My players are going to hate me...

[I'm A Banana]

Eh setting up an encounter to kill a pc without any interaction from them doesn't sound reasonable. I hear some dms saying they applaud KM's decision. I wonder if the players in your campaign are as happy as you think they are. I guess I didn't realize that the PC vs. DM mentality was so rampant.

My guess is that there is a difference of philosophy here, of course. But it's not at all as sinister as the adversarial relationship you posit.

One of the functions of the DM, indeed, one of his *primary* roles, is to provide challenges for the PC's to overcome. This isn't any more adversarial than presenting a villain or a hostile orc with a pie. The only category in which this is different than an orc with a pie is in the hidden fatality of it.

The assassin, even in the killing of a PC, is just a challenge. Especially considering how easy the resurrection would have been. He's a roadblock to overcome. And in the overcoming, they are sapped of rescources, which builds drama and makes them feel heroic when they overcome the challenge. Thus, you have the essence of the game, the potential for failure and the ability to succeed.

Death, in D&D (and IMC) is just one more difficulty to overcome, one more orc with a pie, one more DC to beat with a die roll. It's slightly more annoying than hp damage.

This assassin's attack is no different, in DMing strategy, from including a mimic in a treasure hoard, or including a cursed item, or having a surprise round, or having a trapped door. There are, despite your denial, ways to overcome this. These ways would have required the PC's to be paranoid and cautious about what they were doing (as would be fitting fugitives from an evil empire) If they were, they might have avoided a death. Because they weren't, the enemy took advantage of the situation.

 

[ThirdWizard]

KM, sorry, it seems you are having wrongfun. Be sure to tell your Players this, too, as you definately need to alter how your game is working out. It is against the RAW to have wrongfun, such as killing PCs without their permission. The rightfun police will be at you within the hour. Do not attempt to leave the country, as they will follow you to the ends of the earth.

~ snip session details ~

Sounds like one awesome session! I'm envious. Your players are much more devious than mine, that's great!

Perhaps we do interpret differently. THe tone of KM's post is filled with eagerness. I"m not sure how you're going about interpreting it but I"d love to know how you got that when someone begins their post with "My players are going to hate me" Then very proudly begins talkinga bout the scenerio. That sounds like pride and eagerness in my book and the remainder of the book is arrogance at its best.

Now, I've never played with KM, but I've read his posts for a few years here, and I can tell you he just isn't that kind of guy. Maybe I should have brought that up earlier. You get a kind of feel for people's style on ENWorld over a time, and KM just doesn't strike me as the railroady and vengeful DM that you're seeing.

I base my assumptions not only on what I read here, but what I've read over KM's posts previously.

Well, it came off as eager because in that first post I described an ideal scenario for the villain (which, actually, wound up occuring pretty nicely), and I was reveling in the possibility of spurring the players into heroic action by presenting them with a challenge that would be more difficult to overcome than "you walk into the room and there's an orc there, and he has a pie." The more I can make the PC's stradle the line between life and death, the more intesne the action, and the more they feel the pressure of being hunted by a powerful evil empire.

I got that, and I do it all the time. Many adventures come to me with the idea of a scene or location. Then, I figure out what I want to happen and work with that. The PCs can change it, of course, but its always fun to look forward to those cool scenes. I replay that scene in my head, thinking about it. Half the time it actually happens. Half the time it doesn't. It's still fun to think about it, though. Preparation is never a bad thing.

I have a feeling people wouldn't be so hotheaded about it if the scene were in the PCs' favor for some reason.

Pitting a 1st level PC against a Balor is against the RAW..

Nah, its just usually a bad idea.

My guess is that there is a difference of philosophy here, of course. But it's not at all as sinister as the adversarial relationship you posit.

Don doesn't believe in killing PCs. Or rarely, I should say. For him a character dying is a Big Thing. He also doesn't belive in ressurection unless under extreme circumstances with large quests to back it up. There is nothing wrong with that. But, there is nothing wrong with the way you handle things. They're just different. I immensely enjoy debating the topic, of course, but this is not the place to do so IMO.

EDIT: Don, if I misrepresented you, I appologise in advance. Be sure to correct me if that is the case!

 

[helium3]

An important thing to remember as a DM (which is something my current DM has trouble with), is that the players will very frequently not have any idea at all about something the DM thinks is a logical consequence of stuff that’s going on in the world. The DM is in charge of all of this, and is thinking about things pretty hard a lot of the time. But the players only see what their characters are described as seeing. (And good players ignore things that they hear that their characters don’t.)

Ehh. I'm not sure about this. I'm not an great wyrm DM, but I've played enough to note that often times players get into a sort of a weird feed back loop where they take your logic and then somehow come to the conclusion that if they're lazy and never inquisitive, the DM can never do anything unexpected. It's one of the weird results of the way DM and player are set up to be quasi-antagonistic.

Basically, the DM has to occasionally do the completely unexpected in order to keep the players from falling into this trap. The real trick is to do it in a way that excites them, instead of pissing them off. I'm not sure whether that was the case here or not. It sort of depends on whether or not the players had any idea that the Empire might hire an assasin to "get them" and whether or not assassins could have guns and do death attacks from 30'. And yeah, the getting of attention should have minimal consequences.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

Sounds like a great gaming event, KM. Thanks for sharing how it played out. Sounds like your game benefitted from the whole scene.

 

[shilsen]

I do believe the knowing grin from the player of the Elan told me that it was well-played. He enjoyed having a knowledgable foe to spar intelligently against, and enjoyed knowing that I wouldn't pull punches just to keep someone alive. After a few encounters slogging through the wild animals of the Ogrelands, they liked being brought back into the plot suddenly and forcefully. Characterization grew.

And now that we know what happened, we can get back to the idea that my style kills for my own amusement alone.

Even though I disagreed with your original description of the scene as a RBDM moment, let me just state the obvious - as long as what you do works for your group and enhances the gaming experience for the players and you, then you're doing a good job. It sounds like things went very well and you all enjoyed yourself. Nice work !

 

[I'm A Banana]

Sounds like one awesome session! I'm envious. Your players are much more devious than mine, that's great!

Hehe, when they know I wion't pull any punches, they won't, either. And that Elan has been having a LOT of fun with Metamorphosis. It allows transformation into an inanimate object, which has lead to the conversation: "Can I turn into a bed and sleep like that?"

Now, I've never played with KM, but I've read his posts for a few years here, and I can tell you he just isn't that kind of guy. Maybe I should have brought that up earlier. You get a kind of feel for people's style on ENWorld over a time, and KM just doesn't strike me as the railroady and vengeful DM that you're seeing.

Hahaha, I wonder what kind of DM I come accross as...is there a place to go to for a DM Personality Quiz?

As for the deadly style of game...yeah, in a game in which death was a big, final, epic deal, what I did would have been frustrating to the players at best. But, well, that Elan just picked up the watered-down Psionic version of Raise Dead, so resurrection, for better or worse, is going to be come an event that happens a couple of times a session.

 

[dungeon blaster]

Eh setting up an encounter to kill a pc without any interaction from them doesn't sound reasonable. I hear some dms saying they applaud KM's decision. I wonder if the players in your campaign are as happy as you think they are. I guess I didn't realize that the PC vs. DM mentality was so rampant.

Yeah, my players are happy. And I completely disagree with you that there is a DM vs. PC mentality.

IMO, players want to know that actions have consequences and that those consequences will be realistic. So, they know that if they go to up to a great wyrm red dragon and insult it, the dragon will hand their ass to them even if they are only 3rd level. If I decided to baby them and kill off an NPC friend instead of a PC, they would think I was a pushover. How do I know they would think this way? Because one of my fellow DM's is a pushover and we make running jokes about it. KM's evil empire is like the red dragon. If you aren't powerful enough to take it on, you need to be very, very careful in your interactions with it. The PCs weren't careful in their interactions with the more-powerful evil empire, and thus they suffer the consequences.

Personally, I've never killed a PC in this manner. I've tried to kill a PC in his sleep, but he had taken a feat that allows him to make listen checks while sleeping and he made his check. Had he failed the check, he would have been dead.

 

[The Shaman]

An assassin uses magic to get close to a player character and kill her.

Setting aside the specifics for a moment, it's just a cliche encounter that most of us have run at one time or another.

For me, it's not so much the save-or-die aspect of the encounter that makes me cringe - rather, it's the take on resurrection tied into the campaign assumptions and the prevalence of magic in D&D in general.

"It's okay, the character will be merely incovenienced by being killed," screams video-game - as both a player and a GM this gets a big ol' eye-roll from me.

The fact that this is built into D&D was mentioned earlier in the thread, as is all of the magic and psionics displayed in the post-game commentary that followed. It's Magic: The Gathering - The RPG.

A last thought: the "rightfun police" comment completely misses the point. Fun is fun, and certainly what is to one gamer's tastes may be very different to another. That doesn't mean that every encounter, or character, or GM, is equal, IMHO. In this case, this doesn't strike me as a particularly clever or interesting encounter - it's just a plot device. It may be fun for the players in the game, but it's nothing special.

 

[Hitokiri]

I saw nothing wrong with the original scene honestly. The PC let his guard down and paid for it. Now if raise dead wasn't an option and the PC was down for the count, I might have a little more issue with it, but as it stands all this scene does is act as a big alarm for the whole party (and the spellcaster in particular).

Sorry, but I can't stand games where the gm is unwilling to ever dish it out like this. Yes, most of the time I can see the danger, but if every obstacle is obvious and I am never surprised, where is the fun? It doesn't have to be death, but I WANT something that makes me occasionally step back and go "OH ####!!!!" , and in a campaign like that death seems a very reasonable choice. It gets the message across and provides quite a memorable moment for both the players and the PCs. Surviving is all the sweeter for having lost before.

Funny thing to think about for those that try to push PC death out of the game. My characters have been through thousands of battles over the years. Most of them were well balanced for the parties level, set up "fairly", and did not involve any sneaky DM tactics, some involving climatic encounters to sweeping story lines....they were also mostly forgotten soon thereafter. The battles I remember from my years of playing were the ones where the unexpected happened Where I found myself outnumberd, outgunned, and outclassed, hanging on by guts and luck. Whether I went down swinging, ran away screaming, or somehow managed to snatch victory, these are the moments that I and those that were lucky enough to share them talk about for years to come.

 

[Nebulous]

I don't normally run games where i blow off PC's heads with sniper assassins (although it did happen in CoC once )

In general, it's easy to think up ways to kill PC's. The HARD part is walking that fine line where they think they'll almost die, but end up surviving the day.

And like someone else said, being a rat-bastard DM is using the PC's tactics/decisions against them in ways they could not or did not foresee, not Save or Die. I hate save or die spells. I much prefer Save or Feel Like Extreme Crap...