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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brown Jenkin" data-source="post: 4495540" data-attributes="member: 2572">I am the one who brought up ambushing the other party so let me explain my reasoning. This scenario was brought up in response to a DMs feeling that the PC party was taking too long because they were being cautious (from their perspective) or paranoid (from the DMs perspective). It was brought forward that the way to deal with this paranoia was to force the players to react faster and one way was to have the PCs show up at the dungeon only to find out that they were to slow getting there because they see another party already leaving with the loot. I was pointing out the player reaction to this happening. All of a sudden it is turned into an indication of a party turning evil and wanting to play an evil campaign. I will give an alternate viewpoint. The players are probably not thinking they are being evil, they are thinking, hey the DM has been dropping hooks that we are supposed to go to this Dungeon and we are supposed to do something there. Seeing that the Dungeon has been already looted there must be another reason they are there and that other adventuring party certainly seems like it is that reason. Lets consider the effects of all of this on paranoia. The DM is punishing the PCs for not acting fast enough, but if they act fast here they are further punished for their rashness by being made into criminals so it is better to slow down and act cautiously in the future. If they don't act fast and follow and stalk the other party they are following the same cautious/paranoid slow play style that was originally being critizied. If it ever gets out that the reason the players were denied the dungeon is because they were being punished for being too slow then that puts into the players head that this is not a cooperative between players and DM but rather a competition between players and DM where in order to succeed at the game they need to be able to corectly guess what the DM wants they to do or they will be punished. This then leads to more paranoia as they players spend more time trying to figure out what the DM is up to so that they won't be punished for making a wrong call. Sure this may also be an indication of a sociopathic and evil bent to the party, but it may not be as well. To start overreacting by punishing the party for one action (it would be different if this was an already established pattern) by turning them into hunted criminals is not the party turning evil but the DM choosing to turn the tenor of the campaign from one of heroic characters to one of hunted fugitives. The players arn't making this decision, it is the DM. It is the DM who took away thier heroic defeat of the dungeon, it is the DM who set them up by putting a trap for them to fall into by placing the other adventures in front of them, it is the DM who chooses to turn them into fugitives for falling into the trap, and it is the DM who will further install paranoia in a bunch of players who only wanted to heroicly kill monsters in a dungeon.</blockquote>

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