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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 4832125" data-attributes="member: 80487">"Challenge, not outwit" is right; one is delighted if the players' wits overcome the challenge.This is only anecdotal evidence, but in 30+ years, I have encountered only one DM who was out to screw players. That was a stranger running a "pickup" game at a convention, and he apparently got his jollies by letting his player pal assassinate everyone else's characters. Neither do I recall hearing much of such creatures until quite recent years. The "killer DM" seems rather suddenly to have become such a pressing danger as to warrant any excess billed as combating the menace.What's up with all the passive aggression on issues such as this? Don't people talk with each other any more? Has it fallen out of fashion to play D&D with friends, as a social activity?Impartial adjudication keeps it a game, not an exercise in which the "players" are hapless puppets.It's like designing a computer-program game. One puts in opportunities for players to lose, because that gives context to winning. "Cheat codes" are for those who want to do something else.If players in an RPG want to do that kind of something else, then we can make it so.Different situations are suited to different levels of skill. Player expertise is much more important than character "experience levels" in the Tomb of Horrors. If having attained the latter is something other than a product of acquiring the former, then the players are not ready for the scenario. The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan is less demanding, although failure to heed the PHB advice to stay on objective can easily be deadly; fortunately, there's a continual reminder of that.Those are tournament scenarios; similar setups are also good for "one-shot" sessions at conventions. In a traditional campaign, even a single dungeon is likely to offer challenges in a range of difficulties. The "dungeon level" concept facilitates player strategy: going deeper means daring greater risks, for commensurately greater rewards. Besides that vertical movement, great freedom in horizontal movement is key to a proper campaign dungeon.Beyond that, a full-fledged campaign offers a wide variety of options besides undertaking an expedition into Dungeon X.There's a necessary responsibility: If not for the limited-information aspect of D&D, there would be no need for a judge in the first place! Going further, if the appearance (or not) and behavior of cat monsters were a matter of player decree, then provision of an actual game would depend on some mechanism that somehow makes a challenge of acquiring or managing the power to make such a decree.Was the ambush a product of the antagonism? Was that a reasonable outcome? Did you assign a reasonable probability that it would not happen then, or would not happen at all? If you really were playing at omnipotence rather than binding yourself by such rules, then in my opinion you were indeed serving the players poorly.One serves them just as poorly by wielding such arbitrary power in their favor. It's the referee's job to let the players play the game, not to "play" them.I have seen the argument that a GM should "fudge" to keep a PC from dying, because "otherwise it means the GM wants to kill the character." That in fact is certainly the case when a GM, having cheated before, chooses on one occasion to let the dice lie as they fall.If defeat or death is truly unacceptable, then the sensible course is simply to make that a rule.Now that "D&D" has in some quarters been reduced to "&", not only the "RP" but the "G" seem to be slated for extermination. What lies beyond may be great entertainment for some, but this is crossing a significant frontier into a different environment calling for a different set of tools.The most important tool, though, remains communication. If you're turning the referee's role into writer-director-producer, then the production can flop as easily as any on stage or screen. If admission costs nothing, the hours of labor are unpaid, then the players-become-audience must bring to the table something better than rotten tomatoes. Otherwise, you're going to see a heavy selection pressure against people willing to risk refereeing."When you assume, you make an ass of u and me" is a relevant maxim. If you assume that the GM knows what you want, then it's easy to assume that failure to deliver it indicates malicious desire to keep you from having fun. Instead of building a grudge-producing mechanism, why not try talking together in friendship and maturity?</blockquote>

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