D&D General Does the killer DM exist?

[Ralif Redhammer]

Oh, definitely. MMOs and CRPGs owe a huge debt to D&D, and not all of it is good.

For my preferences, the best D&D games are the ones that aren't trying to emulate the actual tabletop gameplay. I enjoyed Forgotten Realms: Demonstone far more than Baldur's Gate, for example.

You see some very similar stuff in early MMO design, which follows pretty closely from trying to emulate several parts of the D&D experience.

Like, it's conceptually interesting to have a super-high-level zone accessible from the opening town, or a big bad nasty world boss hanging out in one of the starting zones, or quests that people randomly stumble into if they get lucky. But in practice, these things end up being much more annoying than entertaining in a CRPG environment. Likewise, a dungeon that has a clear end point, but lots of twisty side-paths that don't go anywhere, sounds like a great way to make an optionally deep and intricate dungeon....but in practice it often just feels tediously confusing. Having to go collect your body so you don't lose your equipment may sound naturalistic, but it's a real downer to have to deal with it. Etc.

Obviously the specific things that don't work as well are very different. But I've found that a significant portion of RPG design, whether programmed on hardware or played on a tabletop, retains bits and pieces of early-edition D&D that have either been completely divorced from the context that made them good/interesting/useful....or that were purely accidental/incidental/ad-hoc solutions that got ossified into Fundamental Traditions.

 

[Shair-afiyun]

accidental killer dm is basically how I operate.
Players want to play with exploding crits. Okay.
Send them through a simple desert tomb appropriate for their level of 3.
Party doing mostly fine in tomb and have little problems with stuff.
Suddenly an egyptian skeleton with a spear, read: mook, accidentally exploding crit kills a paladin for 48 damage.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

Not a unrepentant one, but an unintentional, unexperienced BBED sure.

I've been that DM once... I forgot how squishy level 1 characters are, especially when run with inexperienced players, and TPKed a bunch of newbie players.

Anyway, don't be me!

 

[bloodtide]

We hear about the BBEDM all the time. The one that enjoys torturing players, killing their characters, abused DM fiat, with inconsistent rulings and other shenanigans. Does he even exist? To me he is a legend. Never met him. Never played with him. I only played with inexperienced DMs that got better with time. Or those who stopped DMing because they weren't any good at it.

Have you actually played with (against) an unrepentant BBEDM?

I'm not sure what a "BBEDM" is....

But, yes, I'm a Killer DM. I have killed thousands of characters, quite often at least one a game session. Though often it's a player acting like an idiot and not understanding that I run a Killer Type game.

I do enjoy engaging the players, and many players that want the game to be an easy button red carpet type game would say that is "torture".

The typical adversarial player would say I'm inconsistent as I don't roll over and let them win D&D.

I run a hard, fast, dark, brutal, adult game.....and many players don't like it, or even get it. Often they just run away, but one in ten or so will get it and like it, and so I get a pool of players.

 

[Hex08]

I don't think I have ever played with that bad a DM but maybe came close once. My gaming group had been pretty consistent for years. Myself and another player would rotate GM duties and then we had four others who were strictly players. Eventually it turned out that the other GM was a real naughty word person and we discovered some of the things he did so he just disappeared. This left me as the sole GM, which I was fine with for a long time but eventually I wanted to be a player again. I offered all of the other players the chance to try their hand at running a game and two expressed interest. One wanted to start as soon as my campaign was over so he had us make characters so he could start working on his campaign. As a group we decided to be old school and roll our stats and one player ended up with a pretty bad charisma, he didn't have to keep it because our house rules would have allowed him to re-roll but he wanted to give it a try. The fledgling DM would regularly bounce ideas for his game off me and he had decided that the character with the bad charisma should have bad things happen to him because he so uncharismatic. He wanted to have birds naughty word on him and other random stuff. I tried to explain that a lot of what he was wanting to do had nothing to do with a bad charisma and even if it did targeting a single player for a bad score that he, as DM, said he was ok with was a bad idea and wouldn't be fun for the player. He wouldn't give up on his plans though so when the time came to move on to the next campaign I just announced my next campaign and moved on. Luckily the other player who was supposed to DM just rolled with it (or at least never said anything) and continued as just a player for years.

 

[jdrakeh]

Yes. I've only played with one, luckily, but my friend has related tales of one particular Killer DM whom he played with. The guy turned even the most trivial of tasks into weapons with which to brutally abuse the players - e.g. "Oh! You didn't explicitly say you tied your horses up, so they all ran away during the night!" "Oh! You didn't explicitly say you built a campfire, so you all freeze to death!" (those are actual examples, the second of which ended a game). Like, he didn't give the players a fighting chance at all. He just really relished screwing them over.

 

[Lyxen]

At our tables, although we had tough (I would not say "killer" in the sense that they were fair) DMs in the past, in the 90s we went deep in story mode.

But when 3e came out, I wanted to go back to the roots of the game, and get players out of their comfort zone, so I purposefully created a new multi-DMs campaign in "Lawful Neutral" mode, harsh but fair. As a result, out of about 100 characters that were played over 10 years in the campaign by about 35 various players, about 30 were killed at the start of the campaign by various DMs.

It was a lot of fun, and more importantly, everyone learnt again what it meant to be cautious, how to prepare an escape route if things went sour and how to run. After a few years, the campaign was much more balanced, and we have kept the spirit to this day even though are campaigns are sill mostly story mode.

As an aside, about 30 more characters died at the end of the campaign, it ended up with divine ascension and it was rally tough again, but people knew it was coming to an end and a lot of characters were sacrificed with the noble intent to save the universe by creating the new pantheon (that we sometimes use for our campaigns now).

So not really Killer DMs, I think, but there are many types of games, some tougher than others.

 

[Garthanos]

Absolutely played with them. Back in the 80s, as teenagers and collage age. Old school play when it was nearly the only play in town.

Some were gleeful and intentional about it. Especially in Conventions or other one-shots. Some got angry when players beat their carefully crafted NPCs. Some were just ignorant of how to balance and wouldn't admit mistakes. Some saw it as a "gift" to the players, that they would have real odds to overcome and a win was a big deal - those also gave out monty haul treasure because you earned it. Oh, and some gave out monty haul treasure and then after complaining that the PCs kept killing all of their monsters ramped up the difficulty to eleventy one.

OR stripped them of their uber treasure the way Gygax recommended also seemingly with a smile on but hard to tell...

 

[Ath-kethin]

Not a unrepentant one, but an unintentional, unexperienced BBED sure.

Can it be both? My 7yo (well, soon to be 8yo) runs games, and I've been through more TPKs and PC deaths in those games than any others I've played in 30 years.

 

[Professor Murder]

Much like kink, as long as everyone agrees to it going in, a punishing playstyle can be what players are looking for. Just check first as a DM and players should be honest. I do appreciate that some players will take part in a game with DMs who "goes too far" and will just try to stick with it for the simple reason that otherwise, they don't get to play. I would assume the reverse can also be true. However, I think it is disingenuous for a DM to claim that they run a punishing game out of a sense of duty to tone fidelity and verisimilitude and not recognize that they may just enjoy a bit of sadism.