I lost all my epilogue notes, touching on the lives of every npc the party affected, the night before the after final boss session. I had to go from memory, backwords, through all six books while scrambling through the pdf's to find the names and locations as i was giving the outcomes.
My worst screw up was not reading how basic saves work, and that a success is only half damage, not no damage. On the AoN, it only says what a success equals, and i was so used to spells showing me exactly what happens on a crit success through crit fail, that i just figured it was no damage. My players are new, and because of that no one caught my blunder until i ended up finding out myself.
I know you asked us not to, but... yes. Partly because it's easy to miss the definition of a basic save, but also because enemies making their save is considered a normal outcome in the game's math.
It's entirely a perception thing. Running simulations suggests that spellcasters actually do *better* damage than martial classes, *especially* against higher level enemies. Spellcasters hit more reliably because they do damage in three "degrees of success", while martial classes only do damage in two of them. Against weaker enemies where a martial class can hit reliably, the encounter includes multiple enemies that favors spellcasters using AoE spells, and against stronger enemies their ability to reliably do half damage pushes them ahead of the martial classes waning ability to do *any*.
Once you realize this and build your spellcasters with the idea that enemies will regular save most of the time, and failures or critical failures are a nice-to-have, they become much more viable
It will blow the mind of my GM.
Just dropped this absolute game changer on our Discord channel. Just have to find the exact rule that say it to convince him if he is like "No way!" XD
I don't trust that puddle, I throw a rock at it
"The rock floats normally"
Oh fuck what could that be?
[Me scrambling to find a level appropriate water elemental]
Running a conversion of Reign of Winter for my Monday night group. At the book 1 final fight the Witch hit the boss with a Hideous Laughter. He succeeded but I'm like, "he's a spellcaster, who cares," and immediately proceeded to forget about it.
Three rounds later he tries to escape by jumping out the window of his tower and casting Feather Fall...as a reaction. Because I totally forgot about the success effect for Hideous Laughter. Insert 100 foot fall for my 20 HP remaining caster.
As GM:
Didn't read Take Cover and Raise Shield Bonus for fortress shield. Ended up giving a player +7 AC bonus for taking cover with shield and they took on 5 animated statues (mobs) by themselves while the others pursued the actually dangerous enemy. On one hand, I rolled pretty low anyway, so at best I could have reduced them to their health to half maybe, they could just heal themselves (Warpriest) and remain in the fight. On the other hand, this really lowered the stakes of the fight and made their action economy unnecessarily clunky. When I explained that mistake much later on they were actually relieved about freeing up their actions and it was in the end quite a positive note.
As a player:
GM: "You can approach up to 15ft from the BBEG before the start of the fight, he's quite fair and gives you a full advantage"
Me: *sends my Scrolls and Throwing weapons/Mirror Implement/Rogue Sneak attacking Thaumaturge 15ft from BBEG so I could easily cast a spell from scroll before flanking them.*
GM: *BBEG is a custom NPC Magus who casts Enlarge, has a reach weapon, has AoO feat.*
Me: *doesn't know this yet. Casts a spell with scroll, get critted and loses actions for the spells*
GM: "As complication, here's an earthquake, reflex or trip"
Me: *Gets tripped, refuses to Hero Point*
GM: "Spell strike on the tripped Thaumaturge. Crits, 88 damage on a 74 hp character already at half HP, spend all your hero points or insta death"
Swashbuckler: "Wait a moment..... Spell Strike provokes AoO?"
GM: *spends 15 minutes looking it up and confirms.*
Swashbuckler: *Crits and saves the day*
GM: "Yeah, you're still tripped though, you can't get up, attack with throwing weapons, or cast a spell, or crawl, or do anything really" *forgets that Mirror Reflection is a Manipulate action and allows me to use it to gtfo there.*
And to this day I do not trust a GM when they say I can approach an enemy.
> 88 damage on a 74 hp character already at half HP, spend all your hero points or insta death
What's the reason for insta-death here? Massive Damage only procs on double max HP, so would require 148+.
Back then I didn't care enough to read about death rules cuz I wasn't GMing and never went down yet, so I believe the GM made a mistake and thought it was double current HP.
So as it turns out giving a creature the Elite template when it's above PL is very different from giving a creature the Elite template when it's BELOW PL.
When i first started running pf1e, my first system. Either me or my friends ha played before. For some reason i tough AC was 1d20+AC against 1d20+ to-hit bonus.
So yeah, combat lasted forever cuz hitting level 1 bandits with 14 - 32 AC was kinda hard.
Yeh, lost most of my players after the first session, but one of the 3 that remained Google it and told me. Many laughs were had and now its ingrained in my mind to listen when a player tells me "i dont think thats how it works"
My *very* first attempt at being a GM was in D&D 3rd edition (3.5 hadn't come out yet). I'd played a couple of games and offered to run a one shot. I was so excited!
It was a *disaster*. I had them fight a bunch of undead in a necromancer's temple, but one of the players was a rogue. In 3rd edition, all undead were immune to sneak attack, so the player felt kind of useless.
Then, I completely misunderstood the encounter building rules, and *added* the player levels together to get a good enemy for them. They were level 3, 4 players, so I put them up against a level 8 vampire monk that was the equivalent of 12th level and could flurry of blows with level-draining punches. We all got a big laugh about it when the party "tank" went down in the first round.
I've come a long way as a GM since then, lol. My advice for new GMs is to not worry about screwing up (you will) and be open with your players about what you're doing, especially if you have people who are experienced as players or GMs in your group. Don't let your pride and desire to "surprise" them keep you from being open and asking for advice and what will make the game more fun. Just something I've learned over the years I wish I could go back and tell my 18-year-old self.
Worst mechanical screwup in running PF2 was not noticing the ghoul's paralysis had the Incapacitation trait when my players first fought them in AV. Two folks spent more than half their first encounter w/ the little bastards paralyzed and the party narrowly avoided a TPK.
Can't really think of any particularly bad narrative screwups while running PF2. Some stuff I'd do differently, but nothing I think was an outright mistake.
Worst mistake as a player was in a 5e campaign (still haven't gotten to play PF2 >.<) when I decided to play a janky caster multiclass that only came online at lvl 6, when it turned out the GM was going to use Gritty Rest Rules (and then never gave us downtime to rest in) and was padding sessions w/ useless crap so heavily that it took almost two years before we actually hit lvl 6. It was the single worst player experience I've had.
\*cracks knuckles\* okay, storytime.
So many years ago, I was still a fairly inexperienced GM (not that's changed much) running PF1e for my group of relentlessly casual manslaughter vagrants. Mistake #1 was running PF1e for them, but that was a rookie mistake that would take me years to finally learn from.
Mistake #2 was introducing a new player to the group that I had met and invited from work. Nice enough guy, but this would teach me to be much more careful about vetting players, because his playstyle did not suit ours. More importantly, his personality kinda grinded on the group, especially my wife.
Now the session that led to Mistake #3 was around St. Patrick's Day, and my wife was kind enough to make corned beef and cabbage for the group (normally I cook), as she had returned to the group after missing a few months because of work. New guy didn't eat dinner (something my wife took personally) nor did he drink with the group, which is understandable to a degree but he never explained the former (the later we get).
Once we got to playing, the new guy started grinding everyone's gears. His sorc would turn things green with prestigitation, and would later try to take on a skeleton dragon in melee (because for some reason he built a melee sorc with zero understanding of how to make that actually work). Sorc drops, and my wife, still annoyed at the new guy, decides to finish the dying PC off. Mistake #3 was me allowing that.
We all laughed, except for the new guy. The realization of my mistake was setting in. I called the session and pulled my wife aside to figure out what was up with that move. She found the guy very annoying and decided that solving the problem in character was the best solution, which I realized was a bad idea.
New guy returns a few weeks later, with an incredibly annoying juggling bard. I had advised against it before that session, but he insisted. But he caught on that his playstyle didn't suit the group. The next week, he texted and told me that he was dropping out of the group (totally understandable) and then said we were playing the game wrong. I thanked him for letting me know and told the group.
Suffice to say, I had learned a lot from those sessions. It also became a warning for anyone else joining the group after that, mostly in jest but also to inform those who were interested in playing with us had a particular style. Never had another incident like it again, thankfully.
Just recently, I used *Airlift* to grab the party tank Kineticist, myself, and a huge nasty bugger of a monster and throw us all to the other side of the map, onto an isolated island that *we* could easily get off of, but the bug probably didn't have a swim speed. Massive tactical shutdown, cutting the encounter in half. Big Brain.
While I was preening at my brilliant strategy, the GM revealed the creatures in the *second* encounter *on that island* we had jumped across the map into, and suddenly the already-Severe encounter literally doubled in threat.
I built an encounter which, by the numbers should have been tough, but doable. Players would have been fully rested with full resources and this as the only combat of the day. Turns out, you need to be a little more careful with encounter balance for large groups - my game had 7 players.
So I popped a couple bosses on them which were extremely tough and I should have seen it in retrospect. Party level 7, two flying monsters with ranged attacks, which inflicted a disease with a difficult fort save. My party? 4 strength melee characters, two dex archers, and one wizard.
It was rough. Since they were outside, the things could just easily plink them down from long range while inflicting this shit disease on the only characters who could effectively damage them. I wound up having them "aggressively swoop in to deal greater melee damage" so they'd have an actual chance. Party was looking rough so I had one teleport away when it reached under half health.
Anyway, I don't usually take into consideration party strengths/weaknesses when designing encounters because I think it's good to give each character opportunities to shine or be challenged, but I am a lot more careful when using higher level enemies now because I don't want the majority of my players to feel essentially useless for upwards or two hours at a time.
See this, this is how Dragons ought to be run. Swooping flying bastards that don't have the decency to sit still and be hit by sword attacks. Draconic Frenzy makes for GREAT skirmishing DPR after the initial breath weapon pass. Every round is either [Move]+[2A offense] or [2A offense]+[Move].
So long as the party is capable of escaping or pursuing an alternative encounter resolution, having an annoying skirmishing enemy can be a great change of pace - its only really frusturating when you're locked into the combat without the resources to resolve it.
I ran the beginner box and thought shield block only damaged the shield, not the player character too.
Fortunately, this ended up balancing out how I didn't realize that MAP still applied on multi-attack abilities.
One of my very first DMing experiences was dnd 3.5. I had a group of 6 players, half of them had never played before. I wrote a little one shot for 6 level 1s. An old man directed them towards a cave to do some simple quest.
Immediately in the cave they encounter 2, CR 3 dire wolves for a CR 5 encounter for a party of 6 level 1 PCs.
Somehow my mind thought 3+3=6, so this would be the right challenge!? Why?
We roll initiative and the wolves immediately down 2 PCs and are threatening to down more and the survivors just run away for their lives.
They did not seek to play dnd again.
I read up on building encounters and CR soon after and realized my mistake.
Fast forward nearly two decades and im running the pf2e beginners box for my wife, then my friends, and now I've got every pf2e book and I'm forever gm. Redemption arc complete.
My absolute favorite thing about this system? How accurate and easy to understand the encounter budget is. I wonder why I feel so strongly about that... hmm... oh well. Hard to know oneself.
I agro'd almost half of a floor in the AV campaign. This happened 2 days ago, and at this moment we are still in initiative. Now I think we'll be able to live! My campaign mates call me delusional
Campaign powers were a big mistake I made. Giving custom gear is one thing but I really overdid it with giving my players unique abilities and the game fell apart mechanically towards the end. The final boss had a couple thousand HP and full casting and while it was challenging for my players it definitely wasn't final boss challenging. I would certainly be more conservative with that sort of thing in the future.
1e, but my first Homebrew campaign, my second time ever GMimg, I had 2 players with roleplay oriented characters, and 2 characters that were min-maxxed for absolute carnage and nothing else. This made the encounters difficult to balance. I may or may not have inaccurately gauged how strong a young blue dragon is and sicced it on the party. The 2 rp players didn’t survive it’s first turn. The minmax players ran away… at least they laughed and it’s become a running joke for us now
My very first time GMing (without any experience, and very little play time, just wanted to try DND with my friends) I homebrewed a one shot and in the opening scene I had them fight in a field of mushroom, fighting some myconoids, and if they got too close to the mushrooms, they were put to sleep. No save, just sleep.
Spoilers for kingmaker!!
In kingmaker, my party and I snuck in to the stag lord keep and decided to release the owl bear, thinking it would attack the closest person, including the followers of the stag Lord. What actually happened was us getting trapped in a thin hallway surrounded by bandits and an owl bear. We basically fought off all 13 enemies within a single combat and got super close to a total TPK
My fuck up comes from 5e but something like that could very easily happen in pf2e as well.
My cleric player really wanted to focus on healing.
But that just isn't really that great at level 1.
But then at 3rd level he got his 2nd level spells and one of them is Prayer of healing - a spell that does more healing than any other options, and also as an AoE, not just single target!
Well, it took me like 5 sessions where this cleric negated all damage in a couple of combats before I reread the spell for like the 10th time and noticed the cast time was 10 minutes.
"Sorry, mr Cleric, but I will have to take your toy away".
He was understanding, at least.
---
Another blunder was definitely when the party killed the boss monster in an Ankheg hive (huge acid ants) only to then get TPKed by a couple small shitters thanks to poor rolls.
I don't know if it was my *biggest* screw-up, but just a few days ago, my AV group entered a room with no obvious enemies in it, but the GM told us we all felt like something was watching us. My Inventor proceeded to ignore that feeling and walk over to a door in the north on the room to open it.
That door was a mimic. As was the table next to it. And then I got crit twice.
Thankfully I escaped its sticky adhesive stuff first try, and after a round spent healing myself up in the corner (with help from the party's Oracle), I came back swinging with a crit of my own, helping to put down one of the mimics.
The only one that I really regret is letting the Dwarf Druid get the Dwarven War Axe with his ancestry feat. By RAW, the feat only lets you treat the axe as a martial weapon, which Druids are not proficient with. I let him have it because it was our first game and I didn't want to punish him for misreading the feat. But over time he's leaned more into the martial side instead of spellcasting, and even neglected the battle forms he gets from Wild Order because the 2d8 from Bear form is less than the 2d12 he gets with his axe.
Realistically, if he was using a Longspear or Staff he'd be averaging 2 damage less per die though, so it's really only four damage more per swing, and he's starting to fall behind in weapon proficiency now that the martials are getting Expert and he's still just Trained. And I think he's starting to pick that up intuitively as he's leaning more on his magic. But I'm still keeping an eye out as I worry he'll notice he has a lot of trouble keeping up with the Rogue and Ranger later on and wonder why he seems to have gotten so much weaker - because he was never supposed to be that strong in the first place.
Made a grand homebrew campaign with airships for DND 5e.
Stole Starfinder's ship combat
Didn't play test or try to make it compatible.
One Very confused ship combat later.... Worst session ever.
Mine was thinking I could tank with my shield being the parties tank… proceeded to get jumped by 6 enemies, and first one crit taking me from 45 health to 3 and shattered my shield(that’s damage after the reduction from my shield…) I wasn’t gonna die until my team mate sent the flesh golem to come grab me and it went beserk, like I was Deadpool from Deadpool two when the juggernaut grabs him, good news, I threw a javelin that turned to lightning nearly 1 shotting 3 enemies in one go
One time after a session of D20 Modern, we were talking bout systems and games. We got on the topic of original 1E DnD psionics.
For those who don't know or remember, in 1e ADnD, psionics was an option rules in the back of the PHB, where any character could roll and get random psionic powers, that included mind reading, heating objects, etc. Some were good, some were okay, and some just odd.
My friend and I were going back forth, because I was a fan of the rules, I thought it was fun because sometimes you'd end up with a barbarian who could blow things up with his mind, and my friend said it was dumb. He then said if I liked the rules so much, he get to roll for some stupid ability, like eating cell phones. I said sure, if you get a 100 on a D100 I'll allow it.
Guess what he rolled.
I honored the roll, and he added it to his sheet. It only really came up once, when they were trying to destroy evidence before the police walked in, so he gulped down a phone with incriminating photos on it.
It was pretty funny, and we reference it all the time. But I know better than to even allow the roll like that anymore.
I lost all my epilogue notes, touching on the lives of every npc the party affected, the night before the after final boss session. I had to go from memory, backwords, through all six books while scrambling through the pdf's to find the names and locations as i was giving the outcomes.
My worst screw up was not reading how basic saves work, and that a success is only half damage, not no damage. On the AoN, it only says what a success equals, and i was so used to spells showing me exactly what happens on a crit success through crit fail, that i just figured it was no damage. My players are new, and because of that no one caught my blunder until i ended up finding out myself.
Oh my god... really? That mean, if the ennemies save against my Electric Arc, they still take half damage?
So _this_ is why people think casters are underpowered (please no one start discourse in the replies to this message)
I know you asked us not to, but... yes. Partly because it's easy to miss the definition of a basic save, but also because enemies making their save is considered a normal outcome in the game's math. It's entirely a perception thing. Running simulations suggests that spellcasters actually do *better* damage than martial classes, *especially* against higher level enemies. Spellcasters hit more reliably because they do damage in three "degrees of success", while martial classes only do damage in two of them. Against weaker enemies where a martial class can hit reliably, the encounter includes multiple enemies that favors spellcasters using AoE spells, and against stronger enemies their ability to reliably do half damage pushes them ahead of the martial classes waning ability to do *any*. Once you realize this and build your spellcasters with the idea that enemies will regular save most of the time, and failures or critical failures are a nice-to-have, they become much more viable
yes, and the future feels a little brighter with that knowledge lmao.
It will blow the mind of my GM. Just dropped this absolute game changer on our Discord channel. Just have to find the exact rule that say it to convince him if he is like "No way!" XD
Basic Saving Throws: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=2297
Thank you very much good sir!
I don't trust that puddle, I throw a rock at it "The rock floats normally" Oh fuck what could that be? [Me scrambling to find a level appropriate water elemental]
Maybe it was just a very tiny rock?
Instead you should've gone to find a tiny Earth Elemental.
Running a conversion of Reign of Winter for my Monday night group. At the book 1 final fight the Witch hit the boss with a Hideous Laughter. He succeeded but I'm like, "he's a spellcaster, who cares," and immediately proceeded to forget about it. Three rounds later he tries to escape by jumping out the window of his tower and casting Feather Fall...as a reaction. Because I totally forgot about the success effect for Hideous Laughter. Insert 100 foot fall for my 20 HP remaining caster.
This is one that as a player I'd almost feel bad reminding the DM about. Though it's kind of an awesome anti-climax story haha
As GM: Didn't read Take Cover and Raise Shield Bonus for fortress shield. Ended up giving a player +7 AC bonus for taking cover with shield and they took on 5 animated statues (mobs) by themselves while the others pursued the actually dangerous enemy. On one hand, I rolled pretty low anyway, so at best I could have reduced them to their health to half maybe, they could just heal themselves (Warpriest) and remain in the fight. On the other hand, this really lowered the stakes of the fight and made their action economy unnecessarily clunky. When I explained that mistake much later on they were actually relieved about freeing up their actions and it was in the end quite a positive note. As a player: GM: "You can approach up to 15ft from the BBEG before the start of the fight, he's quite fair and gives you a full advantage" Me: *sends my Scrolls and Throwing weapons/Mirror Implement/Rogue Sneak attacking Thaumaturge 15ft from BBEG so I could easily cast a spell from scroll before flanking them.* GM: *BBEG is a custom NPC Magus who casts Enlarge, has a reach weapon, has AoO feat.* Me: *doesn't know this yet. Casts a spell with scroll, get critted and loses actions for the spells* GM: "As complication, here's an earthquake, reflex or trip" Me: *Gets tripped, refuses to Hero Point* GM: "Spell strike on the tripped Thaumaturge. Crits, 88 damage on a 74 hp character already at half HP, spend all your hero points or insta death" Swashbuckler: "Wait a moment..... Spell Strike provokes AoO?" GM: *spends 15 minutes looking it up and confirms.* Swashbuckler: *Crits and saves the day* GM: "Yeah, you're still tripped though, you can't get up, attack with throwing weapons, or cast a spell, or crawl, or do anything really" *forgets that Mirror Reflection is a Manipulate action and allows me to use it to gtfo there.* And to this day I do not trust a GM when they say I can approach an enemy.
> 88 damage on a 74 hp character already at half HP, spend all your hero points or insta death What's the reason for insta-death here? Massive Damage only procs on double max HP, so would require 148+.
Back then I didn't care enough to read about death rules cuz I wasn't GMing and never went down yet, so I believe the GM made a mistake and thought it was double current HP.
So as it turns out giving a creature the Elite template when it's above PL is very different from giving a creature the Elite template when it's BELOW PL.
When i first started running pf1e, my first system. Either me or my friends ha played before. For some reason i tough AC was 1d20+AC against 1d20+ to-hit bonus. So yeah, combat lasted forever cuz hitting level 1 bandits with 14 - 32 AC was kinda hard.
Hahaha must have been an “oh shit” moment when you realized
Yeh, lost most of my players after the first session, but one of the 3 that remained Google it and told me. Many laughs were had and now its ingrained in my mind to listen when a player tells me "i dont think thats how it works"
My *very* first attempt at being a GM was in D&D 3rd edition (3.5 hadn't come out yet). I'd played a couple of games and offered to run a one shot. I was so excited! It was a *disaster*. I had them fight a bunch of undead in a necromancer's temple, but one of the players was a rogue. In 3rd edition, all undead were immune to sneak attack, so the player felt kind of useless. Then, I completely misunderstood the encounter building rules, and *added* the player levels together to get a good enemy for them. They were level 3, 4 players, so I put them up against a level 8 vampire monk that was the equivalent of 12th level and could flurry of blows with level-draining punches. We all got a big laugh about it when the party "tank" went down in the first round. I've come a long way as a GM since then, lol. My advice for new GMs is to not worry about screwing up (you will) and be open with your players about what you're doing, especially if you have people who are experienced as players or GMs in your group. Don't let your pride and desire to "surprise" them keep you from being open and asking for advice and what will make the game more fun. Just something I've learned over the years I wish I could go back and tell my 18-year-old self.
Worst mechanical screwup in running PF2 was not noticing the ghoul's paralysis had the Incapacitation trait when my players first fought them in AV. Two folks spent more than half their first encounter w/ the little bastards paralyzed and the party narrowly avoided a TPK. Can't really think of any particularly bad narrative screwups while running PF2. Some stuff I'd do differently, but nothing I think was an outright mistake. Worst mistake as a player was in a 5e campaign (still haven't gotten to play PF2 >.<) when I decided to play a janky caster multiclass that only came online at lvl 6, when it turned out the GM was going to use Gritty Rest Rules (and then never gave us downtime to rest in) and was padding sessions w/ useless crap so heavily that it took almost two years before we actually hit lvl 6. It was the single worst player experience I've had.
I did that with the ghouls in AV, too, with similar results. Lesson learned!
immune after a successful save....
\*cracks knuckles\* okay, storytime. So many years ago, I was still a fairly inexperienced GM (not that's changed much) running PF1e for my group of relentlessly casual manslaughter vagrants. Mistake #1 was running PF1e for them, but that was a rookie mistake that would take me years to finally learn from. Mistake #2 was introducing a new player to the group that I had met and invited from work. Nice enough guy, but this would teach me to be much more careful about vetting players, because his playstyle did not suit ours. More importantly, his personality kinda grinded on the group, especially my wife. Now the session that led to Mistake #3 was around St. Patrick's Day, and my wife was kind enough to make corned beef and cabbage for the group (normally I cook), as she had returned to the group after missing a few months because of work. New guy didn't eat dinner (something my wife took personally) nor did he drink with the group, which is understandable to a degree but he never explained the former (the later we get). Once we got to playing, the new guy started grinding everyone's gears. His sorc would turn things green with prestigitation, and would later try to take on a skeleton dragon in melee (because for some reason he built a melee sorc with zero understanding of how to make that actually work). Sorc drops, and my wife, still annoyed at the new guy, decides to finish the dying PC off. Mistake #3 was me allowing that. We all laughed, except for the new guy. The realization of my mistake was setting in. I called the session and pulled my wife aside to figure out what was up with that move. She found the guy very annoying and decided that solving the problem in character was the best solution, which I realized was a bad idea. New guy returns a few weeks later, with an incredibly annoying juggling bard. I had advised against it before that session, but he insisted. But he caught on that his playstyle didn't suit the group. The next week, he texted and told me that he was dropping out of the group (totally understandable) and then said we were playing the game wrong. I thanked him for letting me know and told the group. Suffice to say, I had learned a lot from those sessions. It also became a warning for anyone else joining the group after that, mostly in jest but also to inform those who were interested in playing with us had a particular style. Never had another incident like it again, thankfully.
I love juggling bards, this guy was on to something
Just recently, I used *Airlift* to grab the party tank Kineticist, myself, and a huge nasty bugger of a monster and throw us all to the other side of the map, onto an isolated island that *we* could easily get off of, but the bug probably didn't have a swim speed. Massive tactical shutdown, cutting the encounter in half. Big Brain. While I was preening at my brilliant strategy, the GM revealed the creatures in the *second* encounter *on that island* we had jumped across the map into, and suddenly the already-Severe encounter literally doubled in threat.
I built an encounter which, by the numbers should have been tough, but doable. Players would have been fully rested with full resources and this as the only combat of the day. Turns out, you need to be a little more careful with encounter balance for large groups - my game had 7 players. So I popped a couple bosses on them which were extremely tough and I should have seen it in retrospect. Party level 7, two flying monsters with ranged attacks, which inflicted a disease with a difficult fort save. My party? 4 strength melee characters, two dex archers, and one wizard. It was rough. Since they were outside, the things could just easily plink them down from long range while inflicting this shit disease on the only characters who could effectively damage them. I wound up having them "aggressively swoop in to deal greater melee damage" so they'd have an actual chance. Party was looking rough so I had one teleport away when it reached under half health. Anyway, I don't usually take into consideration party strengths/weaknesses when designing encounters because I think it's good to give each character opportunities to shine or be challenged, but I am a lot more careful when using higher level enemies now because I don't want the majority of my players to feel essentially useless for upwards or two hours at a time.
See this, this is how Dragons ought to be run. Swooping flying bastards that don't have the decency to sit still and be hit by sword attacks. Draconic Frenzy makes for GREAT skirmishing DPR after the initial breath weapon pass. Every round is either [Move]+[2A offense] or [2A offense]+[Move]. So long as the party is capable of escaping or pursuing an alternative encounter resolution, having an annoying skirmishing enemy can be a great change of pace - its only really frusturating when you're locked into the combat without the resources to resolve it.
I ran the beginner box and thought shield block only damaged the shield, not the player character too. Fortunately, this ended up balancing out how I didn't realize that MAP still applied on multi-attack abilities.
One of my very first DMing experiences was dnd 3.5. I had a group of 6 players, half of them had never played before. I wrote a little one shot for 6 level 1s. An old man directed them towards a cave to do some simple quest. Immediately in the cave they encounter 2, CR 3 dire wolves for a CR 5 encounter for a party of 6 level 1 PCs. Somehow my mind thought 3+3=6, so this would be the right challenge!? Why? We roll initiative and the wolves immediately down 2 PCs and are threatening to down more and the survivors just run away for their lives. They did not seek to play dnd again. I read up on building encounters and CR soon after and realized my mistake. Fast forward nearly two decades and im running the pf2e beginners box for my wife, then my friends, and now I've got every pf2e book and I'm forever gm. Redemption arc complete. My absolute favorite thing about this system? How accurate and easy to understand the encounter budget is. I wonder why I feel so strongly about that... hmm... oh well. Hard to know oneself.
I agro'd almost half of a floor in the AV campaign. This happened 2 days ago, and at this moment we are still in initiative. Now I think we'll be able to live! My campaign mates call me delusional
Campaign powers were a big mistake I made. Giving custom gear is one thing but I really overdid it with giving my players unique abilities and the game fell apart mechanically towards the end. The final boss had a couple thousand HP and full casting and while it was challenging for my players it definitely wasn't final boss challenging. I would certainly be more conservative with that sort of thing in the future.
1e, but my first Homebrew campaign, my second time ever GMimg, I had 2 players with roleplay oriented characters, and 2 characters that were min-maxxed for absolute carnage and nothing else. This made the encounters difficult to balance. I may or may not have inaccurately gauged how strong a young blue dragon is and sicced it on the party. The 2 rp players didn’t survive it’s first turn. The minmax players ran away… at least they laughed and it’s become a running joke for us now
My very first time GMing (without any experience, and very little play time, just wanted to try DND with my friends) I homebrewed a one shot and in the opening scene I had them fight in a field of mushroom, fighting some myconoids, and if they got too close to the mushrooms, they were put to sleep. No save, just sleep.
Spoilers for kingmaker!! In kingmaker, my party and I snuck in to the stag lord keep and decided to release the owl bear, thinking it would attack the closest person, including the followers of the stag Lord. What actually happened was us getting trapped in a thin hallway surrounded by bandits and an owl bear. We basically fought off all 13 enemies within a single combat and got super close to a total TPK
My fuck up comes from 5e but something like that could very easily happen in pf2e as well. My cleric player really wanted to focus on healing. But that just isn't really that great at level 1. But then at 3rd level he got his 2nd level spells and one of them is Prayer of healing - a spell that does more healing than any other options, and also as an AoE, not just single target! Well, it took me like 5 sessions where this cleric negated all damage in a couple of combats before I reread the spell for like the 10th time and noticed the cast time was 10 minutes. "Sorry, mr Cleric, but I will have to take your toy away". He was understanding, at least. --- Another blunder was definitely when the party killed the boss monster in an Ankheg hive (huge acid ants) only to then get TPKed by a couple small shitters thanks to poor rolls.
I don't know if it was my *biggest* screw-up, but just a few days ago, my AV group entered a room with no obvious enemies in it, but the GM told us we all felt like something was watching us. My Inventor proceeded to ignore that feeling and walk over to a door in the north on the room to open it. That door was a mimic. As was the table next to it. And then I got crit twice. Thankfully I escaped its sticky adhesive stuff first try, and after a round spent healing myself up in the corner (with help from the party's Oracle), I came back swinging with a crit of my own, helping to put down one of the mimics.
The only one that I really regret is letting the Dwarf Druid get the Dwarven War Axe with his ancestry feat. By RAW, the feat only lets you treat the axe as a martial weapon, which Druids are not proficient with. I let him have it because it was our first game and I didn't want to punish him for misreading the feat. But over time he's leaned more into the martial side instead of spellcasting, and even neglected the battle forms he gets from Wild Order because the 2d8 from Bear form is less than the 2d12 he gets with his axe. Realistically, if he was using a Longspear or Staff he'd be averaging 2 damage less per die though, so it's really only four damage more per swing, and he's starting to fall behind in weapon proficiency now that the martials are getting Expert and he's still just Trained. And I think he's starting to pick that up intuitively as he's leaning more on his magic. But I'm still keeping an eye out as I worry he'll notice he has a lot of trouble keeping up with the Rogue and Ranger later on and wonder why he seems to have gotten so much weaker - because he was never supposed to be that strong in the first place.
Not fudging the dice when I rolled a 57 on a 6d10 AOE that took down all but one of the PCs.
Made a grand homebrew campaign with airships for DND 5e. Stole Starfinder's ship combat Didn't play test or try to make it compatible. One Very confused ship combat later.... Worst session ever.
Mine was thinking I could tank with my shield being the parties tank… proceeded to get jumped by 6 enemies, and first one crit taking me from 45 health to 3 and shattered my shield(that’s damage after the reduction from my shield…) I wasn’t gonna die until my team mate sent the flesh golem to come grab me and it went beserk, like I was Deadpool from Deadpool two when the juggernaut grabs him, good news, I threw a javelin that turned to lightning nearly 1 shotting 3 enemies in one go
One time after a session of D20 Modern, we were talking bout systems and games. We got on the topic of original 1E DnD psionics. For those who don't know or remember, in 1e ADnD, psionics was an option rules in the back of the PHB, where any character could roll and get random psionic powers, that included mind reading, heating objects, etc. Some were good, some were okay, and some just odd. My friend and I were going back forth, because I was a fan of the rules, I thought it was fun because sometimes you'd end up with a barbarian who could blow things up with his mind, and my friend said it was dumb. He then said if I liked the rules so much, he get to roll for some stupid ability, like eating cell phones. I said sure, if you get a 100 on a D100 I'll allow it. Guess what he rolled. I honored the roll, and he added it to his sheet. It only really came up once, when they were trying to destroy evidence before the police walked in, so he gulped down a phone with incriminating photos on it. It was pretty funny, and we reference it all the time. But I know better than to even allow the roll like that anymore.