DM Mistakes

CB

Sometimes I make mistakes which need to be corrected between sessions.

I'll use this thread as a way to show you where I made mistakes, and which corrections are being made to be reflected in future sessions.

The thread might be bad for my DMing self-esteem, but it will help the players understand why things might change from session to session.

Of course, I will try to keep errors to a minimum, but no one is perfect.

CB

I was a little bit flustered (and slightly overwhelmed) on Sunday. Our first session together almost qualifies as a 'debacle' for me. I made four errors that will need to be corrected going forward:

Initiative: My brain was in AD&D2 when I asked you all to roll d10 for init. We will be rolling d20 as per the rules for future init checks.

There were several rolls that the players made, which I should have made for them. I was just having everyone roll their own checks, when I should only be having the characters roll checks for things that they would immediately understand their failure of. Anything that the characters would not know if they failed, or which might provide the character with false information should be rolled by the DM. This includes ALL spot, search, appraise, bluff, intuit direction, and so forth... This will happen in future sessions.

I haven't yet decided how (or if) to correct the other two, yet. I'll let you know when I do.

GHoosdum

CB Droege wrote:

There were several rolls that the players made, which I should have made for them. I was just having everyone roll their own checks, when I should only be having the characters roll checks for things that they would immediately understand their failure of. Anything that the characters would not know if they failed, or which might provide the character with false information should be rolled by the DM. This will happen in future sessions.

Are you talking about things like the Appraise checks? My understanding, at least from the description in the PHB, is that the player rolls, is given a value by the DM, but doesn't know the DC they were rolling against, so even though they were the ones rolling, it still might provide false information.

My understanding might be flawed, however.


What were the other 2?

CB

GHoosdum wrote:

Are you talking about things like the Appraise checks? My understanding, at least from the description in the PHB, is that the player rolls, is given a value by the DM, but doesn't know the DC they were rolling against, so even though they were the ones rolling, it still might provide false information.

I like to roll these types of checks for you because (for example) if you roll a 1 on your appraise or search check, you know you failed, so you wont trust anything that the DM says.

What were the other 2?

I'll let you know if I decide to do anything to correct them. I wouldn't have mentioned them at all, except that I don't want you to be suprised when I make another correction mid-week after only listing two today.

GHoosdum

CB Droege wrote:

I like to roll these types of checks for you because (for example) if you roll a 1 on your appraise or search check, you know you failed, so you wont trust anything that the DM says.

That makes sense, especially as some players have the DM's guide so would have the published DC chart anyway. Plus, from re-reading the description of Appraise that I can find on the web, it doesn't explicitly state who is performing this roll, so it does make sense for the DM to roll it out... but it does state that an appraisal takes a full minute, so WalkingStick wouldn't have been able to appraise the boat as he fell off the mast under any conditions.

How will we handle communication of our modifiers to you when you're performing the checks? Will you ask for the info from us or just have to flip through our character sheets all the time?

CB

GHoosdum wrote:

That makes sense, especially as some players have the DM's guide so would have the published DC chart anyway. Plus, from re-reading the description of Appraise that I can find on the web, it doesn't explicitly state who is performing this roll, so it does make sense for the DM to roll it out... but it does state that an appraisal takes a full minute, so WalkingStick wouldn't have been able to appraise the boat as he fell off the mast under any conditions.

How will we handle communication of our modifiers to you when you're performing the checks? Will you ask for the info from us or just have to flip through our character sheets all the time?

Sometimes characters have to make checks when they don't even know it (I did manage to do those right on Sunday), so It'll be my job to keep track of, in general. Of course, if you're requesting a check, and you know your mod off the top of your head you can save me a sec by telling me.

CB

Okay, here's the third one. It's not as bad as I thought it was: the stuff I was calling Wizard's Fire is actually called Alchemist's Fire (which is why I had such trouble finding it in the book when Peter asked if it was magical). I think something similar to this stuff was called Wizard's Fire in a George R R Martin novel... I thought perhaps I was wrong aboput how it worked, but it turns out that I did know what I was talking about this time ... Here are the details: It is not magical, it is only a chemical reaction. A special, slow-burning oil with an ignition catalyst built into the flask. It does 1d6 fire damage (with 1 splash damage) upon breaking, and continues to an additional 1d6 fire damage until it is extinguished (which can be done with regular or magical water or even by rolling around on the ground (with a DEX check)). If it burns on something for too long, the fire will spread to the thing it is burning upon (Dependant upon the hardness of the material).

The only fix we need to make for this one is to start calling it by it's correct name.

CB

Okay, here it is:

Due to a math error on my part, I gave you guys too much experience. I realized what I had done right after the call ended, and I've been thinking about what to do about it.

I've decided that I'm not going to take it back away. We can call it a bonus to represent the few things that each character had already learned during his life leading up to the adventure.

I wouldn't even mention it if it had been a low amount of extra experience, but it was a significant enough mistake that everyone will notice when they get the XP for future adventures, and it is significantly lower.

Also: on a related note, I've changed my mind about how to deal with sea encounters and experience. I gave the experience at the end of the session because I was thinking of the encounters at sea as being essentially extra-adventure, I thought about this later, and have decided to treat sea voyages as adventures themselves, awarding experience at the end of the voyage in the way that I would normally award experience at the end of an adventure. Mixing it up like I was thinking of doing just seems like it might cause even more problems.

GHoosdum

I was wondering about the level of experience from the encounters - it placed us from 40% to 60% of the way to the next level already, which seemed odd to me. Thanks for clarifying.

CB

We've been doing critical hits wrong.

I was just rereading the section on criticals to see how they work when negative value is rolled for dmg (Rupert will be rolling negatives most of the time because of his strength).

When making a successful critical hit, one does not multiply their damage role, they must roll their damage multiple time and add these rolls together.

We'll do it correctly from this point forward.

CB

There has been a flaw in my XP calculating worksheets since Saelin left the party. Somehow, when deleting the row for his character from the worksheet template, I screwed up the formulas.

Even though I went back and assigned all missing experience, this error only resulted in a small correction for each character, but since everyone was so close to leveling, it put Dal'Ruth and Amon over the amount they needed to reach level 8, so Drew and Rob should contact me about leveling up one evening this week.

In case you care what the actual error was:

Here's what was happening:
The worksheet I use takes the total XP for each encounter, and divides it up among the participants in the encounter, throwing away any shares that would have been earned by NPCs.

In every worksheet starting with the first one that doesn't have Saelin in it, the worksheets were referring to the coordinating cell on the previous sheet to find the value of the encounter in the 7th and 8th encounter of each adventure. As I said, I have no idea how this formula got borked, but that's what it was doing.

This means that each character was loosing a bit of experience, but not much because there was still XP being added, it just was being added as if it was an encounter from the previous adventure, which had a lower average encounter level.

For example: The 7th encounter from "The Escape from Flai" adventure (which began when you first talked to the dudes at the bridge) was the 3 mummies who were guarding No'He's Scabbard, and that encounter should have been worth a party total of 2400xp, the chart was instead drawing that number from the 7th encounter of "Traveling through Southern Draconia" on the previous page which turned out to be "helped people in overturned cart" which I had made worth 1400xp for the party, meaning a total of 1000xp was missing for the party as a whole. This entry actually caused the largest of the discrepancies.

GHoosdum

Dude! Cool that you found it. Now I have to think about this level...

primesuspect

Ur doin it rite

CB

We've been doing Withdraw incorrectly. I've been letting you escape from any one threatened area freely, and then go on to do whatever else, including casting spells or firing bows. This is wrong.

Withdrawing in such a way as to cancel the potential AOO from the enemy is a full-round action, so if you want to do that, you can't do anything else that turn. I don't think it's happened very many times, but we'll do it right going forward.

primesuspect

CURSES. Foiled again! I would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for that pesky DMG

CB

Another thing, that may be yet more disappointing. Since it doesn't say it anywhere in the spell, I never realized that detect spells can be blocked. However, upon closer reading of the Materials Hardness section of the DMG, I have discovered that most walls block Detect spells.

Honestly, I often felt that Detect magic was a bit overpowered, since, with the way we were using it, one could essentially find all the good loot in advance of exploration, though I don't feel that you guys exploited that overmuch.

Don't be surprised if your Detect Magic casts are not nearly as effective as they used to be.

Thrax

Detect magic is a cone emanation. Spells can be classified by type, shape, or both:

<h3>Type</h3>
Burst: Affects whatever's caught in the area, even creatures that cannot be seen, but not creatures with total cover. Unless otherwise specified, the typical shape for a burst is a sphere.

Emanation: Like a burst, but the spell continues to radiate from its point of origin for the duration of the spell. Unless otherwise specified, the typical shape for an emanation is a cone.

Spread: Works like a burst, except it is capable of turning corners. Any turns made by the spell count towards the spell's radius of effect. Unless otherwise specified, the typical shape for a spread is a sphere.

<h3>Shape</h3>
Sphere: Extends from its point of origin in all directions to fill a spherical area of the spell's specified area of effect.

Cone: Fills a quarter circle in the direction of the caster's choice, beginning from a corner of the caster's occupied square. As most cone spells are bursts or emanations, they rarely turn corners.

Cylinder: A rare type of spell that permits the caster to select the point of origin. The center of the cylinder becomes the point of origin, and the spell emanates down from the top of the cylinder to fill the affected space.

Line: Shoots away from the caster's occupied square in a direct line until impeded by a barrier which obstructs its effect (e.g. a wall). All targets which occupy squares in the line are affected.

<h3>Examples:</h3>

The Evocation spell Ice Storm is classified as a Cylinder that extends 40' vertically, and 20' horizontally. As Ice Storm is a cylinder, this spell hits anything caught within the blast radius, even creatures above or below the caster's floor, or behind walls.

The Evocation spell Chaos Hammer is classified as a Burst with a 20' radius. Because the typical shape for a burst spell is spherical, this spell only affects things within line of sight.

Hope this helps.

CB

Well, it specifically says of Detect spells that they are not stopped by things like doors, or other small obstacles, but that a foot of stone or a few feet of wood will stop them. There is no way to know that from just reading the spell details, or even from the helpful information above.

I guess for some reason, I already assumed that things like cone of cold, and line of acid stop at the walls, but since Detect spells are sensing something rather than projecting something, I didn't really think of it the same way, but I guess if you look at it in terms of something that must first radiate away from the character, like sonar or something, then it's easier to imagine its barriers.