How does a DM deal with players who look for these wild ideas?
I think it’s fine to think outside of the box and metagame. But does it end up in a slippery slope where it feels like the players just want to outthink every encounter where it’s just a rube Goldberg set of plays?
There isn’t anything to “deal” with. If you want your players to only give predetermined solutions to problems, you really need to play a different game.
If you’re not a fan of this type of behaviour, I recommend playing a TTRPG that isn’t D&D.
D&D has gotten a bit of an “LULLZRANDOM!!11!!” reputation, possibly because of the content creators needing something whacky to get views, or just because of how mainstream it is. If you need to stand out in a crowd of thousands being extreme, novel, or whacky has the lowest effort for the highest reward.
If everyone at the table finds the game fun, then you are playing correctly. I find this behaviour exhausting and would tell the players that it needs to stop unless someone else wants to GM.
If you’ve got the right DM for it, they lean into it, because everyone’s having fun.
But say by adventure 10, they’re still trying to beat the system. It feels exhausting trying to create a story like “A vampire council, but they have anti-magic doors so you can’t disguise yourself. And also no rats. And you can’t teleport in there. And summoning a devil or warping the castle is forbidden. And…”
In a world where magic exists and anti-magic countermeasures are a thing do you think any reasonably powerful person wouldn’t have them in place? It seems like you’re trying to come across as ridiculous but all of those sounds like pretty reasonable precautions in a magical world.
Just don’t do that lol, let them do wacky hijinks, or play a system without the wacky hijinks
Maybe you could try letting the heroes use their cool abilities designed specifically for these situations
Imo this is firm “you can get away with it exactly once” territory. It’s clever, so it should be rewarded. But after the once every lord will mysteriously have anti-shape shifting wards.
Or guards with detect magic.
Personally I think the players coming up with some cool new trick for each encounter sounds pretty good. The problem is when they find one cool new trick that works for everything. Like, casting Create Water in someone’s lungs sounds awesome the first time you do it, but you don’t want a whole campaign of just that. But even if the players agree that that would be boring, it’s hard not to do that without justifying why it wouldn’t work, and if it wouldn’t work every time, why would it have worked the first time?
Create water doesn’t work inside a person because all living things inherently have enough magical ability to resist spells cast on or in their person. Damage dealing spells have to be specifically designed to work on people, or they have to be able to attack someone by applying an external force.
Always look a gift horse in the mouth
Strategically placed near every door, window, sewer pipe, and vent the DM put an Antimagic Field device.
I especially like to imagine a druid coming in through the sewer as a rat and having his robes get soaked in poo when he gets popped out of wild shape.
A permanent channel of a spell of that high level I would hope would only be available to the most powerful of people.
Also those things would be so expensive they would be worth stealing!
I personally have two mages at entrances that are taking turns ritual casting detect magic. I guess similar impact, but it’s not on all entrances.
Antimagic field is an eighth level spell with one hour concentration duration; an item that has it on 24 hours a day would easily be a legendary item. People underestimate how powerful a spell it is and suggest spamming it everywhere. Having it on every door, window, sewer pipe, and vent would be massive overkill just to spite wildshape.
And if I were a king in Faerun I would spend my money like that. Fuck them druids.
Hiring monodrones is usually cheaper. They are the simplest Modrons, and they would be perfectly willing to work for a Lawful king (the evil-good axis doesn’t come into play) because it increases the amount of order in the multiverse. But every modron has Truesight.
Hell, maybe hire a whole team of modrons. Monodrones to stand watch at all ingresses, with orders of “raise an alarm if you see any disguised shapeshifter enter through that window / door / arrowslit / whatever”, and duodrones with orders of “patrol the castle and raise an alarm if you see any disguised shapeshifter”.
Thats brilliant.
removed by mod
