D&D 5E Confessions of a guilty conscience DM

mamol said:

Since a few sessions I really focus on incorporating player's creativity. This approach gives the game a way more organic feeling. In my opinion creativity should not be only the DM's responsibility, but it is the DM's responsibility to tie all the creativity around the table together and creating a collective creative story.

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I agree one hundred percent. The dude's I play with are way smarter and more creative than I am. HAlf the time I just listen and take notes.....

I don't feel guilty by the decisions I make as a game master, and do not regret anything. Sure, I am not completely ruthless, I avoid railroading or touching the stats of the characters in a permanent way (except in one-shot horror adventures, where it is clear from the beginning that horrible stuff might happen to the characters). I don't mind executing a TPK, my players know that with having a sandbox that some stuff might be too much for them to take, I also love horror and intruigue, and both of those genres can have nasty surprises for reckless adventurers. I tell that new players and my old friends with which I play now for many years know what to expect, so there is usually not that much drama should a character die (or have a worse fate than that). The trick is to make the players feel like it is their fault that this happened, and foreshadowing the possible doom into different directions or giving them a hint of what storm is coming help a lot in this regard. Giving the players a old legend about the castle they are about to enter at the entrence, which includes a clue of what they should avoid, so that when they doesn't heed it, it becomes their own doom they brought on themselves. Guess one could call my approach to game mastering as hard but fair.

If an adventure is really hard, tell your players it is and ask if they want you to make it a little easier.

I reread X2 two days as I plan to run it in my campaign when the PCs hit level 5 or so. I first bought the adventure back in 1988 or so when I was 14. I remember being shocked at how brutal some of the encounters are. I loved it and hated it. The adventure is just so crazy. I think I must have read it through several times, but never ran it. In the interim I don't think I read it again but it stuck with me all those years.

This particular encounter you describe is in the early part of the adventure. Like you said, it advances no plot (aside from pointing out how completely loony everything is). I thought long and hard on that encounter how I'd run it. I resolved to pull no punches except the very last item which kills players outright. For that, I decided to drop the player unconscious to zero hp and narrate them fading as in the adventure if they fail their save they turn into a ghost.

There are a ton of positive outcomes from eating the food. Some of them occur when you FAIL a save. It's crazy. I've told my players, six of whom out of seven, have never played anything earlier than 4th edition, that it's a campaign geared towards old adventures and I'll try to focus on three pillars of gaming. I guess this falls into "exploration" category but I really doubt my players are ready for the "tricks and traps" that so many old adventures have.

I dread to think what your players will do when they get to the room with a bunch of squares with letters on them. Do it wrong and you get "You are turned into a werewolf and become an NPC".

You REALLY want a guilty conscience?

Bust this out on your players:

http://www.amazon.com/Grimtooths-Traps-Paul-OConnor-ebook/dp/B006K1B0BG/ref=tmm_kin_title_0

You'll wake up with a horse's dismembered head in your bed, for sure.

It kind of sounds like to the player the encounter was just... tedious and pointless and then your character just gets worse, and your only defense is to read the adventure before you play it?

Anyway, my confession is an adventure I made up myself and ran with a mix of first time players and veterans. The general layout is that some miners tunnel too deep, find a sort of ward containing a demon of greed and are then corrupted by the tainted gold that it produces, causing them to all become really paranoid and kill each other. The final encounter will be the demon itself, and if a fight breaks out, I have this interesting "save to not pick up the gold that spills out of the creature" mechanic planned.

The demon is then stuck at the bottom of the mine with noone to play with, and realizes that next time it should probably show some restraint. After all, it wants to either get free or attract more people to come play.

I sort of had this idea of a wild-west theme for the whole thing, so I went with what might be found in an old-west mine, and the players found some nitroglycerin on the way through. Most of them avoided it, but a couple grabbed some, and any time they did anything strenuous I had them roll to see if it went off.

Anyway, they meet the (disguised) demon and are naturally wary about it, since it seems trapped in a big ward, and all the miners seem to have gone nuts. None of them want to set foot within the ward. The demon meanwhile is trying to get them to accept some treasure.

One of the new players, having failed to convince the other players to shoot at it with ranged weapons, decides to start flinging the nitro at the demon.

Unfortunately they roll very poorly. I have them roll some dice to work out the scatter, and they manage to hit the party dwarf warrior pretty much in the face, hurting him and damaging most of the rest of the party too.

He is a bit put out, primarily because he thinks attacking is a bad idea, and secondly because he just got 'sploded. His words are something to the tune of "knock it off, or I might have to retaliate"

The thrower tries again. Comically he gets the exact same result. The dwarf retaliates with his axe, rolls a crit and instantly kills the thrower, taking him way, way into negatives.

The thrower takes this somewhat personally, and a real life argument breaks out. I call the session to an end and no one is interested in playing again because of it. The chill between the involved parties persists for several months.

Ouch.

I feel slightly bad about the time i put up 9 orcs against a party. One of them instantly critted the bard to death and it was downhill from there.

This was pathfinder, and orcs are 1/3 cr there, which is wrong imo. They should be 1/2 or even 1.

Once I ran a campaign where the PCs started the game by returning from the dead. Unfortunately for them, the dark magic which had granted them their new Frankensteinian bodies was unstable, and they began to decay.
This was supposed to lead them on a grand quest to find a magical cure before they rotted away. But... they didn't really have any sense of urgency. To give them one, and stave off their decay, I... made them get... hungry. When the first player failed his Will save and heard my narration of his... meal, I assumed his disjointed, stammering speech to be excellent RP. When the hysterical laughter started, I was impressed.

Then he fell off his chair, crawled into a corner, and kept laughing crazily. Yeah. That was an uncomfortable couple of minutes.

In Return to the temple of Elemental Evil, I had an escaped sorcerer team up with the level 14 cleric with the madness domain. They got some preparation time. The Sorcerer cast haste on the cleric. The cleric summoned two fiendish(?) dire bears. This was 3.0, so now he could cast two save-or-die spells a round.

The combat started with the cleric casting Destruction and Disintegrate with save DC's around 25. Two completely destroyed characters in the first round. The next round, he proceeded to cast confusion on the whole party. No one saved, but the Paladin/sorcerer was outside the effect, he grabbed the gnome arcane trickster, grabbed his teleport scroll and teleported out. We just wrapped it up at that point, never to play that campaign again. It's my only TCK (Total campaign kill).

Did I mention I was having a bad day?

The times I feel bad after the fact for killing a character are about evenly cancelled out by the times I feel a character should by all rights have died, but didn't.

The one thing that does tend to make me feel bad is when it always seems to be one player's characters getting the short end due to nothing but random luck. I've a player like this in my game now; poor guy just can't catch a break, and he's gone through what seems like a small army over the last couple of years. He's finally got a character that looks like it'll stick for a while; maybe his luck is finally turning.

Lanefan