IS Your GM Out To Get You (Serious)

[loverdrive]

If I'm running a game with tactical combat, it's fair to say I have an advantage over the rest of my group (with one exception, possibly). So I run npcs to their typical intelligence. Roll random for mindless up to cheating by having super-intelligent npcs knowing things they normally wouldn't. And I roll in the open.

But, the two times there were tpks in my games the past dozen years, no one felt worse than me. I do literally cheer for the players and celebrate with them when they get a hard fought win. I'm not trying to win, that's weird, it's very easy to win when you control everything but the PCs. It's much more fun and challenging to make it look like I'm trying to win.

Sure, but there are ways to take a lot of control out of GMs hands when it comes to fights.

Random encounters is a bit one. I rolled 2d6 goblins and I'm going to use them to the fullest extent.

Another important thing is making it possible to lose but not die. Objectives beyond "kill everyone" are great for that, but most robust way is to give PCs protection in the rules, like how concession works in Fate, or how you choose whether you want your character to die or not in AW.

 

[Agamon]

Sure, but there are ways to take a lot of control out of GMs hands when it comes to fights.

Random encounters is a bit one. I rolled 2d6 goblins and I'm going to use them to the fullest extent.

Another important thing is making it possible to lose but not die. Objectives beyond "kill everyone" are great for that, but most robust way is to give PCs protection in the rules, like how concession works in Fate, or how you choose whether you want your character to die or not in AW.

Yep, after the last tpk, I decided I'm going to steal 13th Age's failure with a loss rule for when the party is wiped out as an option for the players if they want to continue the campaign (if the game doesn't have something like this already, like Daggerheart).

 

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

So interestingly in last nights session - the last in a 10 session delve into Undermountain using WFRP 4e - the part jokingly asked I would be TPKing them this week?

The party has just finished the Drow enclave on level 3. They had several critical wounds - the wizard a broken hip, the front line fighter some cracked ribs. Everyone was fatigued. The dwarf had almost died. They had no resolve left and no fortune left.

They were facing off against a Drider. The first attack from the Drider took half the warriors wounds away, poisoned him and entangled him. At that point we were convinced it was all over. Then by some freak chance the halfling scored two crits in a row - one blinded and stunned the creature and the next stunned it further, destroyed the other eye and left it helpless. They survived. But there was a strong feeling that they had narrowly escaped death. They took a boat to skullport and the first portal they could find back to the surface.

It’s one of the things I love about WFRP the fact that it could all go terrible wrong but sometimes will go terribly right. I don’t go easy on folks. But I do try and play it straight and give people meaningful decisions to make.

WFRP 4E is an interesting system.

 

[bloodtide]

So, what do you think? When and where, if ever, is it okay for the GM to be out to get you?

Yes and no. The idea that the GM is "out to get the PCs" is silly. The GM can just auto win, so what is the point? Even if you add 10,000 rules to de power the GM.....they can still do a lot.

Now I would say I'm a GM that is NOT on the players or characters side, or their fan or anything like that. I'm pure neutral. Once the game starts the players get zero help from me. No Out of Game hints or clues or suggestions or help or anything else.

What's spoiled the hobby are the Soccer Helicopter Mom-GMs who repeatedly fudge dice and present puny combat encounters in order to make sure the PCs never get a boo-boo. Add to that D&D5e's safe haven of death saves and broken CR and we get an entire generation of ttrpg gamers who think ANY form of serious challenge to their characters is a sign of a deranged GM.

I call this the Buddy DM. You see it often as a great many GMs will say they a 'fan' of the players and characters, or something like that. It very much starts with passive encounters with very little aggression. You can sum it up with the overly obvious "action movie" type trope where the action is intense, but dull. Or even more so, Disney. Where villains and bad guys "look cool", but that is about all they can do.

I expect the DM to present challenges as a neutral arbiter and to let the dice fall where they may; and if we-as-players get in over our heads then so be it, we gotta run and we might not all make it out (it's sad that some today see this as "adversarial DMing").

I agree with this!

GM should be out to get ya! Exploit every weakness, punish every blunder, that makes the game eleftryfing!

In the general sense I present a 'harsh' game world. Friendly NPCs are fair and between, most are semi-neutral and really only care about themselves, and the rest are evil.

Nearly all monsters are out to kill the PCs....it is a bit of the "definition" of monster. Most foes are out to kill the PCs too, though some rare ones might capture the PCs.

Most foes, will do anything to stay 'alive in the fiction', so they will go all out. They don't just stab with a dagger and hope for the best.

 

[kronovan]

I haven't played in many campaigns recently, where the "GM is out to get you." But it was a different story in my earlier experiences TTRPGing.

My first exposure to TTRPGs was playing AD&D1e, for which I played with groups that were under the umbrella of a university War Gaming club. Some of the DMs came from tabletop miniatures war gaming, so combat encounters tended to be quite lethal, with TPKs not uncommon. It was AD&D1e though and to some extent it was expected, but players none the less griped about TPKs happening too often. When a DM TPKd 3 parties in 1 month, crap kinda hit the fan and debates and dialog ensued. Eventually the philosophies of DMing sessions divereged along 2 styles:

1) those that favored an overall more narrative approach, in which there was pre-encounter details and even dialog which a party could use to some extent to suss out the danger. There was still the possibility of player death -heck even TPKs- but they were much less frequent. In general, for that group there was more social encounters and less dungeon crawling, which appealed to many players.

2) those that favored more lethal encounters, began to run extravagant hex crawls with some top-notch, homebrewed rules. Due to the randomness of rolls which populated hexes and the encounters within them, TPKs became less common. IIRC this happened around the mid 80s when the AD&D Wilderness Survival Guide came out - believe they used it for some ideas.

The DMs of the 2nd style were really forced to change, because their table populations were shrinking, while the tables of the 1st style were swelling. We were lucky to have club members very skilled in game development, who had previously brewed up some excellent tabletop miniatures rules - 1 is still played in my city 40+ years later. They were able to apply some of that knowledge to their hexcrawl rules. The initial hexcrawl were marches across Darlene Pekul 's map of Greyhawk's Flanaess, but when TSR started releasing other settings, those maps were crawled across too. When players started to see there was more than death to their campaigns, they started to come back to their tables.