So my new GM has that thing in his game. When you die, he asks you If you want to cheat death. You say yes...

So my new GM has that thing in his game. When you die, he asks you If you want to cheat death. You say yes, and he makes you survive whatever was supposed to end you. As an exchange, he gets to draw a small circle on your card. My friend (who is also new in the group) got two of those
>sessions later
>a political intrigue escalates to the point where the reputation of both the princess and our party lies at a huge stake
>It climaxes with a duel between bad noble's champion and my friend
>There are nobles, peasants and even other heroes watching
>Everything lead up to this moment. High class shittalking, betrayals, dead spies, arguing about the nature of morality...
>GM calmly explains that he uses one of the circles from my friend's sheet
>All of the Fate points he had gathered up to this point are transferred to the rival champion
>Using the powers of rerolling and adding to his rolls, the rival beats the ever loving shit of my friend
>In this sad scene of complete humiliation, some people are just standing there, looking dissapointed, other cheer for the good show
>My friend spots a figure clad in dark robes, holding a lantern. It gives a soft applause and vanishes
"That's what you fucking get for trying to cheat Death" says the third player.
So yeah. Both me and my friend still have one circle each. Shit's fucked and the consequences are fucking harsh. The guy who got fucked says the whole thing is fucking bullshit but I think It's interesting enough.

I just wanted to share, Veeky Forums. Have any opinions?

As a player, I would really like something like that. It adds a whole "paranoia from that time I should have died but didn't element" Final Destination style.

The player in your story just sounds mad.

interresting concept , was there any curcumstance which justified this meta mechanic?

It sounds interesting, but in the interest of fairness I would either just remove his fate points, or transfer half.

This. It seems harsher than needed, but it doesn't sound bad

I'd say a bargain needs to be made with Death. Get your life back in exchange for two that Death wants.

Should've been more transparency. The entire point of deals with the devil is that you know what you're gonna get for it but you're too arrogant or desperate to consider the consequences. Faustus knew what was coming from minute one, he was even the one who introduced limits to the contract.

That sounds pretty cool, actually. I understand why the player in question is upset, but from an outside perspective that's pretty great.

You can pull that with a new player.

You can't pull that on someone who's been behind the screen.

A GM knows that if a player dies, it's less their fault, and more your own. This tallying up of your own failures, and then using them as an excuse to meta-attack a player? It's something that makes me cringe at the thought processes that would lead a person to thinking this was a good idea.

Isn't there a mechanic like that in Don't Rest Your Head?

In the words of my GM "Karma is a bitch".
He believes that he needs to be as harsh as possible, to inflict the fear of dying in us and I'll admit that It works so far. It's basically his "now you're fucked" button. Whenever he presses one, you get to lose one of the circles. Other than that, he's a pretty great GM. I know that the third guy prefers to simply die on some occasions.
Apparently, the effects can be pretty fucking unfair, though. Like
>weapons breaking at critical moments
>exchanging circles for dice to add to the already difficult roll
>npc's feeling suicidal
>enemy being a perfect counter for the "bearer of the curse"
It can be arbitrary as fuck.

And the robed old man with a lantern is always there when It happens, in the distance, watching. And the old player has a tradition to add "That's what you fucking get for trying to cheat Death" every single time

i am planning to make a campaign with the players being "bound" to the world so they can stand up again from lethal blows. fights wont become easier , dying just becomes harder. being able to survive 5x your hp in the negatives, but the harder you get beat up , the more you lose stats permanently. re-training stats is a bitch , some kinds of magic and being burned/digested can kill you anyway.

is being beaten to even less than starting stats an acceptable price for being able to keep your character?

I would've made it IC. Do like the old "can I have ten minutes of your time?" story.

The BBEG is a demilich that's learned to manipulate fate, but he can only do it if you volunteer, so he visits people in their most vulnerable moments and offers to change their fates, storing up the stolen momentum of destiny and using it for his own ends.

You don't want to die so he offers to take away your doom. Then he gives that doom to someone else, altering the course of history towards some nefarious end. Maybe he gives it back to you, at some precipitous moment in the world's history, and this time you can't give it away.

I'd say the drawing a circle bit was enough to warn them that shit was going to come back and bite them in the ass.

He should have been explicit about what they would do before hand.

I have no problems with going into meta currency "Debt" otherwise. Using meta currency lets the GM do stuff in a less arbitrary way too, if it is used on NPCs. Cheat death? Alright, but now there is a chance that a chopper will come and pick up the villain next time your corner him.

Seems like the DM wasn't transparent, and the player has a right to be upset. The character he's playing did nothing wrong, right? He didn't make a deal with the devil, and so why is something that isn't that characters doing coming back to bite him?

If it were an actual mechanic, maybe. A game I played had rules for Devil's Luck, where you'd succeed at your roll no matter what, but your mental state permanently gets worse.

As it stands, it kind of feels like the DM just wanted to say "Gotcha!",which I don't think is the sign of a good GM

I'm getting some strange vibes and some troubling inspiration right now.

Losing stats once or twice would work, but unless the player is ok with that sort of story arch of losing power, it'll probably just get frustrating after the first death or two to the point where the player'll just say "I'm retiring my character and rerolling".

>If it were an actual mechanic, maybe. A game I played had rules for Devil's Luck, where you'd succeed at your roll no matter what, but your mental state permanently gets worse.
In all honesty, a GM instituted mechanic is still a mechanic.
Rule 0 is that the GM is always right and the rulebook is more of a guideline.

>As it stands, it kind of feels like the DM just wanted to say "Gotcha!",which I don't think is the sign of a good GM
A little. It really should have been less severe or more transparent.

I love the sound of that mechanic, and it sounds like a great way keep characters in the game without making the risk of death seem cheap.

At the same time though, it seems pretty dickish to do that to the new player of the group, and during a critical story moment too. It'd be alright if at first it was something like weapons breaking in combat, which is bad, but can be recovered from, to let them know they need to watch their back, but the way it sounds it just seems mean-spirited.

The third player also sounds like a dick, especially since it wasn't presented in character or as a major deal with consequences.

>the GM is always right
NO. Jesus fucking christ in a hat, no, that's not even remotely true you fucktard.

considering i dont play with powergamers , they may be too attached to characters to just throw them away for efficiencies sake. stat minimum is capped at 75% of starting stats anyway , with a character rarely becoming more powerful than twice their starting stats without artifacts

designing encounters in a way that they have to deal with competent characters which very well could be PCs , forces them to go into planning a bit

The difficulty is in getting them to plan and understand how to do teamwork.

My players right now are kind of stupid when it comes to combat. They rush in, don't use tactics, and then get surprised when I crush their hand with a hammer. The thing is I back off after doing a lot of damage because they're attached to their characters and whatever else (which I like and is good) and I don't want to kill them. I'm really at a loss for how else to teach them to play smart aside from smacking them around.

I'm not fudging the dice here, in fact I'm playing normally and then putting the kiddie gloves on and having the enemies act a little dumber once I've done my damage.

What system, OP? Fate?

Fatal.

You seem upset, user. Are you okay?

A GM instituted mechanic is a mechanic, you really can't argue with that.

Google "Rule 0", mate.
>going by the rulebook to the letter
>using the rulebook as a guideline and winging it a little
>flying by the seat of their pants and throwing the rulebook to the wind.
>using preestablished monster stats or making their own
>roll or point buy char generation
>third party source books
>tacking fate points onto a system that doesn't come with them
>coming up with how to handle encounters and events that aren't in the rulebook
>etc infinity
It's all the GM's prerogative, they are in charge so what they say goes.

>AD&D
"This game is unlike chess in that the rules are not cut and dried. In many places they are guidelines and suggested methods only."

>Vampire: The Masquerade
"This is the most important rule of all, and the only real rule worth following: There are no rules. The world is far too big - it can't be reflected accurately in any set of inflexible rules. Think of this book as a collection of guidelines, suggested but not mandatory ways of capturing the World of Darkness in the format of a game. You're the arbiter of what works best in your game, and you're free to use, alter, abuse or ignore these rules at your leisure. "

Interesting mechanic. I may borrow it one day.

What your gm did was a dick move because the opponent did nothing to earn that assist from death. If it were just a loss of the PCs assets at the time, fine. That means death was waiting for the worst moment and I can deal. But the case you presented hands another person an arbitrary buff along with that critical loss of resource.

I'd advise bashing your GM in the face with a shovel repeatedly for playing to 'win' against the PCs through emotional abuse instead of telling a story..

I've been on both side enough to know that sometimes to rolls go poorly or the player is particularly foolhardy in their course of action.
If you want to keep things above board for survival without fudging dice, it is an interesting option.

>Google "Rule 0", mate.

Google Rule -1.

"If the GM is wrong, the player has the right to walk out of the game." No gaming is better than bad gaming, and a GM is nothing without players.

Rule zero never fucking states that the DM is always right, you cocksucking retard.

>rocks fall, everyone dies.

Does a GM have the right to do this? Sure. Does that make them a good GM? Not at all. 'The GM is always right' is a rule in place for the purpose of moving past crunch and putting down petty arguments. This does not mean that shitty and arbitrary decisions on their part are 100% justified.

But it was an actual mechanic, and a well-known one with the veteran of the group.
There's no mention of ever questioning the DM about the circle, or asking other players, so it might be that they took the easy way back and didn't look for the price tag.

I have to admit, I can see the appeal of rolling it as a surprise, but if I did anything like that my players would be full of very pointed questions and unease.

shoulda just taken the death

Its awesome, mad guy is being a baby.

Rule -2
"If a player walks away because hes a salty baby, you're better off without That Guy."
A table full of people having a good time is better than a table with cucks who get upset that they're not winning, and a GM is infinitely more valued than a player.

I recall once DM'ing a campaign where Death was a kindly fellow(Think like Discworld). A Neutral Good entity that just loves people. He was in every other way, pretty stereotypical of the grim reaper.

Anyway, every time a player character died, death would give them a choice. Come with him to the afterlife, or play a game of chance with him for their life. Except death would cheat, and make sure that he loses(And he does suck at a lot of games, including chess and checkers). I always tried to have the game on-hand to actually play it with the players to vie for their soul.

So when the player inevitably wins, he gets to come back to life. Except that his character is changed. They now get to have a race change(To a drow specifically, there were campaign reasons). And the next time death showed up, he would kindly remind them that they cannot stay forever, and just take them anyway without a game.

Otherwise it was a pretty damn lethal campaign. I threw Tucker's Kobolds at them, highly avoidable and telegraphed traps that killed players that didn't think their way around them, and of course had other well established mechanics. But they always knew they could get another chance with death.

But you just gotta respect the classics. I'm always a fan of giving players the proverbial "Game with Death". I suppose you could even have the games intentionally rigged, so that death wins if they don't cheat. Then when they quite literally cheat death in a game, he reminds them of it later.

A gm is free to take some liberties, but stating that the rules are irrelevant, and the gm can break them whenever he feels like it is basically saying there is no game. At that point it's just a story with arbitrary dice rolls.

As far as the gm being in control, he's only in control so long as I choose to take part in his game, and if he wants to keep his players, then he better have a solid Fucking set of base rules that everyone, himself included, play by.

What the fuck? Are you all blind and retarded? To my eyes he hasn't said once that the GM is always right, only that they can create rules where no exist, or bend them to better suit the game. He even agreed with that person in making the consequences more transparent.

As with all things, and it should go without saying, there is a balance and exchange between the two parties.

that wizard is about to be kill. shooting single magic missile at undead swarming him?

RIP

Do you even know what words fucking mean anymore, bitchboy? Not wanting to play with your ass doesn't make anyone a fucking 'cuck'.

Shut up Maddox. Go be a cuck somewhere else.

Let's be real here, if the GM is plain wrong or you have a beef, you should sit down and hash it out like an adult. If they are power mad, unreasonable or vengeful, yeah you should cut and run.

I'm not talking right as in right and wrong, light and dark, I'm saying the Game Master said that happened, or this is how it is...and that's that.

Also, there is the option that you could DM.

Frankly, that's unreasonable to say. Or to assume I'm saying breaking the established rules is okay. Obviously if I were to tell you an ability worked this way and then just arbitrarily decided it worked a different way so that it suited my needs, I would be wrong. If I said in advance that I changed something about it to balance things, that would usually be okay. The key words in this reply is "established rules".

You need to chill, desusenpai.

OP, what system were you using?

That's not a fair bargain though. For most, no life is worth as much as their own. It'd have to be a personal sacrifice and then you get into demonic territory.

This thread is in it's death throws! You can save the thread by rolling a nat 20! If you're scrolling the front page and you see this post please roll a 1d20 and see if you keep the thread alive!

>being this mad about a meaningless meme word

Haha! That's awesome.
>MFW basically playing against this guy.

...

Rolled 6 (1d20)

NICE DUBS
I
C
E

D
U
B
S

Except this wasn't a deal, this was attempting to cheat a primal force of nature out of what rightfully belonged to it. Besides, the effects of the curse still aren't as bad as being dead.

>A GM knows that if a player dies, it's less their fault, and more your own.

Do you also think that playing any PnP rpg is supposed to be a story telling circle where everyone gets their way and no one dies ever?

I like the Dark Souls feel of it, that you are cursed if you escape your fate only to come back at a later time and wreck more ruin than your death would of originally.

thx m8

Love the concept, hate the execution. The complete reversal of a player's luck at such a critical moment not only affects the revived player, but the rest of the party as well; the success of the noble impacted all the players, not just your friend.

For Karma to be balanced, it mustn't be indiscriminate.

It's just pretentious and pointless bullshit.

You die - you are dead. You pick up another character sheet and start filling it in. Anyone, no matter if player or GM, who wants to pull some bullshit instead should get a hang of himself.

Fucking pussies.

How about this, then?
>in exchange for your life, you name two friends/party members
>sometime in the future they will die
>when they die, Death tells them who named them and gives them the same offer under the condition they cannot name the person that named them

Risky but with a good group could end up being quite fun.

>To my eyes he hasn't said once that the GM is always right


>the GM is always right

...

Interesting, but the player in me asks the obvious question:

Why?

Why would Death do such a thing? What goal or interest is there for Death? Does Death gets its jollies over watching random people get the shit beat out of them, knowing that they would be... dead otherwise?

I'm not even upset, just confused as to why such a thing would be there.