I should have just done a dream game where the characters are in candyland and had to fight a Chocolate Chimera. So fun silly and would not matter.
Why would I ever do that? What reason would I have to take their views into account to play a fictional game?
And why not the other way? Why don't the players adjust to my view point?
As
@Lanefan said - this wasn't your game.
If you wanted it to be your game, you tell the players, hey let's try something a bit different, used different characters and DM your game. And if they don't like it, no harm no foul - they go back to their regularly scheduled game.
If they LOVE it? then you can discuss with the regular DM about switching every couple weeks or something.
The fun is playing the game, but not by having a red Carpet of Positivity rolled out in front of the players. It's a problem I see with a lot of players in a lot of games. And not just RPGs. The classic is playing a game like basketball, volleyball or softball. As long as the players on the team are winning as they have more points then the other team, they are "have fun". The second their team is loosing, as they have less points then the other team, they are "not having fun". When they are having fun they will laugh, dance around, talk smack and be all happy. When they are not having fun they will mumble, complain, whine and quite often just walk away from the game.
Gamming isn't a sport. It a group activity where, generally the goal IS to have fun around the table. The trick is to find out what everyone thinks of as fun and either agree to do that or agree that maybe the game you want isn't for everyone.
But even in sports, there are different levels. In a pickup game at the gym, you don't play the same as when you're playing for big stakes - and if you do, people will get annoyed, then mad when you don't stop then ask you to leave.
But my problem here wasn't even about that. It was about a targeted hit job on the PCs with the express purpose of killing the characters for the simple reason that they deviated from the plot you had set out (or whatever the reason was). I honestly don't know ANY players that would like that. Certainly not a casual group at a rec center who are just exploring their interest in D&D.
Any of my more regular players would have loved to jump at the chance to "game outsdie the box". They would have quickly made "anti-characters" made to kill the alt characters. Then they would have come up with a plan, and quite likely won. They would have a fun time "making copies of their PCs to kill the evil twin copies of their PCs". Then with the fixing items from the "evil twins" they could have brought back all the dead guards....and even if they wanted to, the original PCs. And they could 'switch' back to the OG PCs and let the alt ones fade back to where they came from.......OR even kept both PCs and continue onward in the game with two PCs each.
Now many people reading the above would find no fun in any of that. They want to play a game where the player "makes a scene" and the GM only reacts to the player in very set limiting ways as the player "asks questions" and the GM "makes up answers" and maybe some dice are rolled to show how much the player "wins". And that is fine, if that is fun for you. But trust me that there are players that would find the above fun too.
You're "more regular" players know your style and have stuck with it - so sure, maybe they'll have fun. But these were not those players. Again, casual, new to D&D players just looking for a standard experience.
You yourself have stated, multiple times, your style is not for everyone. So you shouldn't spring it on people without warning. Certainly not in someone else's game.
