DM seeking advice

[Theory of Games]

D&D, AD&D 1st, and AD&D 2nd edition also had saves vs. death and saves vs. other effects which would eliminate a PC.

D&D, AD&D 1st, and AD&D 2nd edition also had saves vs. death and saves vs. other effects which would eliminate a PC.

Not the same as 5e death saves. Not even close.

 

[Mannahnin]

When we were kids playing D&D, we were just doing what the modules told us to do .

Not always. The bad DMing habits and behaviors Gus identified were sometimes encouraged by some of the advice in the modules or Gary's DMG, but most of the things he listed are simply errors by DMs. Sometimes published adventures included such errors, but they still would have been recognized as bad DMing at plenty of tables back in the day. Because they simply make the game un- or less fun.

Also there's a lot of Presentism clouding how we view older games. Look at the popular games - 5e and Shadowdark. They're both super-protective of the PCs. "Death saves"? Really? It's completely unfair to judge old-school DMs by the modern standard because games weren't as soft then as they are now.

Eh. AD&D 1E is softer than 0E or B/X. PCs start with more HP, they get higher ability scores and more bonus HP from Con, more healing spells (starting at 1st level, Cleric PCs usually have 2-3 first level spell slots, compared to not getting one until 2nd level in OD&D and B/X), and they get the rule where you don't die if knocked to exactly 0HP (optionally as low as -3), but instead begin bleeding out at 1HP per round until you hit -10.

In practice, a ton of tables ignored the 0 to -3 range and just played it simply that anything short of -10 left you bleeding, which is how it was described as a optional rule in 2E.

While it's true that the older TSR rules made it easier for PCs to get killed accidentally in combat, it's also true that the trend of PCs getting tougher and recovering faster was a continual trend starting from the first rules revisions in 1975.

Trivia: The first Death Save rule for being at 0HP (as opposed to Saving Throws vs Death, which was originally for Death Rays and death spells and quickly expanded to other instant death effects like poison) appeared in the 1991 D&D Rules Cyclopedia.

I'm also defending the DM using DMPCs because usually it was someone who wanted to play but couldn't because no one else would DM. The DM chair's a lonely place when you really didn't want to be there in the first place. IMO if a player takes one for the team and becomes DM, we shouldn't begrudge them their overpowered and obnoxious pet PCs.

We can cut them (and our adolescent selves) some slack about the reasons while still recognizing that obnoxious and overpowered are descriptors we don't want to apply to stuff in our games.

Finally, how hard is it for a GM to kill off a party anyway? Super-duper easy. They could do it before combat even starts. GMs don't kill PCs. PCs get perished because (1) the player made bad decisions, and (2) the dice rolled against them. And it's funny because when GMs interfere with player agency, it's an unforgivable offense, but when PCs die from players making bad decisions, it's STILL the GM's fault.

I think you're conflating different things. Sore losers blaming the DM for their own mistakes are certainly a thing, especially when we're talking adolescents. But "killer DMs" making the game unnecessarily hard and unfair are absolutely also a thing. Also especially when we're talking adolescents. Gus enumerated several real ways DMs can accidentally earn a negative reputation through bad refereeing. I've seen all of those forms of bad DMing in real life. Though thankfully most of the DMs I've played with learned and grew over time (as did I, especially in DMing skills).

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

killed accidentally in combat

Not sure I'd put 'accidentally' there...

 

[Theory of Games]

This is why I ask players what their playstyle preferences are and what they want from a campaign - to help avoid unnecessary conflict. 99.9% of all problems at the table boil down to playstyle

Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering

Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds

This classic study still provides one of the most acute…

www.goodreads.com

 

[Mannahnin]

Not sure I'd put 'accidentally' there...

I used it because doing it deliberately is pretty easy in any edition. You basically just need to use sufficiently overscaled/numerous foes.

In 5E weight of numbers + willingness to hit PCs when they're down will still kill them quite quickly. But the mechanics of death saves make it so that if you don't have monsters attack downed PCs, they're more like to stabilize than to die. So it's harder to accidentally TPK.

 

[Gus L]

When we were kids playing D&D, we were just doing what the modules told us to do Also there's a lot of Presentism clouding how we view older games. Look at the popular games - 5e and Shadowdark. They're both super-protective of the PCs. "Death saves"? Really? It's completely unfair to judge old-school DMs by the modern standard because games weren't as soft then as they are now.

I disagree. I played a lot of D&D in the 1980's and there were plenty of different ways the game was played. There were good and bad referees. Moreover, these differences were part of table culture, which was dominant then because there were far fewer means of offical or even inter-hobbyist communication - magazines and conferences were pretty much it. Even TSR referee advice is inconsistent across editions, adventures, or even within the AD&D DMG.

As far as recency biases - the Post-OSR idea that early games were intended as some kind of test of spiritual or intellectual test with harsh rules and constant OC death seems to largely be a reaction to many OSR ideas - it's a 2020's reinvention all the way. The rules don't really support it either - while B/X and D&D do have a death at 0HP rule, we know this rule started getting modified fast because the raise dead spell wasn't satisfying. Look at survivability in AD&D ... you get -10 HP before dying! When did this rule really appear in play? I suspect like most AD&D things it started pretty early. Then consider things like the suggestions in B2 to give players healing potions and extra mercenaries to soak damage. The "sacrament of death" is more a late 90's trad idea then a old school one. I generally think that the idea that there was a clear and correct way to play early D&D is no more true then the idea that there is a clear and correct way to play modern games.

Death saves as used in 5E are are a fairly new idea - though the System Shock roll is in the LBBs and its purpose there is somewhat unclear, and very few OSR and POSR death saves are as lenient as those in 5E (but 5E aims at a different kind of experience - so it makes sense that it's different). As a mechanic the death save is not especially important, a minor variation on the rules that makes a lot of sense in games where raise dead isn't a service you can buy at any village church and party sizes are generally 4-6. How one does them is of course a different subject, but on the whole they make a lot more sense to me then the -10 and you're dead thing in AD&D I mentioned above.

Finally, how hard is it for a GM to kill off a party anyway? Super-duper easy. They could do it before combat even starts. GMs don't kill PCs. PCs get perished because (1) the player made bad decisions, and (2) the dice rolled against them. And it's funny because when GMs interfere with player agency, it's an unforgivable offense, but when PCs die from players making bad decisions, it's STILL the GM's fault.

This sounds like an issue with low trust tables. When players and referees trust each other this isn't a concern. I think this is largely because the referee shows that they aren't playing any intellectual dominance games or hiding the ball ... they are acting to adjudicate the fiction in as impartial a manner as possible. When the dice fall badly the consequences make sense, just like they do when the dice fall well - the fictional world hangs together with consistency and results while not necessarily predictable are sensible. I haven't met many players who had a problem with this kind of thing. I have met players who have a problem when DMs start acting arbitrarily, or punitively.