Killer DMs

[Jon_Dahl]

(I found plenty of these sort of threads here, but most of them seemed old)

Do you consider yourself as a killer-DM (or GM)? Are you in a group that has one? What are your experiences with them?

I'm still trying to calculate the exact numbers but I think that the following is at least 95% accurate:
August 2011. PCs were at 7th to 9th level. I had a guest player join the game and he made a 7th-level character. He only played a couple sessions due to distance problems.
Now I'm hoping to have him back. Then it suddenly struck me; I don't have to increase his PC's levels at all. I'm still holding the same campaign and all the PCs are at 7th to 8th level. I still have the same players as I did back then.

During this time (August 2011 to May 2012) we've played 20+ sessions (I guess 21). After all this time the APL has mainly receded. However it seems that players are content. I'm ok with this also (I love my campaign) but not 100% content. I'd like to advance the game to a higher level but instead I just get near-TPKs. It should be noted that I have never, ever had a TPK.

I don't know what to do. I'm not really willing to change my ways, but it's not impossible. Let's see after 20 sessions my player are still below 10th level!

 

[Radiating Gnome]

So, your PCs are dying by the handful, and that's keeping them from making any level progress over the course of a year. You want the game to advance, but you don't want to kill the PCs in the process.

The easiest thing to do would be to find a way to reduce the death penalty. You might not want to do it in a way that changes the game rules permanently, but what if your PCs discovered a temple to a god(dess) of healing where they could raise the dead without the level loss. Let them gain a few levels then some big-ass dragon comes in and torches the temple.

-rg

 

[Crothian]

I'm not a killer DM. I find that killing PCs doesn't make the game hard it makes it frustrating. I instead go with other types of failure that leave the characters alive so the story more easily continues but it still has meaningful impact on the game.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I don't know what to do. I'm not really willing to change my ways, but it's not impossible. Let's see after 20 sessions my player are still below 10th level!

You said your players are content. Do you think they would remain that way if the difficulty bar were lowered just to advance the game?

Some players prefer a hard struggle and might lose interest in a game with too little challenge. Ask your group how they feel about the campaign and what, if anything , they would want to change.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

What ExploderWizard said. Talking to the players helps more often than not.

I myself was an unintentional killer DM before I realized how necessary loot is -- specifically the Big 6 -- in 3.x. (Combat becomes more and more like Russian roulette without regular AC boosts.) And I've had several killer DMs before the 4e era, some intentional, some not.

As a player, I really don't like dying every other session. I like gaining levels. And IME, if I'm almost dying at a similar rate, it's because the DM is clearly fudging to keep me alive. Which is equally boring. So if I were your player, I'd be happy for the opportunity to say "Yeah, let's tone down the difficulty." Or possibly "Let's get more protective items," if that's the real issue.

 

[the Jester]

I'm a pretty high-lethality dm, but the game gradually advances.

How do you set the level of incoming pcs?

I have a twofold approach to "keeping the levelling going" despite pc deaths. First, when a new pc enters play (I'm talking 4e here- my actual preference, "everyone starts at 1st level", hasn't been viable since 2e), I start them about a level lower than the old pc of that player.

My current method is- look at the dead/retired pc's xp total. Take the number of xp into his or her current level he or she is, and the new pc has that many xps more than the minimum needed to enter the level below.

To make this a little clearer, let's say that Bob's old pc, Horri, was 7th level with 12,700 xp when he died. You need 10,000 xp to enter 7th level; so Bob's new pc will be 2,700 xp above the entry point of 6th level (because Horri was 2,700 xp above the entry point).

Since you only need 7,500 xp to be 6th level, Bob's new pc, Gellis, has 7,500 + 2,700 xp = 10,200- enough to still be 7th level! Hurray for Bob.

The other thing I do is, at the start of each session and any time the group has a new highest-level pc, I give everyone lower level than the top level in the group "catchup xp" equal to defeating a monster of the highest level pc's level.

So let's say our party consists of five 7th level pcs and two 8th level pcs. At the start of the session, everyone who is 7th level gets 350 xp- as if he or she has defeated an 8th level monster.

Now I give xp per encounter as we go in 4e. Let's say that one of our 8th level guys goes up to 9th. Everyone else immediately gets catchup xp for defeating a 9th level monster.

Let's say that propels one of the 7th level guys to 8th level- okay, great. But there aren't any more catchup xps awarded for that- the top level guy is already 9th. Until someone enters 10th level (or the start of the next session), that's it.

 

[Grogg of the North]

I don't go out of my way to kill PCs. Though I like them living with the knowledge that I can. So my PC deaths are either because of extremely bad luck, stupidity, or because it was heroic.

 

[bloodtide]

I'm a Killer DM. Big Time. In general, you can count on at least one character death per game session.

Death is a very, very, very important part of D&D and it is one of the things that makes the game more unique then any other form of entertainment. It's possible for you to fail! That has a huge impact on the game.

I hate the 'safety games' that many DM's run. Where the DM winks at the players and says ''we will keep track of hit points, but don't worry nobody will ever die''. Then your just reacting a cartoon or a Disney movie. The game takes on a very pointless feeling with no fear of character death. The players are free to 'do anything' as they know they are immortal.

Take the simple 'goblin bandit attack' that is a typical 'first encounter' for a typical game. The immortal players just laugh at the encounter. The goblins are little better then Keystone Cops. The players won't even take the encounter seriously, they will just have 'fun. But that is not the way it works in my game. In my game, even 'just' goblin bandits are deadly. If the players don't go all out and take out the goblins, there is a good chance that a character may die.

And it's the same for things like traps. The immortal character thinks of traps as a joke, as no mere trap will ever kill them. In my game traps are deadly, just like everything else.

While a lot of players like playing an immortal character, it quite often becomes about as fun as bumper bowling. At lot of players get bored just being immortal. "Oh the red dragon breathes on us..eh, I don't even bother to dodge..what is the damage 10?''. I've found a lot of players love the deadly game. It becomes a real challenge to the player to keep a character alive. And that is fun and keeps the game interesting. And when my players encounter a random red dragon and kill it, they feel a great sense of accomplishment as they just defeated at foe that could have TPK them. The bumper immortal players just defeat the dragon encounter knowing full well nothing bad would happen.

 

[pauljathome]

I'm a Killer DM. Big Time. In general, you can count on at least one character death per game session.

I'm NOT trying to tell you how to run your game (presumably you and your players enjoy it) but I find that death rate extremely high. Far, far higher than I or most of the people that I play with would tolerate.

My two biggest problems with death rates that high are

1. It is really hard to get interesting characterization when characters and interactions are so short lived
2. It presumably makes the characters insanely cautious and paranoid which, IMHO, causes the game to drag immensely.

I hate the 'safety games' that many DM's run. Where the DM winks at the players and says ''we will keep track of hit points, but don't worry nobody will ever die''. Then your just reacting a cartoon or a Disney movie. The game takes on a very pointless feeling with no fear of character death. The players are free to 'do anything' as they know they are immortal.
.

There is a LOT of room between "Killer GM" and "characters are immortal"

And even in campaigns where characters are virtually immortal there can still be severe consequences for failure.

 

[Celebrim]

I tend to be a killer DM.

Part of this comes from having played for many years with a very talented group of players who were hard to kill and enjoyed a challenge. So I have a tendency to overestimate what people can handle. Part of this comes from a gaming background where 'killer DM' was a far less scathing appraisal of a person's skill than 'Monte Haul' was. Part of this comes from having a somewhat realistic/simulationist perspective on the role of the story teller. I would like to utilize Croathian's safety net narration more often, and do do so whenever I can come up with the thinnest thread of an excuse, but often times I simply can't think of one and there is only so many times you want to appeal to Deus Ex Machina. I'd love to have PC's captured to be ransomed or rescued (or escape), left for dead, marooned or what not, but oozes, beserkers and hunger maddened ghouls don't exactly leave a lot of options here. Sure, I could get around this by using only foes with interests in keeping the PC's alive, but that would drastically shrink my pallette and would tend to move it from the Grimm's Fairy Tales meets Call of Cthulhu sort of games I prefer to run.

Indeed, Deus Ex Machina is encoded into the rules of my game. The PC's, being heroes, can indeed call upon divine favor with some hope for succor. But often the gods are busy elsewhere or don't hear or fear to intervene or perhaps have their own agenda. It is an unreliable mechanic, but it offers at least one more chance of miraculous escape. Likewise, I have destiny points for rerolling failed saving throws or cancelling unlucky critical hits. This provides more safety net.

And further, PC's tend to have more hit points than PC's of equivalent level in any edition except 4th, and I use 32 point buy, and players start with essetially 1 1/2 feats.

Often it isn't enough. After going about 25 sessions having killed no PC's (in some cases purely by luck), I've now killed 7 PC's in the last 5 sessions (and 4 in the last 2). Additionally, I ran two one shots when a player couldn't make it and both ended in TPKs (though that was partly planned). I would also note that in 30 4 hour sessions, we just had the first PC reach 5th level. Additionally, for a variety of reasons (some I feel are outside of my control )no PC is currently at normal wealth by level. I very much want to have continuity and long running characters, but I'm having a hard time finding a sweet spot where the desire to have long running characters doesn't have such a high priority that it makes the story unbelievable, trite, or juvenile. I haven't learned to keep players alive without breaking their suspension of disbelief, or encouraging unthoughtful play because they feel nothing has a real consequence.

Far and away the biggest cause of deaths in my campaigns over the years is something over which I feel I have very limited control - breakdown in party cohesion. I would say that 90% of the deaths that have ever occurred in the games I have ran occured due to the players stopping working together as a team - separating the party, players hoarding resources for themselves, players adopting conflicting agendas, one or more players deciding very early in an encounter that they would adopt the position that they weren't going to be the ones to die and abandoning PC's or the rest of the party. In the current campaign, there hasn't been a single fight that would have resulted in a death had the whole party been working together and somewhat oddly, the big dangerous 'boss' type fights haven't proven to be the most lethal ones. Players tend to come together and rally behind each other for those. It's the ones where they get unexpectedly confused, greedy, cowardly, or self-interested that gets them killed.

If I could figure out how to keep my players from working against each other, I could stop being a killer DM.