DM advice: How do you NOT kill your party?

[77IM]

I'm dealing with this right now. My group of 8 players at 7th level are about to fight a CR 16 legendary creature (I combined the stats of the archmage with the fomorian -- it turns out that giving an 18th-level a big bucket of hit points is pretty useful, and giving a giant globe of invunerability likewise).

1. The PCs are attacking the guy's organization to eliminate his most powerful minions before they fight him. They'll also bust some of his enemies out of prison and have already recruited some other allies for help.

2. The PCs are planning to ambush him. Details are still up in the air, but the bad guy doesn't know they're coming, so they can make the fight happen on their terms.

3. They've been tracking down helpful magic items (in particular, they got their hands on a staff that can cast globe of invulnerability, which is stupidly useful against an archmage).

4. This particular villain isn't very tactically-minded. He'll use his spells smartly but I'm not going to be super concerned about having him make the "right" decisions involving positioning or action-denial.

5. IF the bad guy wins, he won't kill them (or at least not most of them), he'll take them prisoner. Then, they have allies who are capable of busting them out of jail. It would be a major setback and change the tone of the campaign, but the PCs are only 7th level, so they have plenty of time to bounce back.

6. IF the bad guy is losing too quickly, some minions can show up. Even though the PCs are eliminating most of his minions and separating him from the others (or trying to), he's got at one minion who is difficult to track down and could plausibly show up unnoticed and unannounced (or plausibly not show up at all, if the fight is too hard).


Overall I expect it to be a tough fight but with 8 PCs a single round of focussed beat-down is going to really put the hurt on most monsters, so I'm more likely to bring in backup than to go easy on the PCs.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Wow, reading answers in threads this like really illustrates the differences between combative and cooperative gaming styles. For me, I got tired of the Players versus Dungeonmaster style about 20-25 years ago, long before 3.X and 4E got the reputation of being that type of game.

Who told you they had that reputation? 3.5 was great for PvP, and could be used with adversarial DMing if you really wanted to, as could any edition, but 3.5 and, especially, 4e were they height of 'player entitlement' and old-school adversarial DMing was, let's just say 'frowned upon.'

I believe the players and DM are telling a story together.

Very 90s. Not very D&D. ;P

Usually, if I want to avoid killing the party, it'll be made clear through the story lead-in that the bad guy is a "capture and torture" or "capture and experiment" or "slaver" type and that he's specifically going to try to incapacitate the party and use them for his nefarious plans.

That can scare players worse.

Turn this around:
Do you think you can intentionally kill the party in a hard but fair fight?

Yes. Of course, I'm taking 'fair fight' to mean the party and opposition are evenly matched... which would be far beyond 'deadly' in 5e terms. And, of course, at 1st level, you can TPK with a moderate fight, without half trying.

One area I find very conflicted is how to make death meaningful in a campaign with access to resurrection magic.

In most editions of D&D, such magic is a safety valve for higher level characters that the players may actually have finally be invested in. With the proliferation of SoDs (even if you might only fail on a '1' in some cases), cursed items, arbitrary traps, and various, occasionally fatal, gotchyas to create a sense of jeopardy and challenge, it's necessary.

My preference is for death to be rare, but resurrection rarer. We have a general compact that resurrection magic fails in all but the rarest circumstances - because if a PC died a hero fighting evil and goes to the equivalent of Valhalla/Ellysium/the Seventh Heaven, why on earth would they answer the call.

IMX, attempts to make resurrection 'more meaningful' in the narrative sometimes run aground. I've tried making more of a big deal about raising the dead, for instance, only to have the character just die again, right away, even more ignominiously (less nominiously?). I've seen DMs try the same thing only to have the character that everyone just moved heaven & earth to bring back to life get written out of the campaign because the player then had to drop out for RL reasons.

 

[nswanson27]

Can you give an example of "the fate of an epic fight is decided by a single bad dice roll?" I suppose there's the possibility of a single villain being undone by a polymorph spell or the like, but that seems to me to be an issue with the challenge's design. But typically, even if the challenge goes awry for one side or the other in a way that was unexpected, there will have been a number of meaningful decisions and other die rolls preceding it.

You give a good example, and I agree with your assessment. One example might be lower-level group getting ambushed by a group of intellect devourers or something. I guess that could be more than one dice roll to decide the fight technically, but the snowball there grows pretty darn quick. The point is you stave away from TPK scenarios where the group is like "well... ok, guess we're dead then ... that sucked... ...*blink*".

 

[77IM]

Can you give an example of "the fate of an epic fight is decided by a single bad dice roll?"

Oooh, a challenge!

If the Big Bad is a spellcaster, her first few spells are going to be doozies. A good counterspell roll can shut that down, or a poor roll can open it up. E.g., if you fail to counter time stop the archmage then she can cast some combination of globe of invulnerability, mirror image, fire shield, and cone of cold on her first turn. Of course the archmage is probably going to try to counterspell your counterspell so you might want to cast with a higher-level slot so that she has to roll too. So there could be as many as two rolls. Actually three rolls, if you consider the 1d4+1 actions you get on time stop could result in 2-5 actions, which is kind of significant.

Things can go from dicey to terrible if the party's only healer fails their save against a boss medusa, or if the designated tank (buffed up with some good spells) still manages to fail a save against banishment. The demon-summoning and devil-summoning variants are wild cards too: a marilith has a 50% chance of summoning another marilith, which seems like a pretty big change to encounter difficulty (even though killing the first marilith causes the second one to pop).

Now maybe the fate of the fight is not "decided" by these single rolls, but certainly there are times when a single roll, made early-on, could swing things pretty far in one direction or the other, making the fight either really hard or really easy.

 

[ExploderWizard]

If you are planning a major combat, (such as a boss fight) one that has potential to be extremely lethal, what steps do you follow to keep the party alive?
What tactics do you use to prevent a party wipe without the party knowing you helped them out a little.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not an easy DM. I've killed a few PC's in my day, and I'm good with that if it happens here. But this is a boss fight. I want them to win. But I also want it to be dramatic. I want them to survive by the skin of their teeth.

How do you guys create that illusion if you sense things are going very very badly for the party?

I have learned to use the encounter building system (Through Kobold Fight Club), but never to rely on it. I've built encounters I thought were going to crush my party and they wiped the floor with my baddies. And I have built encounters I thought would be a breeze and almost TPK'ed. I'm sure we have all experienced this.

I don't. That being said, there are a number of legitimate reasons an intelligent boss would keep defeated PCs alive.

1) The PC's found them and penetrated their lair. Who have they told about where they were going?
2) What other information does the bad guy want? Having defeated the PC's and taken their gear the boss may want to torture command words out of the owners.
3) The bad guys might want to "re-educate" their foes in a prison camp

 

[The Crimson Binome]

This is the exact opposite of advice I would give to any DM, new or old.

“Know thy party” is the first and most important maxim a DM can follow to make sure everyone is having a good time. If the Party is made up of fighters, rogues and barbarians and the DM keeps throwing challenges at them that can only be overcome by magic or grants rewards that can only be used by spellcasters then they are failing at their basic responsibility to make the game engaging and rewarding. If a DM wants to play this way they should make it very clear what classes and races the party should should be made up of. To each their own, but this smacks of a very top down gaming style.

The DM has total control. They decide monsters, rewards, setting, actions etc. the DM is essentially god. They have a huge amount of responsibility to make the game fair, enjoyable and possible. They are a story teller and when that story ends at level 1 with a TPK (that isn’t the result of mass stupidity) then I really do think they have failed to find the right balance. Creating new characters takes effort, creativity and a fair amount of time to do it properly. When players put that effort in they have a reasonable expectation to get a chance to use that PC. There is nothing wrong with the odd unwinnable challenge but throwing liches at players because they took the wrong path smacks of bad design to me.

If you have a party rogue, make sure they get chance to do some stealthy stuff or trap finding etc. If you have a party bard then make sure a few fights have opportunities for dialogue and negotiation. If you have a party wizard they need to find the odd scroll or staff to keep relevant. If your party fighter uses an axe and only ever finds magic long swords then you’re doing it wrong in my honest opinion.

With great power comes great responsibility. You can be fair without going easy on characters.

The first rule of role-playing is, quite literally, "Thou shalt not meta-game." All of your advice violates that rule.

If the DM tailors the world to fit the capabilities of the party, then that's meta-gaming, and none of the players' decisions actually matter. You have essentially already decided the outcome, when you take their capabilities into account. If you consider their ability to handle a troll, before you decide whether or not there's a troll in that room, then their choice of whether or not to prepare for trolls becomes irrelevant - regardless of whether you decide to give them something they can handle, or to exploit a perceived weakness for the sake of drama. The only way for their decisions to mean anything is for you to not meta-game based on it.

The DM isn't a god. The DM is a neutral arbiter. The DM doesn't have opinions, or preferences; or if they do, they don't let those things cloud their judgment. The DM simply tells you what you can perceive, and role-plays the NPCs, and adjudicates uncertainty in action resolution.

 

[Ranthalan]

The first rule of role-playing is, quite literally, "Thou shalt not meta-game." All of your advice violates that rule.

The DM isn't a god. The DM is a neutral arbiter. The DM doesn't have opinions, or preferences; or if they do, they don't let those things cloud their judgment. The DM simply tells you what you can perceive, and role-plays the NPCs, and adjudicates uncertainty in action resolution.

There's more that one way to play (and run) D&D. Some tables enjoy metagaming, some don't. (although I'm not sure we have the same exact definition of meta-gaming.) I always thought the first rule was "Have fun".

 

[The Crimson Binome]

There's more that one way to play (and run) D&D. Some tables enjoy metagaming, some don't. (although I'm not sure we have the same exact definition of meta-gaming.) I always thought the first rule was "Have fun".

I'm not talking about D&D specifically; I'm talking about role-playing. If you don't want to role-play when you play D&D, then that's entirely on you, and role-playing advice would be irrelevant in that case. D&D is a role-playing game, though, so suggestions which forget that fact are not useful suggestions.

 

[TheSword]

The first rule of role-playing is, quite literally, "Thou shalt not meta-game." All of your advice violates that rule.

If the DM tailors the world to fit the capabilities of the party, then that's meta-gaming, and none of the players' decisions actually matter. You have essentially already decided the outcome, when you take their capabilities into account. If you consider their ability to handle a troll, before you decide whether or not there's a troll in that room, then their choice of whether or not to prepare for trolls becomes irrelevant - regardless of whether you decide to give them something they can handle, or to exploit a perceived weakness for the sake of drama. The only way for their decisions to mean anything is for you to not meta-game based on it.

The DM isn't a god. The DM is a neutral arbiter. The DM doesn't have opinions, or preferences; or if they do, they don't let those things cloud their judgment. The DM simply tells you what you can perceive, and role-plays the NPCs, and adjudicates uncertainty in action resolution.

You’re answer is disingenuous because it portrays the DM as a passive neutral observer/adjudicator. That just isn’t the case. The DM is a writer, storyteller, actor, reactor, tactician, coach and artist (depending on how good your map drawing skills are). Meta gaming is just a jargon way of describing a player using information they wouldn’t have. The DM isn’t a player. As the storyteller/game master/dungeon master they metagame by definition because they are outside the game itself.

The first rule is definitely have fun as Ranthalan says.

You can try and divest the element of choice from the way a DM acts and reacts by claiming they should be neutral, but the reality is I think the DM is constantly making decisions about what the party faces on a session by session basis. If you knowingly put players up against things that are irrelevent, or unachievable then your players will get bored. If one player is less confident or able to articulate their choices you may need to work a bit harder to give their character chance to shine.

Not every player is a twenty year veteran and I think some of the posts on here, particularly advocating the old skool/come what may/killer DM approach ignore that.

I’ve just finished the first section of Phandelver. I upped the number of foes and made them hobgoblins because the party despite being brand new players could take it. I added a worg because I knew it would engage the Druid player and portrayed it as an abomination. I expanded the scale of the tunnels to allow the drow fighters better darkvision to come in to play.

In short rather than invalidating the players choices, I made them relevant by incorporating them into the story. I didn’t make it easy the opposite rather - but I did make it bespoke. They seemed to love it. That’s not a 90’s style of playing - that’s a modern approach, that requires a bit more prep and a bit more imagination/judgement.

 

[TheSword]

I'm not talking about D&D specifically; I'm talking about role-playing. If you don't want to role-play when you play D&D, then that's entirely on you, and role-playing advice would be irrelevant in that case. D&D is a role-playing game, though, so suggestions which forget that fact are not useful suggestions.

The DM is playing multiple characters and has responsibilities to balance and arbitrate the game. Players that act with knowledge that their characters don’t have is poor roleplaying i agree.

However, suggesting that a DM designing an adventure that engages and is relevant to their particular group of characters, is somehow bad roleplaying is just plain wrong. It’s not often that I say that. There are lots of way to play the game. Accusing a DM of not ‘roleplaying’ when they adjust the game to match their party is ludicrous.

There are new players reading these threads looking for advice. That kind of bad/wrongfun is really unhelpful.