the idea that talking or trying to be diplomatic to them in any way was just going to be turned against us again anyway (the whole party was pretty much warriors anyway).
Our good barbarian thought it would be a good idea to intimidate them, so he attacked the weapons of the ones that blocked and shoved him. He succeeded, and obviously this resulted in the mob going into a berserker rage and throwing spears at him, doing damage. We retaliated trying to do non-lethal damage, and because some rule or something it was a critical and two villagers died. The rest screamed "KILL THEM!" so there was no turning back, I suppose.
We managed to kill them all (they never retreated, surrendered or gave any signs of giving up), after suffering 3 casualties out of 4. But then the DM told us "OMG you're so evil, you just slaughtered a whole town!" All attempts to say "but they attacked US!" he was like "but they're civilians! You wouldn't shoot a 10 year old if he threw a rubber ball at you! and anyway they all did Subdued (?) damage so you're healing all your wounds anyway! They use weapons that do no damage to you! blah blah!".
I told him "you just said they threw spears at one of us. SPEARS. You could have said stones or sticks but it was a spear. A spear does damage. I'm pretty sure you can kill someone with a pitchfork too, just because they have Magic We're Level 1 Adventurer plot protection from villagers doesn't mean the adventurers aren't going to react in-character!"
"But you're stronger, they couldn't have never kill you! And... it wasn't really spears, I just said that to see your reaction! But you're evil now! Change your alignments!"
"So, you're saying that attacking innocents is evil and changes alignment? That means the villagers turned evil when they attacked us right? So we really killed a lot of evil people, eh?"
"No no... the villagers were confused and fearful of you! They attacked out of fear!"
"Okay... wait, so fear makes people brave and with unlimited morale? Like, the next time you cast Fear on me let me know so that I can kill my enemies with even more determination! Also, the actions of the villagers confused us and made us afraid of the craziness, so that means our actions were okay too."
We left the town, confronted the bad guy, died in the process and he kept chiding how we lost because we didn't help the villagers and yadda... also our corpses get reanimated and they become very happy undead because in life they were evulz and loved to slaughter innocent people! How you like them apples you evildoers! Also one of the PCs was a merchant so his punishment after defeat was to turn into some sort of Greed Demon Pig of Evil Capitalism (which the DM smugly stated as if some kind of punishing for acting so evil, except... the character was a pregen, and the merchant backstory had been written by him, and at no point did the character act greedy except when telling others parts of his backstory. In fact at no point in the game they saw even a copper coin to be greedy about).
Long story short, we complained later in our Facebook page, but he keeps posting "you guys just lack self control! you should learn better morality blah blah blah". At this point he isn't even pretending we were playing characters whose morality values might not be the same as our 21th century selves, he's just telling WE (the players) are lacking in restraint or something (we actually did all our actions calmly, and even said things like "uh, I'm a barbarian, I should react like this, otherwise I'm metagaming or trying to play optimally", "right, and they attack first, so we should at least defend, no?").
(note that this guy makes us do lethal blows because "we didn't announce non-lethal right before every blow!". "Dude, we've pretty much established that we're doing non-lethal damage, until we tell you otherwise" "Nuh-huh! you have to announce every time otherwise it's lethal by default!")
Anyway, not sure there is a solution other than keep arguing, but this is just a rant. I hope it was entertaining
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Topic: Tabletop Games Thread (Read 197429 times)