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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jdrakeh" data-source="post: 3172619" data-attributes="member: 13892">You keep wavering back and forth on the role that their character choices played in the debacle, but now that you're firmly committed to it, let me point out the obvious (again) -- YOU ALLOWED SUCH CHARACTERS INTO YOUR GAME. This being the case, you have little room to complain about them. You let these character choices, choices that you obviously hated, slide -- and then you didn't adjust the encounters to suit them.  Instead, you let the players use characters that you obviously disliked and weren't happy with, while running the adventure for the group of characters that you would have preferred, rather than adjusting it to work the characters that you had available. Now, granted, this initially seems much better than saying "If you don't play what I want you to play, then don't play in my game". . . but here's where the passive aggression comes in. . . . You deliberately run the adventure in such a way that you know will likely kill all of their characters, thus forcing them to roll up new ones. As the GM, you had every opportunity to tone down the encounters to better suit their charactaer choices and party composition, but you deliberately and knowingly chose to send them into a situation that you suspected would kill them dead, dead, dead. And ultimately, that's just a different way of saying "If you don't do things my way, then I'll show you!" -- you allowed in certain player concepts, granted them your seal of approval, and then deliberately sent them into the Rankor pit. Your refusal to accomodate your player's basic wants (i.e., wanting to play a certain type of character) has every bit as much to do with why their characters bought the farm as some of their choices did. And you simply refuse to admit any culpabiility. Zero. Nada. None. Quite the contrary, I think it has a lot to do with it. You're right. I see more clearly now that you meant "Play my way or diiiiiiiie!" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />If you'd allowed the classes into the game and then deliberately sent the characters into a situation that you knew was more than likely -- or guaranteed -- to kill them (as you did here), yes. If you'd allowed it and appropriately adjusted the encounters to give the party a fighting chance, no. You didn't just put the cliff (i.e., the encounter) there, you led them to the edge (by approving their character choices, thus suggesting that they were suitable) and then pushed them off (running the encounter for a different type of party entirely).[P.S. I think that your last remark about "those terrible characters still being there to haunt you" if you hadn't killed them all is terribly telling as to what your real motives were here. The more that you post, the more I'm inclined to go with "Not just unfair, but plain old rotten" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> ]</blockquote>

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