D&D General Does the killer DM exist?

[Paul Farquhar]

His name is Michael.

 

[Imaculata]

I try to be, but my players are just too dang good at staying alive.

 

[jgsugden]

Killer DM, yes. BBEDM, rare.

I have played with a lot of DMs that fall into two fallacies that tend towards TPKs.

The first is one that gets frustrated that the PCs are not challenged. As a response, they keep on edging up the challenges until the PCs start dropping and every encounter is a deadly. Eventually, the dice go bad, someone makes a mistake, etc... and you get a TPK.

The second is the DM that is inexperienced and just puts things that are too hard into the game. For example, I joined a game store game one night and that DM threw a beholder at us - at first level. After a two round TPK, the DM said, "Wow, I thought you'd run when you saw it." The beholder got a surprise round and was between us and the only exit we saw. There was only one PC that had any chance to flee - and they were offed in the surprise round.

There are also a small number of DMs that like to prove how smart they are by setting up 'tricks' that you need to figure out to survive, and then they withhold the clues necessary to figure it out. They put a giant sphere of annihilation inside a darkness globe that you can't dispel. They have incredibly well hidden pit traps int he center of a corridor that drop into lava, and then drop a boulder on top of you when you hit the lava. They have 10 'apprentices' in combats that are there primarily to counterspell everything you cast. Etc... These do exist, they're primarily situations where a person that has difficulty with social interaction is running a game, and they're usually opportunities for the DM to show how tricky and smart they are. When I find these DMs, I offer feedback, and then don't play with them again as a DM.

 

[Mannahnin]

There were a pair of really bad GMs that I remember who were a guy with a steady factory job and a mostly-unemployed guy that lived with him. They didn't outright kill that many characters, but would hit people with weird attacks and situations ranging from 'questionable' to 'violent rape'. They kept some players coming around because they wouldn't do this to quite everyone (so they'd have a couple of occasional players who talked about fun games), they had a few players with significant issues who stayed around, sometimes they'd let someone live at their place, and they would attract high schoolers because some dudes with their own place and multiple TTRPG and video game options seems really amazing at that age. (As an adult I've run games for kids, but there's a vast difference between spending a few hours running a game in a game store and having high school kids as the center of your social life).

These two were definitely awful GMs but were also just awful people in a general sense.

Oh, this rings a vague bell from my own teenage years. The couple of dudes in question didn't seem AWFUL, but they were definitely sketchy, and fond of incorporating unnecessary adult content. I played with them a couple of times and borrowed a few comic books, but didn't bother going back after realizing that they game and they just weren't that cool.

 

[TheDelphian]

Met them and played with them (Never for long) but yes they do exist just more of a rarity now then in the olden days.

It happened seems to be mostly cured cause people have other options now. Also those passing on the game are better GM's over all I think just a matter of experience and maturing of the game over time.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Yes, I've played with a few. Some way back in the day, when we were younger and didn't know better. Some recently - at an Origins D&D Epic, no less, though admittedly he was someone that got recruited at the last minute when they were short.

And if I'm being honest, when I was much younger, if you got on my bad side, I could be a really nasty DM. I once threw a level-draining wraith, followed by a troll, followed by a pit trap, ending with an ambush by a blue dragon, at one PC. If you were playing a paladin and got me mad, your character would live, but invariably level-drained, stripped of their paladinhood, with your armor and several magic items gone, all from adventures designed to do just that. Because I knew it was far worse to destroy your character concept than just the character.

Granted, it took a lot for me to enact those sort of scorched character protocols. You had to really push me to get to that point. And because I was the only DM most of these folks knew, they were still stuck gaming with me even after all that (of course, I was also stuck with them as players!). I was still generally a softy to everyone but the one player that had gone too far (and even then, after they'd gotten the business, my anger spent, they'd be in pretty much the same boat as the rest of the table). I like to think I've grown up since then.

 

[Professor Murder]

I played under an ST in an ongoing LARP who was proudly adversarial towards the players and made it his mission to defeat and thwart us. Got tired real fast.

 

[dragoner]

Yep. One guy, years ago. Thing is people stop going to their games, which makes it hard to do that for long.

/Cue ending of the Road Warrior

"He exists now, only in my meme-ory."

 

[Charlaquin]

They do exist, but I think most of them are just inexperienced DMs who will grow out of it. I think many stories of killer DMs also come from a mismatch of expectations - DM is running a meat-grinder and the players are expecting something lower-lethality, and for various reasons these things were never communicated.

 

[CleverNickName]

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.

It's been years since I've seen one of these DMs in real life. I think it was the early 1990s, and I was in high school, and he was in the mirror.

It wasn't that I was a "big bad evil dungeon master," I was just an inexperienced and impatient kid with poor social skills. But in the years since, I've learned a great deal about D&D, and playing games, and making friends.