Villian appears

>Villian appears
>Before you can react he casts sleep with no save on everyone and then kills you in your sleep
Has anyone met a GM like this?

No, and neither have you.

/thread

Sounds like you failed your will save there salty

>Not having at least one paranoid wizard who has plans for every occasion in your party
Come on son, that's why we exist to pull your ass out of the fire with xanatos tier "just as planned" bullshit.

Yeah. Nobody plays with him.

Almost. But I let my players have a save, at a level-appropriate DC. Whether or not they succeed is on them, not me.

My standing rule is that if my players do it, then I'm allowed to do it too.

10/10 bait you'll get plenty of replies.

Who is Villian?

Thanks...but I'm being serious. If my players do a thing to my NPCs, then that is carte blanche permission to do the same thing to my players.

Now please note that I won't NECESSARILY do the thing. It just means that the option is on the table. For example, if the wizard uses Invisibility and Sleep and other such methods to infiltrate some place and steal something important to an NPC, then his player has de facto given me permission to have a thief attempt to steal something from him at some later point, if I feel it would be appropriate for the story.

His spellbook, perhaps.

Note, as well, the phrase "attempt". The would-be thief still has to make all the appropriate checks, and the checks have to be level-appropriate (though not necessarily tailored specifically to allow the wizard to have a chance at passing them; i.e., a CR 5 thief (or, heck, even a 1st-level one) is probably going to be better at Stealth and Sleight of Hand than a 5th level wizard is going to be at Perception; but that's the wizard's issue to deal with, not mine).

You definitely don't sound like someone who's just bitter about seeing his players pull something off

I'm not. I applaud and encourage my players pulling something off. What I don't applaud or encourage is in-universe exceptionalism. If the players steal from other people, and if other people steal from other people, then there's no reason why other people shouldn't steal from the players.

Or extrapolate that to anything else; "theft" is just being used here as a useful shorthand.

Pretty much.

Only time I've ever done something like that was when someone played an alchemist who just happened to "accidentally" mix all the right chemicals in the right amounts to create invent functional gunpowder, then figured out how to make fully functional guns 20 minutes later.

He threw an absolute shitfit when I had other guns start getting used, and didn't appreciate when I told him "if inventing guns came that easily, why do you think you were the first one to do it?"

In OD&D you didn't get a saving throw against the Sleep spell, which is why it would wipe out low level parties. The only reason why the enemies didn't use it was unspoken gentlemen's agreement between the players and the GM.

Were I the DM that gentleman's agreement would include that the party wouldn't attempt it against obvious boss characters or otherwise important NPCs.

Mooks only.

You seem extremely reasonable.

In 0D&D the only person using Sleep was boss enemy anyway, so why the fuck are you so salty?

...

In OD&D DM's entire job was to kill the party. Then kill them again. And again. And AGAIN. No other game in the entire hobby was so obsessed with GM vs players mentality nor was treated like a combat simulation and nothing else.

You seem reasonable. I do something kinda similar; I like to view games as collaborative in general, and I'll tell players, hey buddy, if you wanna pull off scry 'n dies, someone's gonna try it on you if you're not careful.

Really, what you need is a gentleman's agreement on what kind of game it is, and that everyone's going to follow the rules of *that* game, right from the get-go.

that would be me

>he doesn't know Villian

Our gm has told us that while he doesn't want to murder us, he's going to give us a run for our money and do everything but murder us, because player death is boring to him.

GM here, this shit rustles my fucking jimmies.

This is all fairly reasonable. Let the RNG decide, try to avoid wrangling a situation to deliberately kill the PCs, but if the party dies, it was a combination of bad luck and their own shitty fucking decisions.

You want them to win, but you want them to work for it, and not be utterly retarded about it. If you try to kill the warlord in broad daylight in front of his army, why the fuck would they not swarm you?

>because player death is boring to him

Full disclosure - PC Fatalities Are A Fact Of The Game. Unless when they're not (I personally haven't played any games of the sort, but I'm not averse to it on principle). But if PC Fatalities Are A Fact Of The Game, the onus is on you to try and not die, which means fighting smart, hoping for the best, and generally being intelligent about your tactical thinking and handling of delicate situations.

Yeah, a player got possesed (according to homebrew rules we didn't agree to) and it turned into tpk. In the span of one session while the party was spread through a planet spanning space station. All save or die attacks. No laughs were had. We don't let 3.pathfinders gm our 40k stuff anymore.

>casts sleep with no check and no save
I don't play shit systems.

The only time I can ever imagine this being justified is of the party has been retarded enough to piss off something so far out of their league that they can't comprehend it.
In that case, the saving throw would be 3 sessions earlier in the form of not being such a fucking retard.

In any other case I can think of, I can't even imagine why someone wouldn't just walk.

It's the player's fault if they don't prepare for enemy spellcasters. Sounds like the enemy wizard tricked the party with a long-lasting curse that makes them voluntarily fail their saves vs sleep.

Nah, the bad DM I used to have was more like "the villain puts you to sleep with no save, but The Lady, the mysterious figure who hired you for this job dashes in and lays waste to him with her twin katanas!".
Suffice to say I use him as a mental example of what not to do when running a game.

I think the curse is having a Shit GM.
Powerful magic indeed if it affects the world outside

>thinking these GMs give a shit about the rules of a system

Sleep spells.

The wizard's roofie.

certainly, but they were supposed to do it in a way that made it seem reasonable, not "you all fall asleep and are killed, immediately" then do it again. it's boring for both GM and players.

I did something similar once, more than a decade ago. Still being mocked for it. HUGELY improved since.

sleep doesn't have a save, it's hp dependent.

>sleeping

well done. improvement is progress. but we must always remember our mistakes, in order to learn from them. hence, you are rightfully reminded of the douchiest thing you've done, forever.

Well to be fair, it was a surprise round and Sleep has no save