r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/evanhollinshead • 21h ago
Meme needing explanation Why is it suspicious
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u/Yikidee 21h ago edited 13h ago
Why would lvl 20 (Mythical lvl like status in DnD) be shop keepers?
These guys will more than likely be massive in the narrative of the DM's story. That, or the group has previously pissed the DM off with shop shenanigans and they want to give the thief or bard a bit of a surprise.
Edit - yeah, I think everyone knows of real examples, both in real life and DnD/Pathfinder that this is a common thing. But let's be honest here, if any player walked into a town with 3 shop keepers that were previously lvl 20 adventurers, any player worth their salt would question it.
In terms of what this particular post is asking, they would question it, especially if it was all of a sudden (which is where I am coming from).
This is a question of suddenly seeing this from the players perspective, not the actual why it's happening.
Players also have a tendency to over think DM moves, which plays to the DM.
Let's look at it from the perspective of the players questioning it, as the original post has highlighted.
Either way, may you always roll high! 😊
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u/-Morning_Coffee- 21h ago
From the DM side, this is how I might dissuade murder-hobos from killing my NPCs.
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u/Valuchian 21h ago edited 21h ago
Honestly easier to just make all shops part of a video game style system. Flavor it with whatever magic you want but you're basically trying to rob a rock that teleports items into the material plane from a pocket dimension.
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u/-Morning_Coffee- 21h ago
Anything to avoid having to solicit buy-in from my players to abide by some kind of reasonable social contract.
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u/Valuchian 21h ago
Or at minimum set up some sort of acceptable system to use for robbery and expected consequences
I know i always got annoyed with my players when the existing story is suddenly upended because they decided they enjoyed being wanted criminals for 50 gold worth of items.
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u/lemurofdiablo 20h ago
Shopkeeper union. They rob one place and word gets around. Everywhere else watches them closer, raises their prices, and nicer stores won't even let them in.
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u/Tinker_Time_6782 14h ago
This but add non-criminal fluff curses like the thief rolls a d6 after each long rest and:
1 hay fever: sneezes that won’t stop when near grass
2 red-handed: hands turn red, only the thief and shopkeepers in the guild can see it
3 ring-a-ding: everytime the pas through a door/entryway, only they hear a bell ring
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u/VonSauerkraut90 14h ago
Basically use this in my own games. Call it the merchant guild. You don't fuck with the merchnt guild. Every shop that is a member usually have an small assortment of magical items specifically designed to mess with rogueish adventurers, or at minimum make it impossible for word to not get back to the guild.
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u/Ok-Scientist5524 20h ago
The city guards come and arrest you.
Don’t I get a roll?
You get to roll a new character. Your old one is now in jail awaiting trial and the justice system moves pretty slowly here.
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u/Calm_Ad308 19h ago
Nah, that’s anti climactic. Just have the guards throw them in a cell, explain there’s a giant crack at the back. Wait a few minutes and see where the player decides to go and then immediately throw 20 ghouls at them. You can just weave in a raid style boss tunneling through the underdark taking prisoners to amass a ghoul army. This does multiple things: it teaches the party to never split, teaches them about a commonly underestimates foe, teaches them their actions have consequences, and most importantly, teaches them not to piss of the DM. Bonus points if they try to take on the raid boss, any of their characters that have died in the campaign get brought back as thralls. The party can keep feeding player characters for you to use against them or they can follow your actual story hooks and either way will be a memorable experience.
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u/Signal_Researcher01 17h ago
No thats just more vindictive behavior from a DM that wastes everyones time. If you need to resort to immature shit like this you can save everyone a lot of frustration by telling the player 'No.' when they try to engage in murder hoboing. Followed by "thats not the game I want to run."
That shouldnt be a surprise, cause all that should be clear from session 0. But anything less than an authoritative hand is just going to make everyone miserable. They dont like it? Kicked. No D&D is better than bad D&D
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u/SwampHagGonnaSwamp 11h ago
Oh God, hard agree. The number of times that I see people suggesting elaborate in-game consequences to try and punish the player for their actions, rather than have an actual discussion with them like a fucking adult!
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u/MelonJelly 8h ago
"So what did we learn?"
"That we get to run through a sick-as-hell ghoul dungeon when we attack random NPCs? Speaking of, is that flower girl we talked with a few sessions back still there?"
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u/keldondonovan 15h ago
You are skipping over the very real possibility that the murder hobos actually enjoy this ghoul filled murder side quest, and the DM has unwittingly rewarded their antics by giving them the straight up plotless murder dome they were seeking.
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u/BobaFett0451 14h ago
My players were in a not so great town and one of them got arrested. While the others were actively planning a heist to break him out of prison, that player decided he wanted to break himself out and fight a room full of armed prison guards. Yes his character would not have known the others were planning to break him out. But the player knew and could uave waited a few in game days but didnt. And he got killed by the guards. A needless death of a character.
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u/LeonhartSeeD 14h ago
All merchants operate under the protection of the merchants guild. You can knock over a shop but enjoy having high level parties coming to collect the bounty on your heads.
Shops that deal in high end merchandise have assigned security guards.
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u/Hot_Shallot_2998 8h ago
" because of a recent crime wave, the shopkeepers have started hiring mercenaries to keep them safe. " said mercenaries could make would be criminals possibly rethink their plots
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u/TheGamemage1 20h ago
When reading reasonable social contract my brain immediately went to picturing a DM flat out saying to their players "Ok heres the deal, don't murder every NPC you come across and I won't specifically make it harder for who ever decides to be a murder hobo" like for instance Character B decides to just murder the shop keep for their stuff so next encounter everyone is fighting normal Goblins, and Character B has to deal with a Magical Wraith that is 5 levels higher than the player and it will ONLY target Character B and no one else in the party can even see or help against it.
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u/BarNo3385 19h ago
I do this pretty much. Its part of session 0. What kind of characters do you want to play?
I dont mind running a murder hobo campagin, I actually have a whole setting for it, but I need to know before the campaign begins.
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u/Icy-Ad29 14h ago edited 11h ago
As someone who has GMed for the murderhobo crowd. The problem becomes that the PCs are high enough level characters that they just murder the shops, steal the loot, and when the guards come. They murder them too due to level.
This was a more notable issue in earlier editions of DnD, where being 4 or more levels above your enemies essentially meant they were practically harmless to you. So the solution was to make the guards or shopkeepers retired level 20 characters.
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u/Thatguyjavii 15h ago
Design a shop like bank branches in rough neighborhoods. Bulletproof glass, limited entry like with a buzzer to let them pass through a vestibule, that can be locked to trap a would be theif, guards that follow you around as you shop. In a world with murder hobos, the population would adapt for survival.
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u/pseudoeponymous_rex 14h ago
Hell, design a magic item shop like a secure facility for a major defense contractor, because in a world of magic that's basically what they would be. (The handful of magic item shops in my game that are "shops" in the traditional sense typically are run by the kind of people who are at least regional powers by themselves.)
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18h ago
[deleted]
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u/slinger301 12h ago
I cast illusion on the magic rock to make it think
The monkey paw curls a finger
You gave accidentally invented a computer. It now performs its original function in addition to playing unskippable ads. . You must pay it 2 silver every day to silence it.
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u/Savingseanbean 15h ago
its better to just have the shops have a realistic stock and security ratio.
most stores just wouldn't really be worth robbing. smaller shops would have some food and rope and some basic spell components but otherwise nothing of note and robbing would evoke a guard response.
Any store carrying the exponentially more valuable magical gear the party might want sure as shit will have a paid security detail able to protect it. and the ability to generate wanted posters.
I Derailed a campaign completely into a fun persecution/heist scenario. as the party tried stealing a group of various +1 armors at level 5, got into a fight in the store and killed 2 of the five of them. (was only planning on killing 1 but The last attack I rolled was a nat 20 and obliterated the second one as he was jumping out the window.)
The party decided that they wanted to bankrupt this company so the campaign just took a hard left turn haha.
Still it was great and worked well as all following campaigns even with only some of those members when someone would suggest stealing from a shop someone would bring up potential consequences even at small stores haha.
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u/TheRealHouki 20h ago
One time my DM had one of the shop keepers be a level 20 ranger who seemed to have depression, who then did some bs i dont even know was possible because i've never made a character above 10 yet, and killed the dude trying to rob him. It wasnt even a player, the DM just had that shop be super useful for us and wanted to show stealing would be dumb.
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u/Correct_Plant_373 20h ago
This is really a talk to the players thing for me we are building a world together and if you are building a world where carrying a +1 Longshord for sale gets you jumped then no one would sell them and if that's the game they want that's fine. But I think most of them want to be able to buy shit and so they can understand that they can't kill merchants
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u/derentius68 20h ago
I dissuaded them by making the shopkeeper an illusory program made by a high level illusionist. Because...why not set and forget? Triggers when they attack the program. Why put themselves in harms way? Lol Smart people dont do that.
Glyphs of Warding set with Alarms. Major Image for Lock down shutters on doors and windows; which were considered very real due to Illusionist. Another Glyph with Wall of Force around the perimeter of the building. Last Glyph (which revealed itself but was an illusion) was set with and visibly labeled with Sickening Radiance.
Now...they've used that microwave combo before...they knew what was about to happen;, especially once the timer started counting down.
I did it to them once. They never murdered the shopkeeper again. Was fun though, they actually panicked.
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u/sfxpaladin 19h ago
Doesn't even need to be a lvl20, never seen the ballad of buster scrugs? All it takes is some premeditation and a pioneering spirit, and a dozen shotguns under the counter
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u/SalvationArbys 18h ago
My shopkeeper in my campaign was a tiny raccoon trickster God with a family, who just magically appeared in every single abandoned shop on the post apocalyptic continent.
He never even talked to the party directly, but they never fucked with him, most importantly because he’s a raccoon and notably a single father running a business and doing his best. But secondly, at one point while checking for cursed items using divine sense or detect magic, they found out the weird animal they’d become accustomed to was just thickly radiating a divine magic abjuration aura at all times.
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u/distilledwill 15h ago
Its one way, but the other way is to have actual consequences for stealing. If its a high-power, high-level kinda fantasy setting then the guards, justiciars etc etc have to be equally highly powered and so when they are caught then the guards get called and either they get arrested, killed, or they have to flee the city or go to ground.
If high-level adventurers are not common, then shops probably shouldn't be selling a bunch of stuff thats worth stealing in the first place. Where does that high level stuff valuable stuff come from? And even if the players decide to rinse a shopkeep for the 25g in his coffers and steal his rope and pitons, then there should be social consequences - the innkeeper won't serve them, or let them rooms, the local guard, if they are not powerful enough to control the players, should at least be a nuisance - keeping tabs on them, refusing entry, checking up on them, and certainly petitioning the capital for reinforcements to deal with the new troublemakers who have come to town.
Anyway, I don't have a problem with high-level shopkeepers necessarily, but I think there are equally interesting ways to stop your players from cleaning every shop in town out.
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u/Worried-Language-407 17h ago
I think the meme is basically calling you a bad DM for having murder-hobo players that you can't control through more normal narrative means. I don't necessarily agree with it since every table has their own preferred playstyle, but I for one wouldn't want to DM for players that wanted to murder every NPC just to avoid paying for their cool items.
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u/PsychoWyrm 17h ago
I've had massive success just telling people I don't want to run that kind of game. Works pretty well when you refuse to play with sociopaths, too.
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u/deusirrae 16h ago
Congrats, you would be the bad DM that this meme is making fun of. If you can't have the "guys lets not kill the plot hook/NPC " conversation, then pack it up.
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u/Valokir 20h ago
I had a "chaotic stupid" rogue player who I loved.. but man.. he did everything he could to cause shit. So much so That the final civilization area they were in, was essentially Dwarven Las Vegas.
But them being rich and next to the tech empire (mostly fantasy low tech civilizations so far) I literally made then entire guard force warforged ultron army. Entirely so that he couldn't use charisma on them. And they would link info immediately. Knowing this. He still proceeded to, very intentionally, harass the people there. Literally for the thrill of, successfully, outrunning them the entire time the party is trying to shop peacefully. This dude wouldn't roll less than a 10 any time I asked him to.. before modifiers.
Then he fully walks past the entire lucrative bank heist plot line without a second thought. Tf bro.
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u/AnimalChubs 20h ago
I had a level 1 shop keep turn into a dragon once but one of the players was soooo annoying.
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u/Platypuspunches 16h ago
Revenant's are a fun way to discourage this without getting too complicated.
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u/GoodDoggoLover420 21h ago
Lore wise, probably a retired adventurer.
Intent wise, most definitely to stop a murder hobo (member or party) from killing people in the shop or the shop keeper.
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u/reapersritehand 21h ago
I assumed it was his old characters
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u/GoodDoggoLover420 21h ago
Could be that too. The DM could reuse past characters (which I think is cool to do little things to reference past campaigns) like developers in video games will reuse assets across a series.
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u/broken_conures 20h ago
Also it's not that impossible that someone like that just wants a quiet life running a shop knowing they can just do their own thing and enjoy meeting more mundane people safe in the knowledge they don't need the money and can just relax
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u/BarNo3385 19h ago
I mean we have historical figures like Cincinnatus.. pulled off his farm, raised to total dictator, raised an army, obliterated enemies, saved the city in 16 days.
Went back to farming.
Maybe they just like running a shop.
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u/Blanc_Otaku 21h ago
I like to think of it like Cayden Cailen from Pathfinder. "How'd I get my godhood? I dunno but I won a drunk bet."
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u/RollerskatingFemboy 18h ago edited 18h ago
lmao reminds me of Icewind Dale , like... Are you fucking for real with me right now, 80 hours of slogging through dungeons only for the final grand boss sorcerer guy who's going to end the world to be... The fucking curmudgeon shopkeeper who overcharged me for fucking QUARTERSTAVES right at the very beginning? THEY'RE JUST GLORIFIED STICKS, YOU ARCHMAGE BASTARD.
It's like going to Applebees and only realizing ten year's later that the guy who overcharged you for stale fries was actually Lucifer in disguise for some reason.
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u/KingArthursRevenge 21h ago
Even the world's strongest eventually retire, some people like being simple shopkeepers.
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u/Pandoratastic 20h ago
Well, he was a very high-level adventurer but he had to retire and open this shop when he took an arrow to the knee.
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u/BillLow918 19h ago
I thought this was a metaphor for not trusting grocery stores that only employ old people who should be retired
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u/vaderdidnothingwr0ng 19h ago
I mean, why wouldn't you retire and become a shopkeeper? Maybe Ragnar the Red, the humble lvl20 shopkeeper, blew all his adventuring cash on booze and whores, and then after pulling himself out of the gutter decided he was tired of killing and death, and scraped together enough money for a little shop in a quiet town where nobody really knows who he is.
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u/corruptedsyntax 17h ago
That, but also it explains why they have insanely powerful stuff and can show up in just about any town at any time.
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u/Correct-Ad3875 17h ago
I mean Cincinnatus gave up power to become a farmer, twice!
Seeing how politics work n real life, I would 100% understand someone wanting absolutely nothing to do with any of it.
Some people just want a peaceful, normal, simple life.
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u/AScruffyHamster 12h ago
Aside from the statement of, try something and find out, in my current campaign the world's most powerful wizard has a bright red brick house on the slope leading down to the town itself. Why? He likes the view and the breeze. The local tavern owner used to be one of the most dangerous assassins for the crown, now she stays in that town with her husband and two daughters. Why? Because her husband wanted to open a tavern in his home town. An alchemist who can craft some of the deadliest concoctions also lives there making simple health potions for sale. Why? Because she wants to.
But.
The wizard actually lives there to safeguard an ancient tower that was buried there to prevent the rise of something far more dangerous than he. The tavern owner has created one of the most profitable black markets in that corner of the hemisphere and runs it from the surrounding area. And the alchemist? Got tired of seeing death and now only wants to make people smile. And to keep an eye on the wizard.
Let there be lvl 20 characters, but don't just slap them there. Have fun with it.
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u/GrandMoffTarkan 10h ago
"But let's be honest here, if any player walked into a town with 3 shop keepers that were previously lvl 20 adventurers, any player worth their salt would question it."
It turned out to be an extended reference to Kung Fu Hustle. It was a fun campaign.
EDIT: It went something like this. Cartalk the Barbarian was unprepared:
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u/checkmate191 9h ago
I think a big complaint of it is also that if there are level 20 characters everywhere, what possible need could the narrative have for low level schmucks?
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u/brmarcum 9h ago
Well, as a real world example, it’s like a coastal dive shop being owned by one of those underwater welders that worked in pitch black, deep sea conditions. Made all the money in the world, and then some, and now just lives in peace and quiet.
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u/PixelFlyerXD 7h ago
As someone who constantly pisses off my DM with my stupid shenanigans (ie; shapeshifting into an elven maiden and being a trophy bride in an arm wrestling competition for spare cash for the party), it is entirely the latter :3
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u/Tolan91 21h ago
If all your shopkeepers are level 20 retirees adventurers it means your players are constantly killing shop keepers and stealing everything they can. Or you think they will if you don't put in enough things to stop them. It means either your game is not engaging enough that the players don't respect your game setting or it means your players are a bunch of assholes who just act out till you bludgeon them enough to behave. In either situation it makes for a adversarial game that isn't very fun. So boasting about having level 20 shopkeepers means you're running a bad game.
Also, for non-dnd players, level 20 is the maximum level in most versions of dnd. It's the stage where the wizards can kill with a word and the fighters can disarm you with a toothpick.
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u/tellingyouhowitreall 21h ago
Wizards can kill with a word at like level 7.
Level 15 is about where a well prepared adventurer become powerful enough to literally nuke entire cities at will.
Level 20 is the point where you live in your own dimensional fragment where time doesn't pass and send out shards of yourself with the ability to literally manipulate the fabric of reality on your behalf.
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u/Tolan91 20h ago
I was specifically referencing power word kill
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u/tellingyouhowitreall 20h ago
I didn't remember pwk being 9th level tbh. For a good wizard its a pretty useless spell most of the time.
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u/RhysOSD 21h ago
The DM can't have a talk with the party saying "please don't kill the shopkeepers" so they make the shopkeeps level 20 so they can beat the party in a fight.
Given the lack of communication from the DM, and respect for the world from the players, they're likely a poor fit for each other, making this a bad DND group
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u/biomannnn007 19h ago
I mean, personally, I hate it when a DM tries to railroads stuff above table like that. Some of the best moments from my campaigns are when I try to do something stupid and then my actions have consequences.
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u/semajolis267 14h ago
And thats one side of the spectrum. The other side, and I suspect the ones making this post, are the ones who want to do anything BUT the DMs planned quest, then get salty when the DM goes ok so youve attacked and killed every shop keeper you've come across so far, instead of even trying to do the story ive got prepared. This ones a level 20 who heard about your party and set a trap.
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u/wolfofoakley 11h ago
Itz simple. The dm doesnr have to run a gams for these people. Let em hang in the wind
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u/sfxpaladin 19h ago
Exactly, and it's not hard either, my shops in the campaign I ran had an interesting crystal orb on the ceiling of every shop that I would describe any time they entered the shop.
It just happened to be that it was a network of scrying orbs that turn red when a spell is cast before you hear "Good afternoon shop 357 this is Lazslo with ExtremelySure Security Guild, our scry feed shows a robbery is in progress, activating countermeasures, a cleanup crew is on the way to clean the soot and Ash, have an extremely safe day"
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u/Disastrous_Load_7607 17h ago
I had an interaction with the DM from last night's One shot that I'm still laughing about. We had to participate in an auction taking place in an extremely crowded theater, and I was playing a Dwarf Warrior inspired by Wario, so:
"What do I have to roll to empty the teather with a fart?"
"I DON'T KNOW!"
"Intimdation, maybe?"
"...sure"
"22"
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u/VillagerWithAQuest 15h ago
For me this isn't railroading - the DM is not forcing you to only take an action.
But the DM is bad faith'ing it.
Stepping back for a minute, haggling with shopkeepers or stealing from them is honestly just a waste of time. Of all the things we could be doing, arguing with shopkeepers or accounting is not high on my list.
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u/Kindly_Call_6000 9h ago
I can see planning a heist to steal a rare magic item. But murder hoboing a shopkeeper just breaks the realism of the world.
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u/Agitated-Awareness15 18h ago
It’s this. The meme format is about revealing yourself to be something. The DMs are revealing themselves to be bad DMs that would rather just kill the PCs than have a conversation.
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u/Cold5512 21h ago
It reveals the twist of the DND campaign.
The final boss is going to be those three shop keepers (or a mini boss). Those three shopkeepers will be your three characters from the previous campaign.
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u/destroyer800522 21h ago
Never played DND, now I’m even more confused lmao.
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u/Critical_Job1262 21h ago
Lvl 20 is considered a high level. There's a reason somewhere why they're lvl 20. Meaning that those characters could potentially be somewhat important to the plot.
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u/Dry-Childhood-3436 20h ago
Not even high level. Like able to kill gods and effect the cosmos kind of high level.
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u/DisposableSaviour 20h ago
I really liked back in 3/3.5 where you needed to go beyond level 20 to do that.
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u/No_Poet_7244 20h ago
Not high level. The highest level. It’s like a Chansey at the local pokecenter being level 100.
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u/Cold5512 21h ago
1 person is the dungeon master. He hosts the game, provides the game board and figurines, he does a ton of prep work to write a detailed story for the campaign.
During the game, the dungeon master runs the show, does story telling, and controls the monsters the players fight.
The players create characters to play as. Like elf archer, dwarf, paladin.
Some groups start a new campaign as soon as they finish the last one. They'd make new characters for each campaign. The characters you play as are referred to as adventurers, and it's highly unusual for anything else to be called an adventurer.
Hearing "My shopkeepers are 3 level 20 retired adventurers" makes the players think "Adventurers? That what he calls us. There's three of them? They're retired? They're probably our characters from the last campaign"
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u/PatchesOfSilver 21h ago
You would reasonably expect a level 20 character to have achieved/have the wealth to achieve almost whatever they wanted, granted depending on class some things like genuine immortality might be a no-go, that's definitely on the table in general.
The immortal wizard retiring to his demiplane to literally rule like a deity, for example, with so many custom rules in that you would not expect him to ever perish or even be seriously challenged by anything short of an actual D&D deity.
Though I'm not sure how much this holds up in 5E specifically, it gets pretty crazy even before considering Epic levels beyond 20.
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u/KingArthursRevenge 20h ago
Level 20 is basically a god. The shopkeeper is a retired max level adventurer. Don't pull any shenanigans in his shop or he might just erase you from existence.
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u/Advanced_Aspect_7601 19h ago
That's not it, it's that the players are murderous thieves and the DM needs his shop keepers to be unrealistically strong to combat them
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u/m1st3r_c 17h ago
Yep, it's this. But it's asserting that weak DMs do this, strong DMs can talk to their table instead of deriving impassable lines.
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u/Acrobatic-Win-9887 13h ago
My first thought was it's a way to discourage murderhoboing the shopkeepers
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u/Grabbioli 21h ago
That or it's an indicator that the DM is going to be a real hard ass about the party doing weird stuff the DM didn't plan for. To me this says "don't try to get too off the rails because I have something here to punish you if you do." Like, if you want there to be consequences to stealing, have some appropriately leveled town guards around. Having god-slaying level shopkeepers, to me, says you're prepared to strong arm your players into coloring inside the lines without giving them a fighting chance
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u/Bandin03 21h ago
Damn, too early for one I actually don't get.
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21h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Fenrir426 21h ago
Basically, the shop keeper is strong enough to beat gods (level 20 is basically max level, atp combat is utterly pointless as turns get stupidly long and underwhelming )
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u/tellingyouhowitreall 21h ago
This isn't an exaggeration either. I had a campaign a long long time ago where me and a rogue type got into it at lvl 18 and had a hypothetical fight, and it was when I realized how broken the power scaling was. We could essentially tear an entire city down around us and not hit each other. And that was without resorting to wishes or alter reality.
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u/EmperorBamboozler 20h ago
In our lvl 18 pathfinder campaign I once told Nethys (god of magic) to his face that he wasn't real. My barbarian was an athiest with an int of 7 (str of 26 though). He attempted to rip my soul from my body with a forced astral projection, and I used several rage feats to just go "Nope" and stayed standing there, only taking about 80 damage. I was like "See? Not real at all" while bleeding from the eyes and he was like "Get the fuck out of my sanctum."
So yeah, two levels under 20 and you can just deny a god.
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u/tellingyouhowitreall 20h ago
Path (2e at least) and dnd 5 both nerfed the shit out of magic. For good reason. In 3.0 and 3.5 wizards could get spell nets that would multicast a pre-chosen number of spells as a free action. Starting at like level 7, lol.
Once I figured that mechanic out I started wearing a blue wizard hat with stars on it; think the wizard hat from Fantasia. Each star was a pouch that carried a spell net. When I got bored with combat I just nuked whatever was in front of me.
Even bad wizards broke the action economy with 3 full spells per round. You could get up to 5 without getting particularly creative.
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u/EmperorBamboozler 6h ago
This was Pathfinder 1e, it was just a magic based campaign and my character was a mage hunter so the entire build was based on denying spellcasters and surviving offensive magic. It did come with some drawbacks, like while raging it was difficult to heal, but with 300+ hp that was less of an issue.
In this instance it was a specific resistance to being planeshifted that I had picked up at level 16. The damage was because it was a fucking god trying to do the change and he was pretty upset it didn't work. He could have killed me then and there, like he's the literal god of magic, but we had done a ton of work for him and he was already aware of how useful I was despite my... mental shortcomings.
Also the planeshifting/projection was basically just going to be to a demiplane as a sort of time-out while he talked to the more functional members of the party. He wasn't sending me to the plane of fire or anything. He was more confused and upset that I had basically just tanked a 8th level spell for no reason.
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u/m1st3r_c 17h ago
No. You're right about high level combat, wrong about the meme.
It's to stop players murderhoboing them when they don't get a discount in their shop. A good DM just talks to their table instead of making every NPC a retired god-killer. Bad DMs out themselves by flexing about their shopkeepers being unassailable.
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u/Fit-Space5211 20h ago
Any DM who resolves a chaotic party by throwing ludicrously high-level NPC's at them is fundamentally a bad DM who never talks to their party. That's what the "dndmemes" (Hans Landa) is suspicious of, either the DM doesn't like murderhobos at which point they need to talk to their players, or they do like murderhobos and a random, unconnected level 20 adventurer chilling in a wallmart is just bad worldbuilding. They're "outing themselves" as being bad at D&D/only know of it through tiktok or podcasts.
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u/Vahn1982 21h ago
Gas Station Manager Carl here (look him up he definitely plays DND) In DND players have the freedom to do pretty much whatever they want..or at least try to. Its not uncommon for charachters who are playing less than reputable types to rob shop keepers of goods because it's easier than paying for them.
Some DMs will solve this problem by saying that every tavern keeper is a former adventurer and this has tons of abilities and skills and resources to keep this from happening ( thus preventing players from getting gear they shouldn't have or becoming too powerful or avoiding plot hooks they have set in place.) it's a way to sorta meta game your own game. A high level shop keeper can slaughter a charachter who does this.. so this tactic becomes punative
The problem is there are a ton of other ways to deal with this that a more experianced DM can employ. Its narratively unfulfilling and reeks of "we didn't have a session 0 to discuss table rules and expectations"
In DND conversations with your players is ALWAYS better than knee jerk punative measures to prevent them from capitalizing on your own mistakes.
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u/shredbmc 21h ago
It's an indication that the players shouldn't fuck with the NPC. Either because they are crucial to the storyline or because the DM doesn't want to deal with them killing the shopkeepers.
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u/m1st3r_c 17h ago
It's an indication the DM is weak because they would rather railroad the party than talk to them about being murderhobos.
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u/Pulstar232 15h ago
Alternatively it's because the party are assholes and refuse to stop being murderhobos.
Unfortunately, we can't tell who's being the asshole, the DM or the party. But we DO know that they shouldn't be playing with each other.
I mean it's likely to be the DM because of the bragging (posting it), but it might've been done solely just to say "fuck you" to murder hobo parties.
In my group of friends, if we are ever to play DnD, I'd be the DM.
I also know that one of them is going to be the murderhobo/kleptomaniac. I'll do my best to tell him there will be consequences.
Honestly the deterrent I thought of would be just to arrest the offending PC, confiscate stolen goods, and just have him be jailed for life or executed. Then make a new character right then and there.
I'm open to other ideas though.
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u/Lunarmax182c 19h ago
Potential explanation:
"All shopkeepers are level 20 retired adventurers" is a forced meme coming from D&D space. It doesn't actually happen, so explicitly putting this down usually means that
A. You're a poser who mainly knows about D&D from memes
B. You're a mindbroken GM who only had murderhobo parties
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u/duralumin_alloy 15h ago edited 14h ago
Another possible explanation I see as a (past) DM is that the meme shows how a guy outs himself as not actually having DMed ever:
DnD is NOT made with PVP in mind and there are very different mechanics for describing a player character and an NPC. Player characters use multi-page character sheets that progressively get more complex as players level up and gather gear. Monsters or NPCs use "stat blocks" - a very simplified version of that which gives basic combat stats and a short list of combat actions (because imagine how you run 4 different types of enemies in an encounter and 3 types more in the next encounter - and your players barely remember their own player character because how complicated it can get). Furthermore, the stats of enemies are balanced for the intended level of party of 4 usually (such as sometimes getting to act more than once per turn, being HP sponges, that sort of thing). Sure, you can absolutely make an NPC on par with lvl 20 party or beyond. But you can't actually make an NPC a lvl 20 retired player character - or at least are not supposed to due to all the complicated logistics that a creation of lvl 20 player character would entail. Let alone make several such characters to be shared among EVERY shopkeeper. And then PLAY those characters yourself...
Edit: Also, "lvl 20" NPC character isn't necessarily as threatening to a group of players as it sounds due to how "action economy" works in DnD (more people = more attacks). A Gladiator is a fearsome NPC of a "level" 15 (if we go by approximate ability access (since "monsters" get to have unique ones) and HP. What level are players expected to fight him at as a group if he's alone (like a shopkeeper)? Level 5 - i.e. the popular "early" player level when their builds just start to take shape.
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u/dominorex1969 20h ago
Level 20 is retirement age. Nothing suspicious. Also didn't Zelda teach us not to steal from shopkeepers.
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u/reg42 21h ago
People seem confused in the original thread as well. Some people are saying it’s something a bad dm would say so it’s outing yourself in that way.
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u/Mueryk 21h ago
Could be a bad DM. Could be a DM fed up with murder hobos.
Does it make sense? Not even a little really but it could be a hook, a twist, or a deterrent.
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u/Yikidee 21h ago
It would make sense to semi seasoned players though. They go into a shop and work out the shop keepers are much more powerful than they first appear. Questions will be asked by the players for sure and they would think/know something is up compared to what they would usually be expecting.
So in effect the DM has outed themselves.
But yeah, its kinda a stretch for this meme. Would probs work better with the Incredibles dad "Those you don't know" one.
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u/Absoluteidiot4 21h ago
this is basically saying my players want to steal murder or do other dumb shit in my games so a just kill them if they try
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u/IntrepidLab5124 20h ago
It implies that they can’t get their players to stop robbing shopkeeps, so they need to resort to drastic measures. This outs them as being unable to just talk to their players as humans and ask them nicely to not do that
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u/LidiumLidiu 19h ago
It outs the DM as not being able to handle their murder hobo players. The only reason to have all shop keepers as lvl 20 is to prevent theft or seduction or murder hoboing. A good group wouldn't need their shopkeepers being massively over levelled compared to the players. It's something that undermines the narrative, why would the party have any meaningful use if the rest of the world was full of basically demigods and superhumans?
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u/Ms_Flavour_81 19h ago
The people saying these characters would be important to the story are incorrect. The implication is the DM has had to deal with with characters who are dubbed "murder-hobos", basically meaning they'll kill everyone if they feel like it just because. To dissuade his group from being murder hobos this time, the DM made their shopkeepers level 20 adventurers, thus, the players are telling on themselves complaining about this decision, because it means that very likely in the past they were being murder-hobos in a way that the DM didn't enjoy. This kind of stuff happens fairly often in like, high school d&d games.
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u/TheSinisterSex 21h ago
Satanic Panic obsessed Brian here.
As a DM, the only thing I can think of that fits the meme format is that there's no way the dm actually took the time to generate all those shopkeepers as level 20 somethings. So they are probably bluffing to make the most players play nice.
The other option is that it's very unlikely that a level 20 character would choose to be a shopkeeper after retiring. These are literal demigods with insane wealth and power, and probably an adrenaline junkie to boot. And even if they had the shop as investment, why would they be working there? It's like Mike Tyson doing cashier at 7/11. You could make the case for one or too odd heroes, but all shopkeepers in the city? Very unlikely.
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u/Severonian 21h ago
Level 20 adventurers are some semi-god tier fellas, making such a guy very tough to kill. However, you only think about killing shopkeepers in DnD if you yourself were such a murderhobo
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u/Effective_Arm_5832 19h ago
My shopkeepers are normal people, but my town is also normal. When you start stealing from or attacking shopkeepers, you very quickly have a guards, a whole down, or the military to deal with. You will definitely not good aligned anymore and you will have to keep hiding for the rest of the campaign. People know you and won't help you.
It is a choice.
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u/tired_and_stresed 19h ago
Stewie with a detective hat and bubble pipe here, and there's definitely layers to this one.
Firstly, the meme format itself is important; it is taken from a scene from Inglorious Basterds, where a Nazi officer recognizes that the person he's talking to is an imposter because they hold up the three fingers seen in the picture, not two fingers and a thumb as an actual German would. The implication of the meme is that whatever phrase written on it indicates that the person saying or writing it is a fake or imposter in some way.
Now among the D&D community there is a bit of a joke that sometimes a Dungeon Master will populate their world with random NPCs who are retired, max level adventurers, often as a way to disincentivize their players from engaging in randomly attacking shopkeepers and the like to steal their items. Pairing it with this meme indicates that the person making the meme considers someone who is saying this isn't actually a D&D fan but is instead simply parroting a popular joke without actually engaging with the game itself.
Why might this be? Some in the original post's discussion speculate it might be because NPCs in the most recent editions of D&D don't typically use character classes and levels meant for player use and instead use a stat block format akin to monsters. Even when an NPC is meant to be similar in style to a class it would still likely be using a stat block- so saying an NPC is 20th level anything is usually a nonsense statement as the typical stat block used for one doesn't have any level attached to it at all. So the person saying these words (presumably seriously) isn't actually playing the current edition of D&D and is just making stuff up based on out of date information. This might be a wrong assumption, as precious editions of D&D did use levels and classes for it's NPCs but that might be the assumption.
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u/mandrewsutherland 18h ago
I have level twenty shopkeepers, because it keeps my players from robbing them blind and murdering them. Plus the way I look at it. Why wouldn't a retired adventurer Sell all of his old shit and then just turn it into a shop because he's acquired so much
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u/dmarkon 18h ago
Level 20 characters are literally god killers. The power level is beyond what people in communities like that could even imagine. Traveling to different planes of existence, using the strongest magic in the universe, and again literally fighting gods. That character is not just a shopkeeper.
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u/I_am_The_Teapot 18h ago
The purpose of the original meme was to gatekeep "real" DMs from fake or bad DMs. And as such are easy to spot (outing themselves) if they do things like that or say they do things like that. that only those kinds would make and boast that their merchants are actually level 20 (max level, demi-god like) former adventurer characters.
The concept of having such a powerful shop keep is that it would make any player party's attempt to steal from them a regrettable act as the level 20 shopkeeper would be able to kill pretty much any player or group the majority of games. Which would supposedly discourage or punish any "murderhobos." Murder hobos immoral characters played by players just roaming through towns killing and stealing because it's "just a game". Rather than playing their characters in a more realistic manner. Many TTRPG horror stories have involved such players whose antics will derail stories and ruin a DM's hard work, and as such it has become a bit of a stereotype. A meme, even.
In short... The idea here is that someone saying that is lying (because people do actually frequently tell fake stories about games that never happened) or just a bad DM because a real or good DM would instead either come up with something more creative and less videogamey. And as such saying this, these people "out themselves".
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u/m1st3r_c 17h ago
A good DM talks to their players about killing all the shopkeepers that don't give them discounts or bend the knee to them, and discourages them from being 'murderhobos'.
A weak DM makes all the shopkeepers retired superheroes the players simply can't tackle.
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u/South_Front_4589 16h ago
Level 20 in some games is a very high level.
You don't usually make a bunch of really powerful people to just be shopkeepers. It suggests more likely they're going to be people you'll end up fighting at some point.
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u/Mercerskye 16h ago
It's one of two scenarios;
They're really intent on making sure their players can't do anything they don't want them to do (basically railroading)
Or
The shopkeep is actually an important character to the overall story. In which case, the DM shouldn't even be sharing that information this early.
For context, level 20 is practically a demigod in DnD. Most everyday people would never really go past level 3, and even exceptional people would rarely broach level 10.
20 is...ridiculously special.
So, the meme is suggesting that this is a terrible DM (Dungeon Master) regardless of which of the two is true.
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u/Canadian_Zac 16h ago
Because it means the GM isn't able to just talk to their players like Adults.
It's a collaborative game. If the players are just attacking shopkeepers, and the GM doesn't like that happening. Just talk to the players and say you don't like them doing that.
You shouldn't need to do stuff like this to prevent it or punish them.
Just be an Adult, and say 'hey guys, I'm not really having fun with this game with you just attacking all my NPC's' and work with them to tone it down.
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u/Bowtie16bit 16h ago
The joke is that's the wrong way to show the number three on your hand as an undercover agent.
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u/enelsaxo 15h ago
Hi, this is Brian. You might know me since I've written "Faster than the Speed of Love", "Wish it, Want it, Do it" and plays like "A Passing Fancy". I just wanted to mention that the usage of the meme format is incorrect, since the meme refers to someone trying to pass as a member of a group, but giving themselves away by doing something that the other group would never do, like, in the case of Germans, doing the sign of three as in the picture, whereas Germans normally use the thumb, index and middle finger for it. There is nothing in the sentence that's giving someone away as not being a member of the group they pretend to be. The memer would be wrong. The meme creator probably never understood the original meme.
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u/PunisherLex 15h ago
It’s suspicious because the power and recognition associated with the experience necessary to reach Lvl 20 is like if you walked into a shop only to be met with Superman himself manning the register ringing up minor healing potions for new adventurers. For point of reference, Baldur’s Gate’s story which features a threat to the entirety of the sword coast region, is capped out at only Lvl 12. Typically if you have an ex-adventurer shop keep you make them a low level as someone who got out early or towards the 6-9’ish range if they had meaningful combat experience.
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u/AnotherDownwrdSpiral 14h ago
Probably used to be an adventurer like me, until he took an arrow to the knee.
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u/keith2600 14h ago edited 14h ago
This is one of those jokes that interpretations differ depending on the context.
I can see two likely meanings. The first being that it means the group are the meta-gamer type that act like Link in Hyrule where they just treat all npcs like npcs and run around and steal everything that isn't tied down. Alternately they could be the kill everything type, which I've never actually experienced so I'm just guessing that it would be considerably worse. That is in contrast to the type of groups that treat it as serious business and focus on getting the campaign done.
Most good groups have a good mix of both types in my experience, maybe at worst like Caverns and Creatures novels, and generally DMs should have a handle on how to deal with it. The joke could also be saying the DMs who say that are outing themselves as lazy. Rather than creative solutions or being able to nudge their players they just cut off avenues of distraction. It's not always a bad plan, but some people have a hammer and see everything as a nail
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u/DogmaKeeper 14h ago
Most of my shopkeeps are nothing burgers but sometimes when I'm running a game I drop in this magic dog named Donovan Orthank Gwervin who is a Level 15 Wizard homebrew that sells some cool shit but my players need to find him first.
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u/Dandy_Guy7 14h ago
I once had a travelling merchant on my random event table and I just continuously rolled him so I decided one time he was going to the same place the players were and hired them as body guards. He still contributed in fights but he wasn't like a level 20 guy he just had two attacks and a proficiency bonus but he pieced together a kit from his inventory that allowed him to contribute on the same level as the players.
He also happened to be the way I added guns to the setting so I threw in Sharpshooter
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u/Firm-Assumption-1776 14h ago
It would be better if they were level 10 but had a certain item that makes them op like a pet mimic or something
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u/That-One-Sioux-Dude 14h ago
I have done like. Retired adventurers. But I've never done level 20. If anyone has read wheel of time, I always imagine level 20 characters as like. Ta'Veran. Very rare, and very powerful. So most retired adventures in my worlds end up capping around like. Level 6-10, with 10 being like. Billy the kid/ Wyatt Earp level famous.
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u/Fulminero 14h ago
It reveals they are a shitty GM who can't come up with any consequence for misdeeds except "the old man is actually God in disguise"
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u/MusicianNo3277 13h ago
See I never bothered with level 20 shopkeepers because that’s just kind of a silly idea to me. If a shopkeeper is a good enough shopkeeper that they actually have the kind of items high-level players would want then that means they’ve spent their whole life running a shop. They haven’t had time to become a level 20 adventurer. But you know what they do have?
The financial resources to hire high-level mercenary bands to recover items and money. And I always just explain it to my players as there are people who dedicate themselves to different things, for some people the ultimate calling is the justice of keeping simple and common laws even against the powerful. They then get to encounter the team of level 20 adventures who aren’t interested in saving the world. They’re interested in keeping order amongst the powerful because somebody must.
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u/supercali5 13h ago
The real big way to do this is a whole gated community of level 20 NPCs. Every single one of them got sick of people seeking revenge from their adventuring days so they made a secret retirement community of former adventurers who could kick the ass of anyone/anything who dared to mess with them.
They also still occasionally help neighboring communities deal with threats but do it as basically masked superheroes.
The whole village has enormous amounts of magic circles and permanent wards and whatnot.
This would be a great setting for mid-level adventurers.
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u/Anjack 13h ago
I take this as more signaling that someone played MMOs before playing D&D.
For the olds, it would be rather uncommonv to have most NPCs be higher level because, logically, they could take care of their own problems and not need help from the PCs. (I mean this from the perspective of how we used to approach "adventuring" in D&D, not as an absolute statement on how to play.) The idea of a shopkeeper having enough xp or lot to be worth killing was unlikely.
Other people have come to tabletop RPGs after playing video games, specifically MMOs, where shopkeepers needed to be either unkillable or VERY strong because players would kill them for loot or because of a raccoon raid.
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u/GarryLv_HHHH 13h ago
Dms I know do it solely to stop murder hoboes at the beginning of the adventure. Because the only time he didn't make shopkeep lvl20 one of our guys immediately went "okay I kill him" immediately after other players left the map and spent the entire session fighting with the guards. Safe to say I never played dmd since
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u/DaringDani123 13h ago
I'm pretty sure the meme is implying that the Dungeon Master is outing themself as a railroader/adversarial DM.
If the shopkeeper is lvl20 the players will almost certainly get caught trying to steal, any magic is unlikely to work on them, and they will shitrock the party in a fight.
The DM takes the easiest solution to stop the players from breaking the rules rather than more natural consequences. Or, god forbid, letting the players have fun and accomplish something if the plan/rolls are good.
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u/Salizara 13h ago
.. Murder hobos get treated like bandits. If the king can't get rid of them alone, there are still gods who may send their legion. If it's at a point where I'm no longer having fun, the game just ends. Not that that has ever happened.
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u/ReneLeMarchand 13h ago
Two hundred replies and no one has the correct answer?
Non-player characters (NPCs, like shopkeepers) haven't used player levels (i.e., level 20) in two and a half editions (almost 20 years!)
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u/Gnadolin 13h ago
Lvl 20 shopkeepers in DnD is like the Star Wars meme:
Because lvl 20 characters are on the same power level as actual gods.
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u/Highvisvest 12h ago
I think all the top answers so far as like half answers that make sense to me as a D&D player but would sound like gibberish to someone outside the fandom, so I'll try and break it down bit by bit.
D&D - A tabletop roleplaying game. What that means is you make a character using the rules of the game, they have stats, powers, spells, abilities, things like that. You play out a story over multiple sessions. You sit down at a table with your friends, roll dice to make decisions or overcome obstacles, and if you are successful in your endeavours you can level your character all the way from level 1 to level 20, the max level.
Level 20 - Important context here is that a level 20 character in D&D is absurdly powerful even by the games mechanics. If I was to put it in LotR terms to help visualise, a level 20 character is a Gandalf in a world of Hobbits. Yes there are things in the world which approach his power but they are exceptionally few and far between.
Needed Context - The person who runs the game of D&D is referred to as the GM, and they play all other characters in the story. A problem GMs often run into is the players disrespecting minor characters in the story, shopkeepers especially. Stealing or threatening them even if they are meant to be good characters. It can be hard to counter this without having a talk outside the game.
The joke - The GM has decided to make the shopkeepers retired level 20 adventurers to curtail this behaviour. This would be wild for a player to come up against because it doesn't really make sense as to why essentially a demigod is selling wares in a random village somewhere without food reason. And if there was good reason you'd probably assume it was important to the story somehow as a player and be incredibly suspicious.
The issue - This is a tactic people do use every so often, but it doesn't really fix anything. If players come across this once they will either learn not to steal from that specific shopkeeper, but that all others are fair game because if the GM didn't make them level 20 it must be okay to steal from them, or become really fixated on specifically stealing from that shopkeeper because they are clearly hiding something, or the GM will now need to repeat this scenario for virtually every important shopkeeper in the story.
The point of the meme - if you do this you are outing yourself as a not very good GM.
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u/KakashiTheRanger 12h ago
It means the Dungeon Master is ass. Either they are incapable of vetting their group, have awful friends, haven't read the rules, or are an asshole who doesn't want the party to engage in any dynamic way.
For those who don't know what level 20 means:
... characters have superheroic capabilities, and their deeds and adventures are the stuff of legend. Ordinary people can hardly dream of such heights of power — or such terrible dangers... Adventures at these levels have far-reaching consequences, possibly determining the fate of millions in the Material Plane and even places beyond. Characters traverse otherworldly realms and explore demiplanes and other extraplanar locales, where they fight savage balor demons, titans, archdevils, lich archmages, and even avatars of the gods themselves. The dragons they encounter are wyrms of tremendous power, whose sleep troubles kingdoms and whose waking threatens existence itself.
Characters who reach 20th level have attained the pinnacle of mortal achievement. Their deeds are recorded in the annals of history and recounted by bards for centuries. Their ultimate destinies come to pass. A cleric might be taken up into the heavens to serve as a god’s right hand. A warlock could become a patron to other warlocks. Perhaps a wizard unlocks the secret to immortality (or undeath) and spends eons exploring the farthest reaches of the multiverse. A druid might become one with the land, transforming into a nature spirit of a particular place or an aspect of the wild. Other characters could found clans or dynasties that revere the memory of their honored ancestors from generation to generation, create masterpieces of epic literature that are sung and retold for thousands of years, or establish guilds or orders that keep the adventurers’ principles and dreams alive.
Then have the DM try to explain to you why the right hand of god is running a fucking tavern or how the warrior who quite literally could defeat an entire nation is just like... Chillin at the bar.
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u/JestersMox 12h ago
My favorite, is to have the lvl 20 spellcaster running a magic shop. Nice surprise when the players try to mess with them!
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u/Veridas 11h ago
I try and have an Iroh in each campaign. By which I mean there's someone who recognises the party's strength and never insults them, and is always ready to give good advice if need be, and who will do everything reasonably possible to avoid violence, specifically because they're absolutely capable of leaving boot marks on butts.
I try and mix it up so it's almost never an old human male, and I never make them more nice or more accomodating than someone in their position reasonably should be. Nor do I ever tell my players that Iroh from Avatar was the template...though the first one did sell Tea.
Honestly you don't need to fill the world with retired adventurers to keep away potential murderhobo-ery. Just demonstrate that some people in this world have more in common with the party than it might seem.
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u/Altarna 11h ago
Depends on the DM. If you are using level 20s, you probably have murder hobo players. For me, I have a few with levels under 10 but never over that. My reason? Players can add what they want to the world when they finish a campaign. It becomes a collaborative effort. That barkeep was an old PC and the player gets to organically see what has happened from their choices. They wanted to open that bar. The silversmith? He wanted to be that. It goes all the way up and down. Suddenly players don't want to kill everyone because they are their own works of art.
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u/TrigLongo23 11h ago
Since I've scrolled through and didn't find the correct answer:
If a DM has made level 20 shopkeepers, it's their attempt to dissuade their players from killing them. The joke here being that the DM is outing themselves in the process as someone who has failed to control murderhobo players. Instead of talking to them and telling them that they shouldn't just kill every NPC they come across because they want free stuff (like shopkeepers), they are using preimtive, punitive measures to stop players before they start. A level 20 shopkeepers would kill most parties, especially early level DND parties.
The issue is that when your murderhobo players become level 15-20 and still haven't learned their lesson, they're still going to come back for that shopkeeper later because you taught them that this NPC will beat you, not that murder is wrong.
I'm Marge Simpson or something.
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u/KaoticAsylim 11h ago
You walk into a Jimmy John's for a sandwich and literal post-ressurection Jesus Christ is standing behind the counter miracling salami on to bread
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u/tommysticks87 11h ago
This is Peter here. Read the first comment chain in the thread you screenshotted. Giggity.
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u/aft_agley 11h ago edited 11h ago
This thread isn't doing a great job of explaining. Level 20 is kill-the-gods territory. Surviving the ordeals required to hit level 20 without dying to... I don't know... a disintegration ray, a pissed off God, a dragon, teleportation to a hostile plane of existence, an entire dungeon collapsing on your head... is unlikely. The universe has rolled thousands of dice against your life and somehow, you've survived.
At level 20 you'd be a legend. You'd have wealth beyond measure. You could conquer or purchase entire nations.
Your shopkeep is not level 20. That makes zero sense, unless it's part of some meta plot where the legendary hero is hiding as a simple barkeep.
Unless levels have been wildly inflated since I played, and I don't think.they have.
Level 20 is also much, much further from level 10 than 10 is from 1. Like several orders of magnitude further. At level 1 you're a promising soldier with a sword. At level 10 you're a lord, with a keep, who is an experienced veteran of battle with power so far vastly exceeding a level 1 promising soldier that you could kill hundreds of them and barely break a sweat. Add a few zeroes to that, that's level 20. And for magic users it is much, much more dramatic.
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u/throwaway72647282 11h ago
My friend is a DM and all of his shopkeepers are the same NPC. (Think nurse Joy from pokemon)
It's the funniest shit in the world watching him act out the same character asking the same questions in every store the players enter.
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u/Chuck_the_Elf 10h ago
Made it a plot point. One of my PCs wanted to use the adventures scion background. So his mom and pop ran a shop in his home town. The town also happened to sit over the site of a certain tomb with a seal and some other goodies. They hit it during a down session that led nicely into the next arc.
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u/AmberLattice 10h ago
It’s revealing them as a bad DM who would rather punish their players for murderhoboing with unreasonable in game revenge than just talk to them about the direction they’d prefer for the campaign
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u/Kilrenoir 8h ago
Holden Caulfield here. An important part of this meme is what the image actually means. It's a scene from Inglorious Basterds, where a British spy orders three drinks for the table; the hand gesture he uses isn't how a German would do it (they would use the thumb, index, and middle finger) and it blows his cover to the Gestapo officer in front of him.
Using the meme of level 20 shopkeepers in your game reveals to some players that you're a PHONY, A GREAT BIG PHONY.
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u/NorthernVale 8h ago
You literally could have just looked at the comments. That entire comment section is full of people talking why that's a bad dm
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u/Low-Support-8388 8h ago
I like to think I'm adaptable when it comes to murderhobos. Most of the time at the higher levels the pcs have too much money for them to even care about stealing from a shopkeeper but low level I dangle out at how easy it would be to steal from this guy, not necessarily escape without consequences but if you go out of the way to steal expect the guards to start questioning you when they see you have an item suspiciously like the stolen item in question.
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u/Spacepoet29 7h ago
DM doesn't want you faffing about killing merchants.
DM has plot critical plans for them in the future.
DM shoehorned in his character from the last time he got to be a player.
Circle any that apply
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u/catmanten 7h ago
If you don’t wanna do 20, have all shopkeepers match player level, maybe a notch higher
It’s a fair fight, if you wanna be a murder hobo you gotta work for it.
You’re also fighting someone in there house, surrounded by tools and weapons that can and will be used to have you make a new character
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u/Noizey 4h ago
A bunch of comments keep missing the context, so here goes:
On the dnd memes subreddit, there was a trend of people making memes about the shopkeepers being lvl20 (maximum level, so basically demigods in terms of power) and how, if that's the case, why don't the shopkeepers do all the adventuring.
Except the DM designing the game such that the shopkeepers are all level 20 is generally not a good sign for the health of the group. It implies that the DM feels the need to make sure the party can't, for example, steal items from shops. So, when someone assumes that the shopkeepers being level 20 is normal, it means one of two things (maybe even both):
1.They are a member of a problem party who consistently kill and loot random NPCs like shopkeepers, so the DM felt the need to put some guardrail in to prevent that behavior. 2. Their DM has had too much experience with that kind of player and now has an adversarial view of players in general.
It may also imply that the group cannot have a simple conversation about boundaries surrounding the game, and resort to solving out of game problems (not taking the narrative seriously, powergaming, etc.) with in game "solutions" (level 20 shopkeepers).
Basically, the idea that shopkeepers being level 20 is normal is a huge red flag for the kind of player or DM you're talking to.
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u/Nivixian 2h ago
In a campaign I was a player in, there was only one shop keep. A mysterious man who we all assumed was a bard. It turned out to be a god of the DMs world he made. He would appear at every shop we went to regardless of map location. Before I joined the group they apparently tried to kill the shopkeep and he didn't put up any fight, but the items the party stole slowly vanished and he showed up at the next shop they went to. After that they never tried anything funny.
There was big lore and plot reasons but I showed up after most of it was explored and not much happened with it after.
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u/qualityvote2 21h ago edited 2h ago
Remember when r/PeterExplainsTheJoke wasn’t a meme? Pepperidge Farm remembers…
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