D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

mamba said:

yeah, pretty sure some did, I just don’t think it was anywhere near as ubiquitous as some make it sound… I basically went with ‘I would hate if this were done to me / my character’, and never did as a DM. YMMV of course

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TiQuinn said:

The thing that gets me about this conversation is I remember literally being at a table at a Dundracon convention back in 1990 where a DM took out a lighter and lit a player’s character sheet on fire after the PC was killed by an energy drain attack and stomped it out quickly. The number of people who were impressed by the antics outnumbered the ones who weren’t, and the whole thing was allowed to slide. It was by far the most egregious thing I’ve seen of bad behavior at any table.

So I don’t know - when you actually witness stuff like that, and then you hear other people talk about how they were killer DMs, whether that is performative or not, it leaves an impression. Whether it is ubiquitous or not kind of becomes irrelevant - who’s to say what was ubiquitous at the time? If enough people celebrate a particular attitude when it comes to gaming, how much does it matter whether a story is real or “just talk?” Who’s to say which was which?

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Minigiant said:

Again I think that the Rules from 2000 and earlier were much harder than they are now and this allowed DMs who didn't read the rule books heavily to play harder than a game expects and allows to learn DMs and power hungry DMs to justify the difficulty of their games.

I mean if the base game lets you kill a mid-level character on a single roll, it lets the lackadaisical DMs and the killer DMs off the hook when they do it

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EzekielRaiden said:

Sure, that's perfectly reasonable. It's not exactly my interpretation, but I'm not crazy far from that either.

But my point was that the books themselves advocated it--quite hard, in multiple places. At least two that I know of, possibly more.

I would expect that things the books tell people to do, do in fact get done a lot. Absolutely not ALL the time--but by that same token, I would expect it to be fairly common because...I mean it's what the book literally tells you to do! There's no way it was the most common experience--if it were I don't think D&D would have survived!--but it doesn't have to be the majority to still be a horrendously toxic issue. Put it at say, a fifth, a quarter, perhaps a third at absolute most. That'd still be an ENORMOUS chunk of the player base getting the nasty end of the Viking Hat.

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• Whether such behavior happened. Here the burden is find an example, and personal experience works. So that should be pretty easy and not have much to equivocate over.
• Whether it was widespread (seen in many places). There, I think Thomas Shey is right that although it is not proof, seeing it referenced in A&E, show up in convention games, and be seen in multiple game groups not just within one's primary circle are certainly strong evidence towards the notion.
• Whether it was commonplace, or an overall measure of how prevalent it was. There I think SableWyvern is right that the burden of proof is on the claimant, and we just don't have the information to solidly make a case.
• Whether it was more common then than it would be now. Here I think you are providing solid reasoning that it ought to have been. One would think that the ruleset advocating a course of action would increase its usage compared to rulesets that don't or even advocate for competing behavior. Of course it is still a prevalence measure and we just don't know (and can't rule out that some other quality might have drowned out the importance of this factor). Still, one could say that having the books include this guidance would increase the prevalence at the time compared to what it otherwise would have been, all other factors being held constant.

el-remmen said:

Folks bragging about being a killer DM (whether they actually were or not) felt a lot more common throughout my gaming experience of the 80s and 90s than post 2000.

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billd91 said:

It's entirely possible to have various rituals, even some teasing, when it comes to PC death and not be a "Killer DM". Lighting a character sheet on fire in a public game may be a bit much (I keep my character sheets even from one-shots at conventions as records of the games I've played), but gleefully posting a dead PC on the Wall of the Dead, as an example, doesn't make someone a Killer DM. (Wallpapering the room with them may be a different story, but that's really one of magnitude.)

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Willie the Duck said:

The problem is that I don't find my recollection on the matter to be particularly valuable, from a survey-research perspective.

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tetrasodium said:

Not every public game is made entirely of people who have never met each other, especially when the GM is running at a con localish to where they live and run their regular games.

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haakon1 said:

I deleted that part of the comment, but you saw it in time. Oh well.

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