Have you ever had the whole party assassinated in their sleep?

Sounds more like crappy ambiguous exposition than proper warning signs.
Now if the friend had warned that experienced adventurers had been murdered in their sleep in the local inns ( I am assuming you stayed at the inn) it would still be crappy exposition but wouldn't be ambiguous. I get the impression the DM was trying to railroad things and got pissed off with the party refusing to enter the forest of pissing trees.

I like a middle ground, like a spate of them getting terrible rolls, while I am rolling diamonds as the monster/npc attacker will kill a character.

But generally I like to keep things quite within their possibility to defeat cleanly but dangerous enough that mistakes will bite them in the arse and repeated mistakes will kill them outright.

Last session my party of players lost 2 player characters and some of them got quite emotional, but none of them got angry with me or eachother they just wanted a few minutes to talk about how their characters would feel about what just happened, would they learn or just carry on as normal etc. Although the session ended with a really somber tone as the DM seeing the emotional investment pour out was extremely satisfying especially when one of them (not the guy who died) said "I didn't realise how emotionally attached I was to those characters".

If you as a DM just slaughter player characters like it's nothing the players will treat it as nothing and always have their next "toon" written up and ready to roll. If you let them get away with anything the game will lose gravitas and no one will care about anything.

What's the point of the DM just arbitrarily says "rocks fall, everyone dies" with no chance to influence the outcome?

And no, rolling for it doesn't make it any less arbitrary. It just means the arbitrariness is now random.

here: may I just say that I like you. Not in a same-gender, romantic sort of way. Just in a good way.

>If you as a DM just slaughter player characters like it's nothing the players will treat it as nothing and always have their next "toon" written up and ready to roll. If you let them get away with anything the game will lose gravitas and no one will care about anything.

this.

I mean my first thought is stupid DM mistake making it an assassin. I mean he either wanted to end the session because you guys are dicks or he relied on the dice and lost big.

I mean he could have poisoned you all in your sleep leaving a mystery to untangle. Subdued and kidnapped you all. Knocked you out and taken ever fucking stitch of equipment clothes and money so you're unable to even pay for the room in the morning- so many opportunities to fuck with the party for being obtuse and dm just "welp, everybody died" it? Pathetic, lazy, obtuse or mad. In any case it would suck and I wouldn't be back.

>poisoned you all in your sleep leaving a mystery to untangle.

*and you all as the walking dead as you search for the antidote

>party with more than 0 fighters
You gotta start with a believable situation if you expect anyone to believe you

>all variant humans

I stopped reading right there

I've been in all variant human parties before.

What's the point of playing if the bad guys can just take us out whenever they want because the GM said so?

You should use this OP image less it's a dead giveaway now.

In my opinion, the bad guys should always be able to take out the pcs "whenever they want" IF they are strong enough. The issue is more "do you need bad guys that strong ?"... If the players care a little bit about realism, they will just ask at the end why they were not killed before.

But indeed, it was bad dming (no character involvement, no true foreshadowing...)

What I did recently in a CoC campaign was foreshadowing strongly that they were in danger (many information from several sources about one guy being dangerous, but also they were followed since several days, and it was becoming worst. They met the dangerous guy and one of the player gave him his visit card (later he was destroyed by the remaining of the group)). They did not really know what was going on but they decided to leave London for the night. During that night, the bad guy summoned creatures to seek an item they showed him (trying to get information), and killing some of the people they were living with, so when they came back, they just lose their shit, scared as fuck, and they became completely paranoid. I just feel it's a right middle.

archive.4plebs.org/tg/search/image/xF7JVLiTZHb7kH2XbpWUyw/
The hell are you talking about.

>What I did recently in a CoC campaign
D&d is not lovecraftian horror, it's high fantasy. Imagine if in Lord of the Rings, Frodo was just killed in his sleep by a ringwraith in the middle of nowhere, to emphasize the scale and power of the enemy and the worthlessness of a mortal life. Maybe that's be cool? But it's not empowering, it's not heroic, and if you want to roleplay that you shouldn't use rules designed to empower players.

Sure, PCs should be able to die, but in my opinion it should only ever really happen if they totally fuck up. Narratives in a D&D game should be based around an interesting world and player empowerment in that world in the name of heroic (or possibly self-serving depending on your party) goals.

Don't be an idiot and say "wow D&D fags are so sensitive about death" and then talk about you game where the universe stresses the insignificance of humanity.

I'd thank the DM for their time and then never let them run a game for us again. They can roll up a character though.

Also, all that said, I got unreasonably angry and conflated two obviously different people. Whoops!

>Imagine if in Lord of the Rings, Frodo was just killed in his sleep by a ringwraith in the middle of nowhere,

I agree with you but isn't this almost what exactly happened in Breeland? They survived because they ran into Aragorn, randomly

why didn't one of the great eagles just fly the ring all the way into mordor though

when I did that (similarly awful DM) the DM as player then just wrecked my game out of stupidity or spite. I mean he was just a way more completely awful player than I ever imagined could exist and literally could not handle any other progression than
>you start in a bar
>weird/old/hooded ranger in corner tells you tale of something/something/something
>party fights kobolds
I mean anything short of being led by the nose was absolutely ignored and all the other players were so used to his bad DMing they just followed him as players and PCs. I thought I was prepared for any direction they wanted to take the game, in my feeble attempts to not railroad, but he literally wanted a hooded figure in the bar corner giving out a go kill the rats quest, nothing less, nothing more.

The Nazgul would fuck them up.

Well yes, that made the book a better read. That's kinda the entire point the user was making?

Sets the hook.

The troll.

The suckers.

>Then again, I don't play D&D
The countertroll.

Earnest bro doesn't know what he's getting into.

This exact situation is why you always have a Wizard in the party with the Alarm ritual.

> enemy assassin brings a stealth wizard
> he dispells your alarm while you are sleeping
> assassin procedes to slit throats

Once is enough some people are on here a lot, if you're going to shitpost then have the courtesy of being a bit more artful eh?

Is a zone of alarm a visible spell? I've never actually had this come up before.