Why is it so "unethical" to TKP in DnD anymore? I have a brisk understanding of the whole concept of let the players have fun; but why does it HAVE to be at the DM's expense.
It's all the time it's like people are like, "Who cares if you've sunk 5-200$ USD into content books." or "Who cares if you spent 1-5 months preparing home-made content to experience." So long as it's the players enjoying themselves, who cares if the DM is bored of meeting up weekly to DM you guys farming or fishing and building an economical empire!
It's apparently this "Golden Rule" that the DM has to shut up, nut up, and enjoy it. Despite wanting to DM a Dungeon's and Dragons game for Sword and Sorcery adventures.
Why is it that if you have been throwing plot hooks at the now farming/fishing party that have been in Role Play time ignoring the wizard trying to summon space demons for an entire year - that meteor's fall from the sky carrying CR10-15 Space Demons that wipe the party out?
If they would have followed or at least semi-payed attention to the plot hooks and went on adventures, maybe they wouldn't be level 6 fighting a swarm of space demons that kill them.
This is always going to come down to your group and what they want out of the experience. There will be some players who don't mind being killed; there will be other players who find that blatant waste of time frustrating. In this way, it seems to be that you are speaking just for a theoretical group of people that you don't agree with. If this really is the party you are GMing for, you should find a new group because that dissonance is probably wearing on you, and I just want your free time to become more well-spent.
Jack Lewis
You're not funny, OP. Just stop.
Andrew Watson
No, this was a bunch of Youtube drama from content creators like Taking20 and Nerdarchy. And their followings that seem to agree that TPKing is the worlds WORST thing you can do as a DM.
Nicholas Morgan
Have to agree. Pretty tired of people who claim they only want to play, yet don’t invest the effort to do anything other than what they want. Fuck the GM, and any attempt to bring structure is railroading.
It’s why I stopped running games. Got tired of spending money and putting in tons of wasted effort.
Aaron Sanders
good thread, really worth it
Robert Robinson
Well, to step back from the strawman, I come from the old grognard days of D&D, where the GM was an impartial mediator between the players and the game world, TPKs were part of the risk for players making poor decisions.
It wasn't players vs GM. It was players vs the game world, with the GM as arbitrator...and sometimes you had to let the chip fall where they may.
Jacob Barnes
Basically everything you've written makes me think you're a garbage GM, or a mediocre GM with a shitty group.
Oliver Cox
The DM's job is to provide the players with fun. If they have fun, you should be having fun too. If you're not having fun, then maybe you should consider quitting DMing
Christopher Miller
Could be. I’ve seen one or two shitty players kill a few games. In all but one case, the GM was just new. In the last... well, some GMs just suck.
Lincoln Brooks
I am of the opinion that: >In order to be fun, the game needs to give players the ability to make decisions that matter. >For this to be the case, their choices must result in realistic consequences that they could reasonably have forseen. >If they are never in danger of death or TPK, then their decisions become rather more trivial: whatever they do, they will be fine, so it doesn't matter what choice they make. Therefore, for the game to keep some excitement, the danger must be real. As a GM, you must be willing to hurt and kill your PCs if they fuck up. If you pull your punches (because character death or TPKs are 'bad') then your players will realise, and take the game less seriously because they know that they are insulated from any serious consequences of their actions.
Furthermore: Sometimes the dice roll very badly for PCs (or very well for the GM), and PCs die. If you fudge things sometimes to prevent death, then if a PC dies then it's because you - as the GM - /chose/ to have them die rather than fudging it. This results in a situation where death is ooc unpleasant because the GM made an OOC choice. Whereas a strict 'dice fall as they may' approach results in some deaths, but there's less bad feeling about it because it's not /personal/, you just got unlucky (or fucked up). This dichotomy means that if you start protecting the PCs from death etc, social pressures mean you probably need to keep doing that, and then any tension in the PCs choices is gone because they'll never suffer anything nasty because of bad choices.
>but cavegirl! why not hurt the PCs by attacking NPCs they love or messing with their sheet? Give them narrative consequences! Fuck that noise. As a player, losing a PC stings briefly, and then I roll up a new PC and move on. Whereas if you render my PC crippled, I have to keep playing a rubbish character, which drags the sting out. As for attacking loved ones, why do you think so many PCs are orphans? Players hate that shit.
Cameron Flores
>players vs the game world, with the GM as arbitrator the issue here is that the GM is also usually the designer of the game world and furthermore the ultimate judge of what that game world is when the players experience it. it's difficult to say "I'm sorry, there's three black puddings here, you all ran out of spells and you fell for the trap, if you lose you die", while you're player is looking at you with puppy dog eyes. I mean after all, in that moment, you could have just as easily said that it was only one pudding or whatever, regardless of what you wrote down earlier.
Aiden Powell
There's so many things wrong with that post i must conclude it is bait.
Jack Ortiz
Except that's totally bullshit?
It's all built on the false idea that the only thing that can act as a consequence or threat in a game is death, which is flatly not true. Death is actually a copout, in many ways, as it means the player never needs to actually interact with the consequences of their failure.
I run games in which death and TPK's are basically non-existent, but I've never had any problem with keeping up tension and a sense of danger, because every PC has things they care about that they could lose, objectives they could fail or progress towards greater goals that could be stymied. If your players are invested in your world and the events of the game, then death is only harmful as it provides an unsatisfying ending rather than continuing forward in an interesting way.
And your last comment is total nonsense which ignores the vast scope of alternate consequences to death that you can make use of as a GM. At least assuming you don't have shitty murderhobo players.
But being a kill happy GM only encourages murderhobos, so you deserve each other.
Sebastian Martin
>I mean after all, in that moment, you could have just as easily said that it was only one pudding or whatever, regardless of what you wrote down earlier. then what was the fucking point of writing it down in the first place? Perhaps the PCs, being low on health and out of spells, should have done the smart thing and withdrawn to recover their strength, rather than pushing on with 0 resources like idiots. If you retcon the game world to save the PCs bacon, then if you ever let the PCs die, you made that actively decision, and the players will be able to tell. If you merely sit back and allow (potentially lethal) events to transpire, it's not personal and you made no concious decision that 'yes, I should have Jim's PC die'.
Luke Ortiz
Well this is going off of many podcasts and video content of "advise columns". A large portion of questions that get asked are "What should I do if my players have no interest in the game I am running?" and various of the like. And it seems like a large majority of vocal members of the community just say "Players rule the game, deal with it."
If you want to run a sword and sorcery game, why are you going to have fun DM'ing months worth of DnD content involving sitting around and doing nothing but fishing? Fun is subjective, and not every DM should be shoe horned into enjoying things like that as a part of their job description. Considering DnD Content Modules can be costly to some.
David Richardson
>It's all built on the false idea that the only thing that can act as a consequence or threat in a game is death No, it's built on the idea that other threats are less desirable in practice. Being forced to play a character who is massively crippled or no longer matches your initial conception of them sucks way worse than your PC dying. The point is not to make your players unhappy, it's for them to be aware that they are not protected from the consequences of their actions. >Death is actually a copout, in many ways this is my point. It only sucks briefly, and then you have a new PC. It's undesirable, but not gonna ruin the game for somebody long-term.
OK, so, you have players who have /other places/ you can punch them that actually scare them. Excellent. Hit them there. But those things require a buy-in to the world that often takes time to develop. And in a lot of cases, there isn't one of those things that is under threat, but something bad still ought to happen.
I'm not actually saying 'kill your PCs as hard as you can'. I'm saying that if the dice say a PC is dead, you shouldn't fudge things to save them. The threat of death (or of the other punishments that exist in many games) keeps the tension in the game, without which it rapidly becomes stale.
Easton Campbell
The DMs job is to provide a game, not to bend over backwards for the players. GMs should start kicking out shit players after they have maturely explained what is wrong more than once. The player/GM ratio favors game masters enough that you will never run out of players unless you are a complete shit. And even then, you will find plenty of outcast players willing to give your garbage ass a go.
Christian Russell
Reminder that if the players fail to engage with your plot then it's one of two things. >Subverting bullshit. Talk to them >Your hooks are tedious. Talk to Them worst case is you need new players
Bentley Martin
Except nobody is talking about forcing people to play crippled characters? Where does that stupid strawman even come from?
And it is going to ruin the experience in a long term, story focused game, because the story you'd been enjoying just came to a shitty, unsatisfying ending. This is very much a playstyle thing, but in a game all about continuous, consistent storytelling death is something to use extremely sparingly.
I just don't understand your logic. If your players are engaged in something dangerous, why isn't there something greater at threat? Why are they involved in a life or death battle that's apparently completely disconnected from everything they care about and has no possible consequences beyond death? That just sounds boring as hell.
The GM rolls the dice because he likes the sound they make. Your authority and discretion in doing what is best for your group is absolute.
Now, saying that? In some groups, what works best for them is playing as the dice fall, and that's fine. But in others, fudging is entirely justified and a powerful tool a GM can use to enhance the experience of the group.
If you're going to repeat the assertion, you could at least try to back it up. Because I've run games where no character has ever died, and yet it's never become stale, lacked tension or had my players acting like idiots because they assume they can get away with anything. It might just be a matter of not having shit players.
Dominic Adams
mostly right but overlooks >Your game system disincentivizes engagement. Talk to them then change/rig things as necessary.
Angel Brown
Then lets hear some suggestions for these incentives, smartass.
This is peoples hobby, theyre expected to be bringing the willingness to engage with them, because they chose to do this. What are you gonna incentivize them with? Gold stars? Food? Money? A gun to the head?
The incentive is that youve prepared something for them to play and they want to play. As said if your hooks are tedious then address that, but you're not being paid to entertain a group of kindergardeners. They have agency and they're supposed to bring it. You have no reasonable way of incentivizing an adult that doesn't go beyond all reasonable expectation here.
Juan Morris
Fundamentally, I want my games to be about a challenge. I like 4e combat, I like OSR dungeoncrawls, I like vicious political PVP in Vampire. I want to play the game on hard-mode and feel like I'm good at it when I succeed, and to feel like it was fair and deserved when I fail. Story is... if it happens, that's cool I guess, but that's not why I'm here. The same is true when I GM. You're here to try to outwit the game world that wants you dead. I don't run games for story and deep characterisation, I run them so that when you finally (say) clear out that dungeon that's been defeating everything you tried, you feel good about yourself. It's a playstyle thing. Calling it 'murderhoboey' and saying that it's what 'shit players' do is disingenuous. We have fun.
Honestly I have no advice for people who want to run narrative-focused games with, like, emotional resonance and story arcs and stuff. It's so outside of what I enjoy that I don't know where to begin.
Nathaniel Cooper
Your censored portion of the post is actually -really- enlightening. Of course there is nothing wrong with that, and I don't expect people to ALWAYS like story's and deep immersion in DnD. But I feel like that is what this post is primarily pointing to.
If your game set up is: Show Up > Crawl a Dungeon > Roll some Dice > Go home. None of what has been mentioned mostly won't effect you.
Joshua Barnes
At this point, I have no argument with you. I only disagreed with you at first because you seemed to be trying to make a general statement, rather than stating a playstyle preference and how things work with that set of priorities.
Juan Adams
From a player's point of view, character death means losing the result of a significant amount of time and creative effort. You'll notice that experienced players are more blasé about player death, because to them, making a new character is less demanding. Meanwhile, a player's first character represents the product of literally their entire experience learning to play. A GM should consider that killing a character fundamentally represents an expenditure of the player's investment in the game. It shouldn't be done carelessly.
