DM Hell: How Not to Give Things to Players in Tabletop Games

(original: Stevebidmead, edits mine)

One of the problems with D&D or any other tabletop game is how to give loot. While I'm not going to talk about things like equitable distribution of loot, or how to handle party conflicts regarding loot, there are certainly times when a DM gives things to players thinking that it will lead to a good experience and it actually ends up undermining the campaign or the players' experience. In this article, I will address three times (in a single campaign, ouch) that as a player (and experienced DM) I saw a DM give me things that I really shouldn't have had.

This campaign was a continuation of two years of intermittent story in Faerun, the generic D&D fantasy setting (aka the Forgotten Realms) that most players are familiar with. I had been the DM the first year, introducing some new players to the joy of D&D, and while it wasn't perfect, it was a good introduction and I think all parties (except the players who decided it wasn't for them and left) were excited to continue. I passed the reins to two of the players that first year who co-DM'ed the next year's campaign, and it went quite well, if perhaps in the opposite direction of this post (not giving players a whole lot of toys to play with, etc.). The third year, a player who had basically missed half or more of our sessions said that he wanted to DM and that his real world obligations that had made his attendance poor were ending, and so we gave him a chance. Well, let's just say it didn't go well. However, instead of looking at the dumpster fire as a whole, let's look at three ways not to give players loot, abilities, and rewards in D&D and other tabletop games.

Before the campaign even started, there were warning signs. He wanted all of our characters to have special abilities beyond regular abilities, and this worked two ways- we rolled our stats twice and kept the higher block, and we got special "snowflake" (his words) abilities that supplemented our class and race. This is in 5th Edition, where things are already pretty lenient with feats, class abilities, and specializations, so it meant that our character sheets were going to be quite large. I was playing an edgy, Tiefling Rogue monster hunter (I wanted to try out the twin handcrossbows build that I had seen a while back, so I went for a Rogue Thief archetype. There are two reasons for this: I'm cursed, and going rogue meant that I had access to Reliable Talent, the level 11 Rogue ability that lets me treat any roll on a skill or ability check that I'm proficient in as a 10, even if I roll lower, while still keeping higher rolls. It also meant that I had expertise, so I could get my key skills to insanely high values- with reliable talent, there were a couple skills that I would always get 22 or higher on. Starting at level 13, we got all these goodies right off the bat, so I of course asked for a bunch of things related to my character's fiendish heritage, and slipped in a racial "Pass Without Trace" spell-like ability. I justified it by saying that enemies in the area would detect fiendish whispering and menace, being put on edge even if they didn't notice my character, and that it only affects myself (instead of allies like the actual spell).

As a player, I knew how broken this would be. Pass Without Trace is an automatic +10 to stealth checks and prevents being tracked, so for a rogue already rolling a solid 24 minimum on stealth, this ability bumps it to a game breaking 34. The DM not only agreed to this (and some of the other, less broken abilities) but even ignored my caveat that it alerts enemies, giving me an incredibly powerful ability. This was obviously a problem; no monster in 5E except for those with tremor-sense or telepathy could actually detect my character while sneaking. This is already enough to be the first error, but wait, there's more. Instead of dealing with making stealth mechanically difficult (i.e. lights extinquish the shadows that were the fluff of my racial Pass Without Trace ability, or demanding that I use cover and obstruction for stealth) the DM's solution was to cutscene power any monsters who were supposed to detect my rogue. So, while breaking into the vampire compound (more on that later), they were simply magically aware of my intrusion (with no save or skill check), or while fighting werewolves my stealth was meaningless because of their sense of smell (a decent answer, but worn thin by the fact that my character, a professional monster hunter, wasn't allowed to disguise his scent earlier by DM fiat and a dismissal of "It won't matter.").

So this is the first "How not to give things to players": Give them things that you then make worthless. This comes up later in some of the other things, too, but is most egregious here- not only does the DM make this ability worthless by skirting mechanics with story elements, it also detracts from the fact that this is part of my character's design. His expertise in stealth and actual, standard development for stealth is also made worthless here, so not only does this "gift" penalize my character's (admittedly broken) special ability, it also penalizes class features. Granted, some of that might have been the same even if the broken ability had been removed- the DM obviously didn't want us to do too much sneaking around instead of fighting his story encounters- but it hurt to have the supposed special ability and my character's core design struck down in one blow. Other examples of this include magical items that only work in one context, but which have no logical reason to be constrained (for example, an amazing +10 sword of slaying that only works while it's in one cave against one boss monster, and then loses its power)- these can work well as story elements, but not as loot or character abilities, and the limitations should be explained to the players or their characters.

The second mistake came in giving each character a unique magical item. Now, this is actually one of my highlights of the campaign, because I was given one of the coolest magical weapons I've ever seen in D&D- the Grappling Shot. This weapon is basically a hand crossbow, but instead of shooting bolts, it shoots a grappling hook. This became incredibly valuable because I could use it for both movement and combat. The rest of my party also got magic items here too, which messed with the action economy (every player got a bonus action option with their items except the poor Adept, who got shafted with loot every step along the way, RIP). Action economy is a longer subject for another time, and probably would have been fine if we didn't have a rogue, but because rogues in 5E already mess with the action economy, it breaks balance because suddenly my class features for bonus actions are worthless because our special magic items are bonus actions also... but I digress. This item was described in the most gushing of terms- it had a magical cord with an "adamantine" grappling hook attached and it could ensnare and control enemies as a secondary attack, as well as granting me additional movement as an attack action. It all sounds great, until you look at the actual numbers. Controlling enemies was a low DC (I think something around 12) for level 13 characters, with no scaling with my attributes, and I could even be pulled towards enemies if they made a contested strength check that my rogue was almost certain to lose. The adamantine head was solely a story element- in practice, while indestructible (like basically every item carried by party members), it didn't function like adamantine does- it didn't penetrate resistance against non-adamantine weapons (a particularly egregious oversight), it didn't interact differently with magical surfaces (including the BS "magic" walls that every area had to prevent my rogue from using Second Story Work to just waltz inside), and it functioned mechanically as a hand crossbow with reduced range in combat.

This is the second "How not to give things to players": Give them things that seem amazing, but are much less powerful in practice. I'm not opposed to giving players bad loot or things that are only marginally better, but for a high level character, a standard item with a mobility gimmick and a few underpowered accessories is definitely disappointing. Now, I still got a lot of use out of the item because of poor DM enforcement- the movement on the grappling hook was treated as teleportation, so it didn't provoke attacks of opportunity and basically cheated on some other area movement things. However, compared to the other items (for example, the Triton monk got a trident that could be used, for Ki points, to desiccate enemies for crazy damage and next to no cost as a bonus action), it really underperformed, especially since some of the coolness, like bonus action use, actually reduced the value of my class abilities. It basically became a teleporting alternative to my class based free bonus action sprint, which is helpful in niche situations, but otherwise worthless. Additionally, DM fiat made the out of combat mobility uses less than meaningful, since I couldn't use it to bypass anything that the DM wanted us to fight and, with Second Story Work, my climb speed was the same as the grappling hook's movement. So, while this item is super cool, giving it to my character basically just gave him access to a bunch of things he already had access to in a different way.

The third error is probably more readily apparent. As part of the story, we were securing artifacts of great power, each designed to match one of our characters. While the DM's real world obligations (oh, did I mention that still was a problem, and that it took us four sessions out of an ill-begotten ten to get an artifact?) and failure to equitably distribute these items (at one point, my character, the DM self-insert, and the new player who was just straight up given were the only three with these, while the other two party members had nothing) are all arguably contenders for issues with loot distributions, the most significant is this: the artifact destroyed my character's playstyle.

Let's take a second to talk about how loot should work in a tabletop game. Whether it's a powerful magic item in D&D, or cyberware in Shadowrun, or useful gear in Degenesis, or a weapon in basically any tabletop game, each character is good at using certain things. This is synergy- a rogue does very well with poisoned daggers, while a barbarian would rather take a mundane greatsword. Giving a character items that contradict their playstyle is not necessarily bad, if it shores up a weakness, but giving a stealthy character a machinegun doesn't help them play a stealthy character. Now, part of this is that loot can and should be distributed to the party- if the aforementioned stealthy character steals a machine gun, he can give it to his Street Sam and they can move on to bigger, better heists. Locking loot to a character for story reasons can be a problem, however, if it doesn't work with that character's build. I think you know where this is going.

After fighting the werewolf prince and taking back the cursed artifact (more problems to talk about there than we can cover in a day, this campaign had issues left and right) my character acquired it. It was, after all, the "stealthy" story arc and this was designed for my character- in fact, the DM explicitly gave it to my character, who used it prematurely (long story) and almost got his soul taken over (more problems- this would have removed my character from play entirely, as the DM didn't think that I, an experienced player of several years DM experience and many more of playing, could not roleplay my character as evil, but that's another story for another time). This artifact gives my character control over lycanthropes of all shapes and sizes (not just werewolves, but wererats, weretigers, werebears, and all the DM's poorly balanced "official" homebrew garbage in between), but also transforms him into the Lord of Lycanthropes. Now, that doesn't on paper, seem like such a bad thing... except that this ranged stealth specialist is suddenly a frontline melee combatant with capacity rivaling or exceeding a vanilla 5E barbarian of a similar level and is now much, much more powerful for it. Yeah, it got broken fast. But I'm not concerned about the balance issues- this campaign was already a balance trainwreck (not to mention that, in the finale, the DM literally killed our characters because, as he mentioned to someone outside the group which was eventually relayed back to us, Jesus supposedly told him to kill our characters... awkward), but because I wasn't playing my character anymore. The skulking, monster hunting rogue became a king and brawler without peer, and stealth (while still incredibly powerful and worthless as mentioned above) and finesse basically went out the window.

So this is the final "How not to give things to players": Don't destroy their plans for their characters. There are many things that loot can do to drive character development. Giving the party money which the thief in their midst steals can be an organic party conflict that leads to an interesting story, or a magic item that they can't identify might become something wonderful when they expose it to magical energy, or maybe you just give the barbarian a bigger, better stick. However, an item that fundamentally transforms how a player's character works can be a mixed bag. It can help, for example, if a player feels their character is underperforming- giving a +2 bow to the ranger who keeps missing and feels worthless can balance out some of that performance anxiety and make the game experience better. However, if a player is happy with their character (or wants to be happy in the role they want to perform, but can't because of gear limitations), giving them something else entirely doesn't fix that problem. A rogue simply doesn't need to be a frontline fighter- it doesn't match the measured, calculating combat style of a monster hunter or a thieving assassin. Making a player play the way you want them to play is bad DMing- you can incentivize certain actions and styles of play, but unless you communicate to your players the rules and limitations of your universe, especially as they apply to their characters, it generally is a more entertaining and dynamic experience to allow players to organically grow and develop their players. Shiny MacGuffins can be fun, but don't make your players feel like the story is beyond their reach.

That is all for this session of DM Hell, where the suffering is real, the stories are incoherent, and the sessions are trainwrecks. If you have your own stories, or have a topic you want me to cover, please let me know in the comments. Thanks for reading!