That's Your Fault: A D&D Rant

As a DM, the thing I dread most is hearing a player protest a judgment call I made on the grounds that it shuts down some design decisions they made when they created their character. I mean, I really hate that.

Case Study 1

(This was during the 3rd Edition days.)  The adventuring party had come upon an ancient ruined city in the middle of a haunted forest. One character decides to use the Ancient History skill he equipped his character with. I tell him the roll automatically fails. He demands to know why. He demands that I honor the result if he succeeds. He goes on to tell me all about how I'm shutting him down. He specifically chose that skill for exactly this kind of situation and I'm not letting him do what he designed the character to do, and now he feels the choice of that skill has been wasted.

Now, you might say "Well he's right.  He is entitled to the roll.  If there's something about this ancient city that would make it especially unlikely that he'd know anything about it, you should just set the CR higher.

Well, no.  If I set the CR so high he couldn't possibly succeed, then it amounts to the same thing.  What if he'd rolled a critical success?  Then I'd be obligated to give him information the PCs just weren't supposed to get yet.

Let's look at the situation to see how this player has failed to see the forest for the trees. The ruin in this case was not what it appeared to be. It was an ancient city, but it had been entirely separated from the world around it through magical means, and thus its existence wouldn't have been recorded in any source the characters would have known. That, in itself, was intended as a clue to its true nature. If I had allowed the roll and he failed, he'd not have had a way to realize that there was something very special about this place. If he'd somehow succeeded, like by rolling a natural 20, then it would have ruined the mystery of the city and undone the point of the adventure. The simple fact that his character, having studied history, couldn't identify the ruins was itself a very important clue! Thus, taking the skill wasn't a waste because it helped to create the feeling of mystery. That thought never occurred to him, because he was too busy worrying about having his design decisions validated.

Case Study 2

 The adventuring party is walking down a dungeon corridor and triggers a rolling ball trap (Think of Raiders of the Lost Ark). the characters each get a saving throw to mitigate the damage they'll take. One player fails the save but wants to use a reaction spell to blink out of the path. I didn't allow it and I got to hear about how this was exactly the sort of scenario he chose that spell for, and now it was wasted.

Well, the problem is that the rules simply aren't structured to allow that. A Saving Throw represents the character taking some kind of action to protect himself. By failing the save, the character's efforts were unsuccessful. Since the outcome of the save, in the game world, is only known after the impact, there's no time to try something else. Also, if I were to start allowing spells to be used in reaction to a Saving Throw, the potential for abuse would be staggering. Why bother rolling a saving throw to avoid a dragon's breath attack if you can just use a reaction spell to banish it away? The Saving Throw is not a free action, however instant it may be.

In both of these cases, the players made certain assumptions about how things would work during the game that turned out not to be what they expected. That isn't my fault as the DM. Creating a character is an exercise in trying to do the best you can to anticipate what situations might arise and how you would handle them as the character. It doesn't obligate the DM to present you with situations to reward you for your design choices. If you design a good character, they'll succeed more often than they fail, but sometimes they WILL fail. Just like in real life. When I hear someone complain that a choice they made when creating the character has been wasted, it sounds to me just the same as when someone gets a Bachelor's Degree in Medieval Women's Literature and complains because they can't find a job that uses their skills. I never told Player 1 to go get ancient history as a skill and I never suggested to Player 2 that a spell could be used to escape the result of a failed Saving Throw.

Now, you could argue that this was my fault because I must have been running the game inconsistently for the players to have had these expectations.  No.  In both of these cases, the situation was entirely unique and hadn't come up before.  If they had, then there'd already have been a precedent for the players to know what to expect.

I'm not looking to stifle and shut down characters. I want people to feel good about their characters and to feel like they did a good job creating them. It's just that I'm not going to bend and break the system or the adventure narrative to give them a cookie for every little thing they put on that character sheet.