[(A)D&D] How I Surprised My DM

[Web_Weaver]

Why not think of it like, oh, I don't know, a train on a railroad? 

Good point but:

I went on those mystery bus tours as a kid with my Nan and it was so similar. I got exited because you could go anywhere and I imagined all the places it could be, and I looked for clues the whole journey, especially signs for zoos or safari parks, but nine times out of ten it was some boring garden, because really it was aimed at my Nan's generation and they had after all paid the cash so they chose. Actually my Nan chose because she was the organising type. But I was too young to work that out, so I thought it was just random or at the whim of the driver.

Oh the scars! Don't remind me at the game table or bad things could happen.

[Thenomain]

Funny stories, Will.  Our GM does that occasionally, too.  At the end of a session, "Why did you keep rolling?" / "Oh, just messing with you."

Callan, although I have to percieve what happened through my own version of the Reasonableness Filter, I can also do the opposite.  I can call into suspect everything the GM did, saying how what he was doing was really manipulating the players to make the characters dance, but that way lies doom.  Because I can't tell you exactly what was going through the GM's brain, we can say anything was caused by anything else.  My only solid concession otherwise is to say we've been gaming together for over a decade and it's never come out that we've ever been lead around by the nose.  So either it's not happening, I'm terminally naive, or he's a mastermind of manipulation.

When I look at key points of uncertainty, I don't see a pattern.  I just don't.  I can't help you out, here.

In the specific instance of the Necromancer, we only failed if you think that the goal was to eradicate all signs of the Necromancer from the face of the known worlds.  No, the goal was revenge, and that succeeded.  He was beaten, he just didn't stay dead.  That's a hazzard of a high-fantasy campaign (at least this one), reasonable and not really worth going on about.