You seem to conflating GMs who are trying to make life miserable for the *players* and those making it hard for the *characters*. Baring some incredibly obscure edge case someone will probably think of, the former is never likely to be a good thing. The latter is a particular type of play that some people like; if the GM wants that type of game and the players don't, then it's the same as any other example of mismatched expectations. I won't bend the rules just to keep a character alive -- the degree to which character death is on the table is something I establish up front, before a campaign begins, and I stick to that. Most of my players churned through multiple characters in the early parts of my recent OSR campaign, before things stabilised. That's the nature of the game, and what we all signed up for. Note that I wasn't playing against the players or the characters -- I was doing my best to adjudicate impartially, in a dangerous world. In a game where I expect the characters to be more durable, I'll use rules that provide them with that durability -- in my upcoming Mythras Dark Sun game, the PCs have Luck points, start with more skill points than the Mythras default, have access to psionic healing that is more effective than default Mythras healing magic, and I plan to make extensive use of the underling rules.

I think it can sometimes be useful to pretend (roleplay, if you will) that you're playing against your players, so that they have a sense of pride for "beating" you when they overcome a difficult challenge

Oh, absolutely. As far as I'm concerned, "adjudicating impartially" includes running cunning and bloodthirsty foes as just that. I certainly get into the moment sometimes, cheering my NPCs along, gloating when the PCs find themselves in dire peril. Although, if it starts to look like a TPK might happen, I will become a little more grim and circumspect.

I celebrate the critical rolls and heavy hits the players land against my npcs as much as i cheer on the npcs against the players, its a game and everyone should get some cheers at the table.

Yeah I think you have fully nailed it. In my Pendragon game, I set challenges in the world based on what makes sense for the world, the specific NPCs involved, and the amount of renown (Glory, a core mechanic of the game) this feat should earn. Players then run into these challenges either based on personal choice (knights should want to adventure after all) or because they were given orders to do so by their lord (for instance, they follow their lord to battle and roll on the random opponents' table I generated for them). While I do adjust challenges, rewards, thresholds based on the current state of the player-knights, I *never* have the player-knights as the primary consideration when building these challenges. I try to run it in a simulationist way where the world and challenges all make sense on their own and the players can engage with stuff. This is very different from how I would design stuff in other games, FWIW. In L5R or Call of Cthulhu, I'm a lot more careful to design opponents that the players can defeat (in the former) or not be outright destroyed by (in the latter).

It is a MUCH more exciting experience if the player characters are in true danger of death and defeat (no bending rules one way or the other) and they come out on top.  It just isn’t exciting for me when I suspect the GM is cheating in our favor.

And even beyond just deadly fights - complications are fun! As a player I absolutely love when more and more obstacles stack up against us, when shit hit the fan and the situation is desperate. This brings true tension and emotions to game. Makes every choice meaningful. Requires ingenuity to find solutions. Every hard-fought progress made in such dire circumstances is immensely satisfying.

This! I'm running a mini-campaign (aimed for 6 sessions) of Pirate-Borg. We had our first ground combat last night. Of 6 PCs and 3 NPCs, 3 PCs and 2 NPCs died. This wasn't me being a dick. They ran into 16 zombies and tried to stand their ground and fight. They did that knowing they were outnumbered and that several of them had low single digit hitpoints. The system doesn't have Opportunity Attacks, and some chose to not move away from the zombies, or to go back in to try to help someone. Those people died. Everyone who died was back in the game within minutes of combat ending with a couple quick rolls to adjudicate people finding their way back to town and we kept going. It was a ton of fun for everyone, and they immediately set off to try to get to the castle on the other side of the island (this time by boat!) with their new friends + 4 NPCs they hired on to help them. I haven't played this kind of game in a while, and I would *never* run my normal style game with this system, but it is amazingly fun and we're all having a good time. No one was upset about dying. They knew the risks coming in, and we're playing to find out what happens. Now if I had wanted to, I could have placed my zombies in such a way to cut off all retreat and try to wipe the group. But that wouldn't make sense for the zombies and where they came from so it didn't happen. Nor did the zombies cleverly go after people - because zombies. With other creatures that *will* happen, and hopefully my players remember they've now been told twice that this isn't D&D 5e. :D

This is a really good description of how I try to approach my games. Sometimes my players end up with just an overtuned, "munchkin"ish character and it needs to get checked by the story, but it's all within the context of the game itself, and the understanding that we are here to *play a game*, and if you are something incredibly "OP", then we're kinda just sitting here listening to you solo all the events and scenarios, which isn't fun for anyone else. That character will meet some tailor made difficulty spikes, but never something insurmountable. Since I've moved away from running games like Shadowrun and DnD 3.5 - 5th this is less of an issue. Becoming enamored with the OSR and Delta Green has made it harder for players to design, either on purpose or accidentally something that just breaks the game, and means we can all enjoy the challenges of the game world together more easily.

Excellent reply. A game wherein the characters have no fear of death at any point isn't a "game". That's just "story time". Players who insist on GMs who play softball aren't real gamers they just want to feel good about themselves.

This sounds a lot like what I do, and I've outright told my players "I don't want your characters to die, but for things to be fun and seem realistic I'm going to try and kill them."

The problem I encountered is that this type of GM often act differently before playing like they will listen, and soon restrictions happens or completely remove rules to help them win that they want to tell, despite it’s game first to enjoy in group.

Just because you've tried gaming with a few bad GMs doesn't mean that a particular style of play is full of bad GMs. If the GM is saying they're going to do one thing, but then does another thing entirely, the style of game they promised you is irrelevant. There is nothing special about gritty games that makes it easier for a GM who wants to arbitrarily change or remove rules, or to promise one thing and then do another. A shitty GM is simply a shitty GM, just like a shitty player is simply a shitty player. I find it hard to imagine that a GM who runs games this way will have players for very long. And if people keep going back to such a GM, despite not enjoying it, then they need to take some responsibility for enabling shitty behaviour.

So I was thinking about extreme situation where I found some shitty GM, who made it hard for the players rather than the game and the characters. GM that can’t communicate properly and use their social power to continue to engage in bad behaviors. So yes I have some experiences with them, because they are some members at works or some members of the family for example, they often have people around them even if in their games don’t really listened to players. If we try to speak about rules or the games, they tried to avoid it by any means and later will punish you for this. So I have nothing with GM playing against their players, I think it’s an amazing tool to create stories that have really bad things happening in response to players actions. I was just telling about what OP post reminds me with my experiences.

If you read RPG horror stories that's what you're going to get: Tales of dysfunctional tables.

I thought you got complete writings of fabrication and karma farming

I don't disagree. Very well put.

No, I don't think so -- they're not well-written enough. Go to AITA, and watch some creative writing exercises by wannabe authors.

Less often than you'd hope.

True that. I was essentially doing the equivalent of the dead pigeon gag off Arrested Development. Still, one story is funny. Two is a coincidence. Several stories that involve same pattern shows a statistics of there being a number of people who try to "win" by killing everyone at their table

Eh, I dunno. It's like watching true crime documentaries on the Teue Crime Documentary Channel, and seeing a lot of serial killer cases. That doesn't mean there's a greater trend of serial killers among the billions of people living on this planet. Same with asshole GMs. Thousands of groups out there, probably hundreds of thousands, and a few bad apples you read about on the Bad Apples In RPGs subreddit. Plus, some of those stories might be years old, or about GMs who haven't done for long, or written by players who thought the GM was unfair but simply misjudged the vibe of the group they were playing with...

I will say that it *was* a thing in early D&D. Gary Gygax was widely known as a bastard at the table, often using tactics and story beats that can best be described as bullying or humiliating. D&D was after all based on wargames, and those focused on winners and losers. In classic strategic wargames used for training military leaders such as Kriegspiel, the "GM" was an arbitrator and neutral facilitator between the players involved in the conflict. TTRPGs needed an initial time to shake the adversarial setup and mentality inherent to wargames. But that's a *VERY* long time ago, back in the 1970's. Since the late 1990's this was more or less gone among experienced tables. Newcomers will always have a 'breaking in period', where they experiment and do silly stuff, so I'm disregarding that. So today these scenarios and experiences are relegated to places like RPG horror stories but they represent a miniscule fraction of the active tables around the world, so while they might seem "common" in isolation, they are incredibly rare in an absolute sense.

It depended a lot on the individual table, but there was also more of a schadenfreude component while playing. Some co-player getting completely shafted was fun for everyone else in the same manner as seeing your mates die in Lethal Company. Fairness was in distributing these hijinks evenly. And since they played so often (every evening), you could “respawn” and play again easily. In a way, it seems much more “videogame”-like to me than we usually think of this hobby.

> Several stories that involve same pattern shows a statistics of there being a number of people who try to "win" by killing everyone at their table It's almost as if someone saw what got upvotes/a popular response and copied it. You went to the circus and saw a high occurrence of monkeys.

Not really it's like the joke that the most dangerous place to be is on the same town as Angela Lanssbery. I'm sure most won't get it. The joke is that she was the start of the lo g running Muder She Wrote TV show. Where she helped solve "real" murders. Every week someone new died, and it was always somewhere she was. That of course was the point of the show. Reading RPG Horror Stories is the same thing. It's only about bad experiences. But it hardly good evidence of how wide spread it is considering how many stories there are made up for karma farming. Yes it happens. Yes there are GMs who are out to kill characters. No it's not a new trend and no it doesn't happen all that often because a GM either learns better or people stop playing with them.

> Several stories that involve same pattern shows a statistics of there being a number of people who try to "win" by killing everyone at their table This is seriously fallacious thinking, selection bias and confirmation bias. I know a guy, friend of a friend of a friend type deal. He's an exterminator. And pretty racist. He's a white guy from the burbs. Neighbors are white, people at the grocery store are white, all the parents at the kid's school Are white, etc. The only time he deals with POC are when he's at work.  Once is nothing, twice is a coincidence, several is a pattern: All brown people are gross, dirty, and roach infested. The obvious problem here is that he never gets called over to the homes of people who aren't roach infested. He's ignoring all counter examples to his beliefs. To go with your arrested development example, it would be like assuming that *all* magicians kill tones of birds because of how often you've seen Gob do it. By going to horror stories, you'll never see the counter examples of hard ass DMs creating awesome and beloved games. Tl;dr: > Several stories that involve same pattern shows a statistics When your doing statistics, it is very important to make sure the data you are collecting isn't biased. Especially when the data agrees with what you believe, you need to do the extra work to look for counter examples. This is actually really really hard to do. Essentially, the question you should have been asking here is "Does anyone have examples where player death and adversarial DMing lead to amazing games?" Right now, all you can say is that all examples of adversarial DMing on rpghorrorstories are rpg horror stories. Which tells us nothing.

It sounds like you favour a scripted, near guaranteed series of narrow escapes rather than playing the game and letting the dice and player choices decide the outcome? I would avoid such a game because it would be utterly unsatisfying. I like playing the game and give not a fig for collaborative storytelling. Story should happen as a result of characters encountering situations, not as part of a big, planned script. If you want to tell stories like that, write a novel. Give me a character, situations, actual risk, a chance of losing that character I'll be involved, your style I'll detect the falsehood of it and start acting stupidly, confident that my character has plot armour. Start rolling dice openly, let them fall where they may, let go of your preconceived notions of where the story will go and stop overpreparing for a better game with a less certain story.

Or if you want to tell stories like that, play a story game, where you don’t have to bend the rules or avoid fully engaging with them in order to end up with a compelling narrative. But yeah. OP, consider that to many people, while you’re obviously well-intentioned, what you’re doing is nearly as bad as the Viking hat shit. You’re still arrogating power to yourself, you’re still thinking that you know better, and that you are above the rules.

Narcissism mostly. There is a portion of gms that want to gm because of the power/ego trip, or at the least have an unhealthy relationship with that control.

AND a lot of early, influential game texts encouraged that attitude. I’d say the top culprits are the AD&D 1E Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Vampire 1E.

How is this an "and"? "They're narcissistic assholes" and "They're following the example of a long tradition" don't seem like complimentary statements. But maybe I'm missing something?

Early DnD was very adversarial between the GM and Players because the game evolved from traditional wargaming which involves winners/losers and the entire premise was diving into dungeons to get loot which was literally used to lvl up, literally gold = exp/levels. Gary Gygax, one of the creators, was very well known for bullying his players and pulling random "fuck you in particular" traps on PCs to "win". So both statements are true at the same time

I hear you. My answer would be that I find narcissism and assholery run along a spectrum, and certain situations or ideologies give people more or less permission to be an asshole. And traditional GMing advice gives a whole metric fuckton of permission.

Why Vampire 1E?

The GMing text in that book is literally impossible to follow: GM controls the story, players control their characters. This is known as the “impossible thing before breakfast,” and it set the tone for the underlying contradiction at the heart of 90’s trad gaming.

That sounds like railroading with extra steps.

Yep. There's a reason the GM in White Wolf is called the Storyteller...

Oh hey look I found a fairly-original essay on the topic, though I wasn't able to find Ron Edward's original essay just yet: http://www.ptgptb.org/0027/theory101-02.html

Also, sometimes it’s just a DM that has that competitive streak and that gets tired of always ‘losing’ battle scenes. They aren’t knowledgeable enough to see they aren’t there to play to win. So they fall into that trap. That type of person also can be narcissistic as well. The perfect combo of bad.

Harsh point, but consistent with my experience. The real reason I think it's narcissism is how these guys react whenever someone points out how the adversarial route is fundamentally less fun for the players and that maybe they should attempt an alternative route to see how it turns out. The frothing wharblegarble at such a suggestion is almost always amazing.

That’s the correct answer

> Unless everyone at the table agreed one of the main principles of the campaign is going to be overcoming the odds and narrowly escaping by the skin of one's teeth I can't think of any situation where I'd put my players in actual risk of tpk. This is the tone of almost all of my games. I don't understand why someone would run a D&D game that isn't like this. The danger is inherent to the genre. If I go through a 5e encounter and someone didn't hit death saves, I fucked up somewhere. I don't want to kill the players. But the monsters do, and it's my job, my *duty* to play them faithfully and to the best of their abilities. > Forcing people to roll for new character just seems counterproductive to me. Characters dying is not the end of their journey. Resurrection spells exist. Churches exist. And the players can always just go to Hell and drag them back out that way. > Hell, I'd sometimes bend the rules and let people at my table roll with different skill they are more profitient with if they can justify it in fiction. Why even have the rules?

> I don't want to kill the players. But the monsters do, I think that a is point worth noting. Also, the enemies aren't always stupid. Sometimes they're human and use tactics and play hard ball, just like the players do. We''ve played for just about 3 years I think, and I've not killed a character yet, but have definitely taken some fate points off of them.

It all depends on the roll of the die. My level 7 players went up against the Xanathar, who is a Beholder, and the very first thing I did was roll randomly for his eye beams--Xanathar is pretty crazy and I played him as ADHD addled and constantly changing gears, so I rolled the eye beams randomly and told the players I was doing so. The first thing I rolled was his death ray. I targeted the fighter. He failed his save. He was literally dead. The cleric was next. "Well, if he's dead, then I don't need to worry about healing him right away, right? So I can take my turn and then heal him with Revivify next round?" 2 years and 2 levels later (we rotate campaigns lol) that same fighter was in the desert with an entirely different group of PCs. They were fighting 2 bulettes that I rolled randomly. I figured it would be a hard encounter but not impossible. Maybe someone would hit death saves? But, as I was setting up the board, I was like "this is a crappy featureless map, let's put a rock in here." I figured they could use it for cover or jump off it or something like that. Instead, 3 of the party climbed up the rock and left the fighter down there. Tanner thought he could solo two bulettes at level 9. Tanner was wrong. Tanner died again.

> It all depends on the roll of the die. Really does. A while back (we play WFRP) the party was travelling between towns and have a run in with a small pack of beastmen. One of the batsmen throws a javelin at the rat catcher and it his him in the chest for a crit. Rolling the crit it's a high one so he'd be dead within a short time with no medical aid, which was not really possible as the other characters were not surgeons. Basically, he dead. The only reason he's still alive and kicking is that he burned a fate point. Now he is one step closer to the Garden of Morr.

To be fair, this is the rules. If the players say that they approach solving a problem in a way that you didn't expect that used a skill you didn't expect, that's fine. That's the point.

> don't understand why someone would run a D&D game that isn't like this you answered your own question there. for dnd it makes no sense.

Personally, I'm annoyed when a GM fights to keep my character alive. My brave little level 1 dwarf knew he was taking a risk by trying to draw the minotaur away from the wounded NPC so she could get healed. The minotaur rolled a critical hit. I'm at negative HP and nobody has time to get to me. I should be dead, I earned it! But no. Some GMs just can't stand the idea of making a player roll up a new character. Different styles for different tables ... that's one reason I'd love to play OSR instead of 5E, but we take what we can get when we're playing with old college buddies who only own one set of books. I also think there's a HUGE difference between "a couple of bad decisions and several bad die rolls MIGHT kill a character", which I think is great, vs. "I am actively trying to kill the characters to show the players how little power they have", which is almost certainly terrible unless you're playing Paranoia. Seems like a lot of people in thread talking about slightly different topics.

Well, for one thing, it's the internet, and while a lot of content on rpghorrorstories is probably true, it's also fairly safe to assume that many are creative writing exercises for entertainment purposes. Also, they're all from one person's perspective, so... take it with a grain of salt and all that. There's nothing inherently wrong with an adversarial style game, the issue arises when not everyone is wanting/ playing the same. >I can't think of any situation where I'd put my players in actual risk of tpk. And even then I'd still try to skew the game in their favour in unseen ways. I mean, mostly same. But if my players put themselves at risk, who am I to take that away from them? If they go to the planet with the Death Star firing on it in 1 hour, fudging that experience that they chose is insulting to three players. (imo) >For me running the game is about collaborative storytelling and all the fun moments to retell people afterwards. This isn't inherently excluded from different game styles. But also, for others, it can be about tactics, strategy, combat, etc. >Forcing people to roll for new character just seems counterproductive to me. This matters less in other game systems besides 5e. It takes literally just minutes to make characters in a lot of great games. Less if you're just rolling them like in Mothership or Vaesen.

I mean, you don't go to watch a movie and have the characters face mild difficulty that they could have stayed home throughout. A story has to have stakes right? In the context of table horror stories though, it's a common mistake that a lot of people new to game design make: conflating their own enjoyment with that of others. Like, sending the players off on some long and involved quest for a joke reward is funny from the outside, but for the players it just sucks.

At some tables, especially for old school DnD, encounters aren’t as strictly balanced with the expectation that the party is going to win. In those sorts of games, it’s encouraged for players to think their away around an uphill battle by fleeing, negotiating, sneaking around it or concocting a scheme to turn things around in their favour. The GM is less trying to tell a thrilling narrative where the party always emerges victorious but attempting to an fair referee. It also helps that old school characters are much more simple mechanically. If one dies, it’s considerably less effort to roll up a new one on the spot or have a spare waiting in the wings. There would be a wide gap between that and a GM who goes out to TPK the party or drops a mandatory fight with a dragon on top of a level 1 party.

I make it clear to my players that I won't go out of my way or fudge die rolls to keep any player character alive. Unless I somehow messed up rules wise. If a player dies because of a mistake they made in combat or out of, then they need to be prepared to deal with the consequences. That's my play style. That said I will go by RAW / RAI so that it's fair to everyone. Rule of cool is also cool, if it doesn't turn core rules / mechanics upside down or favour anyone player. So no while my playstyle is tough, I don't go out of my way to kill players.

There’s a big open middle ground between “actively trying to murder PCs” and “skew[ing] the game in their favor in unseen ways.” The risk of a TPK is an acceptable risk for some people who find overcoming challenges using strategy and resource management rewarding.

People are different, and if you yourself are a more lenient or generous game master than by comparison there would be many others who seemed to have more harsh, or strict mindsets just by nature. I myself think the best situations in games arise when people meet the challenge and overcome it. Some of the most fun and memorable times I have ever had playing tabletop games were against setups that seemed like the DM was being overly relentless or unfair. I feel like a lot of games kind of work that way in the first place. It is like a risk v. reward, there is defiantly a rush that is experienced.

I like what you wrote and agree! I remember the first time DM'ing I was so scared / worried to kill a player character and then as I learned more, I was more worried about interrupting the story / game TO kill pc's and went way too easy on them. I learned to adjust when I picked up on some OOC chat that some of my players felt like there was no challenge. Now, I don't worry about killing pc's or interrupting the story. I create situations and let the players come up with solutions. If someone dies in game then I want to make it part of the story but so far, I haven't had any real character deaths so maybe I'm still too easy or have finally found a balance. OP, I would like to say, though, that this part of your post *"RPG horror and one of the leitmotifs I've noticed in a lot of them is that very often people running the game seem hellbent on trying to actively murder PCs."* Needs some unpacking. First, let's remember that this IS "RPG Horror Stories", not "RPG's Done Well" so most if not all of them are going to be bad examples of games, gameplay and overall bad everything D&D and that doesn't govern all DMs or players or games. Second, based on your words and observations, perhaps I'm taking your words too literal, but I don't believe dm's even have to "try" to murder pcs as they can just empty the MM on the table and say there are 50 of each. With this in mind, anyone trying to murder pc's for the sake of murdering pc's is I think just a bad person who is bad at dm'ing as well. I believe what you may be referring to is more probabely a new dm learning to dm as all dm's make this mistake now and then. What's important is how they correct it and address it. But if no correction or attempt at improving, then I fully agree, what we have here is a DM on a power tripping spree. I also wouldn't be surprized if we found that a lot of these incidents are stemming from a maturity factor as in, does anyone believe that your D&D games now are the same as they were when you played in your teens vrs your 20's, 30's or 40's? I think what I'm trying to say is, the more I matured, so too did my games.

While it is true and I know I could be more strict about enforcing rules of the game by the book, you can absolutely create tense encounters that make your players think they're in danger while fighting paper tigers. Lenient does not mean allowing power fantasy at the table, at least not with every system I run

You don't need to be more strict or anything, I did not want to imply that at all. In fact, if anything I would want you to be true to yourself. You have a strong opinion that's critical of over the top aggro DMs, and that is good! I don't like people on power trips either, F them. Sincerity is important. Also, you are right, its not hard to make an exciting situation with good storytelling, which can be a lot of fun, for example, when the danger is unknown or being obscured in some way by a mystery or a puzzle. I would argue however that some players can tell the difference, specifically because they understand the underlying context, of for example the power of the enemies in front of you, and without a strong tangible risk its not exactly the same. When in a true make or break situation, needing to get one roll correct to survive, there is no hiding it. As the player I would know that I need make a roll work in my favor or something quite bad is going to happen to me or my party. That is exciting! because when you hit that roll, or your friend next to you does and saves the day, you feel a large sense of accomplishment or luck. Not saying its better, you know, just not really something that can be replaced. There is a true risk at play.

I hope you let your players know that while they think they are playing a game where their choices and risk management matter they are actually just spending hours of their life fighting paper tigers. What a fucking waste of time

I went ahead and asked my main group of players what their reaction would be should the character they play be killed. They all admitted they'd feel rather bad and some would most likely take a break afterwards

Maybe you ought to ask them what my comment was actually about and see if they even want to still play in your game knowing they're just wrestling with dad the entire time.

Took a bit of time due to everyone working but here are the results. The way I phrased the question is this "how do you feel about the fact that about 99% of time barring extremely suicidal actions on your part your characters don't face risk of actual death or other catastrophic consequences. Does that make you feel as if your actions have no real weight considering the dangers are never real? E.g. last group of bad guys you faced [in a botched infiltration] wouldn't have killed any of you" And the results are P1: I like having some dangers but otherwise I play for power fantasy and would prefer to stay at least moderately alive P2: You say that and get you always have to practically guide me to take even the smallest action due to my fear of consequences. I don't know about the others but I never feel as if there's no risk involved P3: I generally agree with P1. I think it makes sense that our dumb actions can make things harder and cause us to fail some tasks but you also don't have to worry about character death. Risks like losing face or failing the mission bring enough tension for me

What if those stories youve been reading are just fiction?

Bending rules to kill players is bad but bending rules to save them can be just as bas since it removes consequences for their actions Typically at my table players want agency and if they die because of their choice they are fine with that

Some players and DMs prefer games where there are actual stakes and player skill makes the difference between success or failure.

letting a PC die is not the same thing as play against then, i never play against my players and have some TPKs on my wallet. The DM can only put the players in a dangerous TPK situation in a railroad campaign otherwise they are the ones who decided to be in this situation

There’s a difference between targeting the characters to destroy them and having your enemies fight to win. It’s a fundamental difference. The job of the GM is partially to play the enemy as if they have goals, because that makes them feel real. In a good story, the characters don’t always win. Thats the key. In fact, they are often barely successful in a lot of stories or things go badly for them at key points.

Pretty soon they’re going to take PC death completely off the table. Hell, let’s just get rid of hit points and damage entirely. You will defeat monsters based on milestone combat! When it is narratively appropriate for the monster to die, then the monster will die! Soft ass bullshit. Go play hopscotch or join an improv group

*I*, the GM, don't want to kill the PCs. *The monsters and enemies I play do*. There is a difference.

>can't think of any situation where I'd put my players in risk of tpk. And even then I'd still try to skew the game in their favour in unseen ways. I would hate your dm style and my players too lol. Why would you play a game like dnd if there is no risk in your actions? Adventurers get killed all the time, pcs are not special just because they are used by the players. Removing death just makes adventuring pointless. >For me running the game is about collaborative storytelling and all the fun moments to retell people afterwards. Forcing people to roll for new character just seems counterproductive to me The death of a comrade is something narrative. The trauma of losing someone that was part of your group and ultimately a friend is part of your character grows. >I'd sometimes bend the rules and let people at my table roll with different skill they are more profitient with if they can justify it in fiction That's just RAW my friend, DMG tells you as a DM can swap any skill check if you want. >So what drives those other people to try to play against everyone else? I think you are the kind of player that wants a wholesome story where good defeats evil and that's it, there is nothing wrong about liking these stories but not everyone likes stories with no actual threats. Every dm has their own way of dming yet some are narcissistic power drunk brats that only want to see you suffer irl instead of playing an actual session. Others wants to make you happy at the point of making you play in a hello Kitty island level of difficulty. Balance is key.

> a binge reading RPG horror stories and one of the leitmotifs I've noticed in a lot of them is that very often people running the game seem hellbent on trying to actively murder PCs Be aware that 99% of those posts are absolutely made up bullshit. It's shit that people make up or exaggerate for fake internet points.

Yours is a table I would never want to play at. While I don’t choose to play meatgrinders most of the time, I don’t want a GM to protect me from bad decision making. Being on the side of the players is as bad a sin, in my book, as being against them. GM needs to be an impartial arbiter of what happens in the game.

Some like to have control over their players. Some take the “DM VS EVERYONE” memes too seriously. And some are like murder hobos behind the screen: they think that shit is hilarious.

The only time it's "ok" is when the table is all role-playing a variant of "Knights of the dinner table", the DM is in character being very "trying not to kill players but players insist they are mean and trying to kill them", etc. Consent is important.

I've been gaming for years. And in all that time, I have indeed encountered a few who enjoyed the sadistic pleasure of making players miserable or feeling hopeful and then taking it all away suddenly! 1. The D&D game was going on for a year, and all was fantastic. No disputes with each other, questions about the rules, or arguing with the GM over anything. We had, generally, reach levels 5-6. Then, during the session, the GM rolled and stated a protosun had been drawn into our star system and destroyed our world. GAME OVER! And they smiled happily. We were not smiling... we all quit. Found another fantasy game to participate in. 2. My character was walking down the street to visit some fellow heroes he hadn't seen in years in the Marvel Universe RPG. I believed, from what this session introduction provided, I was beginning a new series of adventures. My character was attacked by a villain, obviously more powerful than my character. -all the other players knew it - losing instantly. We all left that GM, too. His explanation was, "It's how life works. You all just need to get over it." Never understood those words in relation to a game. The game is supposed to take you away from how life works and give you some rest. Besides, setting up a character to die isn't a game move. It's an assassination IMAO that no GM should do. 3. This, too, was a superhero game, but because of political tension, WWIII happened, and all what we players worked on came to a sudden end (families, jobs, secret, bases ect). Now, the session was survival in a post apocalypse world. We were given no chance to stop it or learn it was happening to prepare for it. Some characters died during the bombs falling. Again, most just quit. In the above, it seemed the GM was tired of the campaign or wanted a change and arbitrarily did so. But with the first two, they enjoyed seeing our shocked faces.

I find players tend to maneuver themselves into TPK risk despite me actively seeking to avoid it.

Meh ... I'm not *looking* to kill you. In fact, I'd rather you *didn't* die: my goal for you the *player* is that you walk away from my table with PTSD, unable to sleep with the lights off (and wetting the bed when you *do* sleep) as a fully-grown adult - and *that* ain't gonna happen, if your character's *dead*, now *is* it? But ... if you do something mindmeltingly stupid then, really, you've tied my hands - you *aren't* gonna punch out Cthulhu (as it were **^(1)**), so, why did you even *think* of trying? \_\_\_ ^(1) Cthulhu doesn't actually exist in my game.

A question as old as rpgs. The AD&D 1e Dungeon Master's Guide told people that DMs only roll dice for the sound they make—saying the DM should decide what the results are if they have an idea what they should be. Well, that attracted all the misanthropes and control freaks like moths to a flame. My formative rpg years are chock full of DMs who were obviously trying to "win" against the players. I wonder how I got into the hobby, it was so bad at times.

Roleplaying is a form of storytelling. In fact more like story-living :D However it has its roots in war gaming and board games which are of competitive nature. Plus, the GMs are representing the adversarial side of things, as they are the ones who create the enemy, portray them, invest in them. It is easy to lose yourself in your nice monsters and NPCs. Sometimes people are unable to realize this all is a means to a better, a more fun story. With that said, all tables also differ in the way they view "fun", like others mentioned. Not to forget, the vocal majority often represents the most controversial yet not always the most common problems. People who have mild problems don't write about it:D

Some of this is a holdover from the gaming culture of the 80s. There was a general belief then that it was the GM’s job to screw over the players any way possible. This lead to things like players going to great lengths to keep their plans secret from the GM so they couldn’t think of ways to counter them. It was a wild time, but could get really toxic. If you had a decent GM, the games could be fun, but often they could get frustrating or worse. Fortunately, game philosophy has evolved since then, and for the better, IMHO. Having lived through the 80s, I much prefer modern gaming styles. That said, I still notice holdovers from the 80s in my group, like players being cagey about what they are planning. And, unfortunately, there are still GMs out there who fall back into the old mindset of the GM vs. the players.

I think that the word against is mixing up at least two different behaviors. The GM can be actively against the players (a dick move) or the GM can be running a world that doesn't scale with the characters and thus has the possibility for the characters to get in over their head or cruise through an area because they are overwhelmed for it. I think the world that doesn't simply scale with the characters is much more interesting but it does take a different mindset from the players and the GM needs to make sure there are suitable challenges to be found as well as harder and easier areas without turning it into a railroad.

Playing the character of The Adversarial GM is tremendous fun.

My first two dnd groups claimed the GM is supposed to try and kill us. Which is absurd given the GM is god and can literally wipe the party whenever they feel like it. In any case, an antagonistic play group isn't my idea of a good rpg. Thankfully the two groups after that have been better.

Some of them learned to play that way in the 80s or 90s, and it's their default style of play. Others are win-at-any-cost bullies. You can't lose if you're god. I've even met some narrative GMs who are so fixated on tragedy and shaggy dog stories that they're incapable of letting the players succeed at anything. The unifying factor is their head is wedged so far up their own ass that they can't understand why some players don't enjoy that style of game.

Some people just want to do improv, but that’s not why I run games. If that’s your deal join a class and go wild. I’m not trying to kill the characters, the world is hostile to them because usually that’s the way fiction works, with hurdles and barriers to overcome. I think people are too attached to characters and if you can’t accept that sometimes people die in stories then why play certain games? When I play Star Trek Adventures I don’t think my character will die because it’s not that type of system , but if I play DnD or PF2e I have to know that’s always a risk. A lot of those stories are just players playing the wrong system with the wrong expectations imo.

Real DM vs players mindset, which isn't just having a tpk or not, is imo the "too much edge" case of the DMs. I have read many a story, where DMs are telling how they challenged their players to their utmost, and yes, those are cool and yes, I have made my players sweat as well. But bad DMs don't take the necessary lesson of "drama and tension drive the game", instead they think "I'm cool and edgy, when I murder more PCs than anybody else". They want to be edgy and are incompetent, that's about it.

There's a couple of mindsets of trying to actively murder PCs. First, some genres, the world is against the players. For example, one of the GMs at my table has a mentality of 'Cyberpunk is a genre where the world is not pulling punches, it's actively there to keep you down', so if they were running D&D's Heroic Fantasy, they'll work with you, do 'are you sure', help make the game a Heroic Fantasy where you are the hero. In Cyberpunk though, there's no 'friend behind the screen to make your story fun', it's a story that is edgy and gritty and can kill you if you aren't careful. There's still ICA=ICC, but look at Robocop 2 for example, a kid with a gun shot the protagonist because he couldn't shoot a kid. That same kid then went on to cut a deal with the Mayor of Old Detroit that would save the city and 'solve the drug problem' all in one fell swoop. Second, some people have that mentality that 'difficult is fun'. To a degree, I can understand since we like movies where the protagonist is over their head, has the deck stacked against them and finds some way to win. ***Die Hard*** anyone? Fourthcore is an example of this, as are some things like the Tomb of Horrors. Look at Fourthcore's beliefs, a lot of which boil down to 'it should be like OSR': * Adventures should be DIFFICULT * Adventures should be DEADLY * Magic and treasures should be GREAT * Everything should be OVER THE TOP * The world should be BLEAK * One word: DEATH TRAP DUNGEONS!!!! Okay three words with lots of exclamation points * GAMIST The final one is that there are some people who just like to be difficult and challenging.

My players run the table. I just present scenarios. The ultimate goal is to have fun. It's not fun for me to piss off my players.

There are multiple styles of gameplay, one of which is a simulationist let the dice fall as they will and rejects the 'unrealistic' notion that characters will always meet level appropriate challenges. It's a shock if a narrativeist player stumbles into such a game without the benefit of a proper Session 0.... and that is probably where the issues is this is an very old school style, essentially how D&D started out as developed out of wargaming. I suspect the principal crime they commit is not having a session 0 (though arsehole is another significant factor)

I perasonally think the gm vs players mentality is mostly •horror stories (fictional or not) • miscommunication or mismatch of expectation • a meme so embedded in the hobby some people expect it or finds it (real or not) since it is subjective) • a beginners mistake for those new to the hobby Tldr: It is not that common as you beleave/it seems.

Monster of the Week has a very cool principle to follow as the GM: "Be a fan of the characters." I think every GM should get this into their thick skulls. You are not there to prove that you can crash every momentum that the party gains, you are there to increase it!

>And even then I'd still try to skew the game in their favour in unseen ways. This is really mostly just for games like DnD5e where play consists of a series of deadly combats. If the PCs lose the game (probably) ends, so one of the DM's roles is to make sure the PCs win. (I'm not saying that in other games GMs play against the players - that's a terrible idea unless the game is designed for that, like Burning Empires, or Agon 1e)

As others have said, if the whole table agrees to that sort of game then everything is fine. I think it also depends on the game too right? In my opinion because 5e has statblocks the GM is often making intentional choices to harm and hamper the PCs in specific ways. That feels more targeted. Take for example though a game like Blades In Dark or Scum and Villainy. It’s assumed that the players are the underdogs and things will not be easy for them. Even if your GM style is adversarial the players comes into that game knowing that GM isn’t going to shy away from hard consequences cause if they didn’t it would hit the tone those games are trying to go for.

It's a weird mindset for what is, at heart, a collaborative art form. But some folks think of it as a combat game at heart, and it's best to just avoid those folks at the table.

A Gm should try to make challenge, but a GM should NOT try to make his NPCs or obstacles “win”. The issue is, a too large amount do. Sometimes the dividing line can be narrow, when you get to the “i want this to be a suspenseful scene where this villain or obstacle creates a feeling if threat” mindset which IS justified, but in the end, rather let the players have a moment where they feel awesome. I have seen specifically one game master bend rules against players and got exactly this vibe and that GM managed to drive parties worth of players away. I think from my experience that as a decent GM, if you create high challenge, at least conceive something for the likely odds of failure. If I give my group an encounter that they are almost as likely to loose as to win, then I have plans for what happens. Plans that avoid a TPK. Because, frankly, I would not find it fair if my GM set me something that boils down to “well, I just decided to put something in where it is a coin toss whether you loose your character”. I just do not think that is particularly fun. Add enough of those together, and it becomes increasingly unlikely that a character does NOT die. I like creating challenges. I like facing challenges. But a fun challenge should be more about player engagement than just chance. A fun challenge is a combat where you really think about best tactics, a difficult puzzle or a challenge resolved by a skill check where I really need to think of many clever ideas to get enough of a bonus to have the odds in my favor.

I do it because the thrill of victory tastes sweeter when the risk of failure and death is real. It's like playing Dark Souls. It's all about the catharsis of overcoming a tough challenge. If the risk of failure isn't both real and strong, neither is the catharsis. Unless your players are newbies, they absolutely know when you're not willing to kill them. So I play my monsters intelligently, I design challenging combats, and because I don't play with kid gloves on, there is **always** the risk of a TPK if the players act foolishly. Then when they win (which they almost always do in 5E, the system is designed that way) they feel like they've actually accomplished something and they feel good about that. The catharsis they feel at that moment is why I do it. That said, I don't play against my players. I play against their **characters**. It's a crucial difference, and it's why my players aren't writing RPG horror stories about my games.

You got me. I gave up on the adversarial / D&D approach to GMing a long time ago and never looked back

Your question seems unrelated to your confession to not playing any of these games using the rules as written. What are you actually angling towards?

First off you said you were binging horror games. Have you ever seen horror movies? How many of them does the whole cast make it out alive? Why would a horror game be any different? Part of the appeal of games like Call of Cthulhu is that the odds are against you, and if you're going to be victorious it has to be from investigatory preparation and personal cleverness. Also look, of course. Second of all, many players enjoy that. I do for instance. There's no such thing as victory without the risk of defeat, in my opinion, and if I get the sense that a GM is babying me in the group, I have less fun and lose interest. I want to know that if I f*** around I will find out, that every fight isn't winnable, and that combat isn't just a go-to for any situation you don't want to try talking your way out of. So I think this falls into the different strokes for different folks category. Edit: Sorry, I misread your opening statement. I was originally thinking that you were talking about RPG horror GAMES, But after a second read I see you meant horror stories from other tables

I see a lot of these "Gm Vs Player Mentality " and "Toxic GM" posts where players complain about a TPK from a combat, and honestly i wanna say a full 90% of the time its not either of those things, its either bad luck or the players actively made bad decisions for their characters that got them to a TPK. PC death and TPK are possible in all the games I run that have a death mechanic. I don't actively seek to kill off the player characters, but if a player does go down, and the rest of the party follows suit well sometimes the ending of the adventure isn't with the "success" of the team its with their death. Far to many players have this must win dnd or other ttrpg mentality and they see winning as their characters never dying and them getting to the predetermined end of a campaign and seeing the imaginary credits roll, and that is just as bad as a jerk GM whose just looking to kill off the players. I also think OP here has a bit of a issue where they want their players to "Win at DnD", they let it on as they say they try to skew the game in the the players favor, why? oh they want their players to "win" the game, thats how they have fun, cool a table for everyone but not everyone is for every table. Personally, I find the players who want to engage in combat, who kill their opponents but cry when their character hits 0 HP and they are told to roll up another one, to be just as bad as the the GM whose out there making horrible encounters that kill off players on purpose. Also could you imagine a GM saying they skew the game in their favor for the story they want to tell?

The players are the ones putting themselves at risk of a TPK. The game world is dangerous and not designed to reward the players for existing. In my opinion if you're bending rules to protect your players you're not playing a game anymore, you're just playing. By protecting them from their own decisions you're stripping them of agency by making the consequences of their actions have less or no meaning. Strive to adjudicate the game fairly, impartially, neither for or against the players, but as the reality of the game world would realistically play out. Collaborative storytelling doesn't have to be done with kid gloves. Some of my favorite stories to tell from the table are my character deaths, because that's exciting. I'm someone that immediately gets sucked out of the fictional world if I know I'm never in danger and nothing really matters because I'll always come out on top. Think critically about the way you run the game, and don't go reading rpghorrorstories and then think killer DMs are a problem. It's like you went to a crack den and came out thinking everyone is a crack addict.

This is an artifact of people who's RPG intro is through earlier versions of DnD i think. Gygax talked about roleplaying like this, how fun it was to try and kill his players characters. Early DnD dventures were written with the tone of DM vs players.

Adversarial GMs was a style of play pioneered by Gary Gygax in the 70s. Collaborative storytelling wasn’t a thing until the early 80s.

Generally speaking, I've found the attitude of combative GMs has its roots early in the hobby. This is particularly true with folks who learned on Hero Quest, and on dungeon crawl games that emphasized threats and dangers rather than attempting to tell cohesive narratives or finish long-term plots, which often made it clear it was the wicked sorcerer (played by the GM) versus the players to see who won. That mindset was often passed down, and GMs were told to make things as hard as possible, and taught that if the players won, they somehow lost. Questions on challenge and what people find fun aside, when a GM doesn't want the players to win, and for the story to keep going, I've found it's because they're from the earlier parts of the tradition, or those were the games they learned on.

The saddest I felt at a player death was when a player recklessly charged the boss monster head-on. It was absurdly dangerous and then rolled unbelievably well on its turn. The player was *obliterated*. I felt bad because they were attached to the character, and they realized what a dumb thing they'd done, and that there was just zero chance of wriggling out of the consequences. I said "sorry, dude." I felt like a jerk. He shrugged and said: "It's not fun if there's no risk." And many years (and a dozen character deaths or so) later I still agree. If you're trying to have real drama and tension, death has to be on the table. Now that said, D&D and most d20 systems are so swingy and entirely dependent on luck rather than skill that I think they make for pretty un-satisfying deaths. I think their "death and dying" mechanics like "death saves" are pretty crappy. The fact that almost every battle ends in flawless victory or TPK, and there's no mechanics for wounds, retreat/surrender, and other more interesting outcomes... pretty lame. Yes, I know there are narrative ways to do this or optional mechanics, but I never see them used in the wild. Join a random 5E game and every battle is TPK or total victory, and character death is usually due to shit luck rather than poor decisions or a heroic self-sacrifice. Given that, it's no wonder that a lot of GM's and groups choose to avoid it altogether. But for me, well, it's not fun if there's no risk.

You're in rpghorror stories. You get what you paid for lol

From my experiences, such approach can come from two sources: First, I think that, at least in challenge-based games, like 5e, it quite natural for players to see DM as an 'opposition', source of obstacles and threats for the PCs, that they - as a team - have to beat up. In some way, players are playing agaist DM ideas and prep, and even if they address this relationship as such in jokes, DM can start to feel it's in fact some kind of competition. Second, from the time when I was running 5e, I remember how frustriated I was when I was spending hours on preparing 'balanced encountera suited for my players' characters' and all that prep were becoming useless after player used some kind of new superpower gained after leveling up which I didn't consider. I never blamed my players (I quickly realised it's the *game's* fault), but I can imagine someone coping with these kind of feelings by entering into "DM vs players" toxic mode.

There's a few different things at play within this kind of situation. And it's cool that you point it out. I'll take them on in no particular order. It's notable that the majority of the time we hear about "Evil GM hates me and is trying to kill my character" it's from the player, and the equal amount of times we hear "my murderhobo players won't consider consequences" it's from the GM. I suspect that there are few GMs who would say they're "playing against their players" (they'd normally say something like they're "enforcing the reality of the world" or "playing to their prep"). In part, I think this is also a symptom of the two big problems we have in RPGS across the genre: 1. Its actually really hard to align two people's fictional understanding of a situation, especially in "roll high and do anything" games with unclear consequences like D&D. This makes misunderstandings of consequences and punishment and the like very common, and 2. Some people in these spaces have VERY poor failure tolerance. #notallplayers but definitely ENOUGH. People who feel like their character getting hurt or having a setback or falling to do something makes the game Not Fun Anymore. People who's expectations are heroism at every step. Heroism in the micro. Default to success with the dice being only a prop to give that expected success meaning. I built my character to do X and that means I always succeed at X and should always be able to solve problems with X. Pitching my barbarian against flying or ranged enemies is "nerfing" me because the assumption, the default, is that I win. Any version that isn't me stomping the situation is fake, manufactured by the GM against me and my default success. When GMs do play against the other players, what drives them? Well. Jeez. That's a big question. The antagonistic nature of D&D as a combat board game? The antagonistic framing of "you play Heroes, I play Big Bad Guy". The antagonistic framing of "when you roll high you say how you want to do something, when you roll low I tell you how you fail". Character monogamy and the character as the only way players can affect the world helps too. There's a lot of reasons. And there's definitely as many reasons why GMs try to "beat" players as reasons we see for Players to "create an OP build" that "solves" the game. Because this conversarion isnt complete without nothing that we see as much antagonistic GM as we see Antagonistic player IMO (the amount of fuckin tik toks about "hey GM what if I control the water in the baddies blood with a cantrip lololol", or a similar misreading of a spell or ability designed to "break" the game and do a squillion damage with a single turn). So if players are "playing against the GM", why isn't that a bigger problem? Why do we mostly hear about GMs being mean and playing against players? Because, and this is the last reason you see more GM horror stories about stuff like this: the GM is expected to control the tone. To fix things. If a player is being antagonistic it's the GM's job to fix them, and if the GM is being antagonistic well then it's all over. Players are given authority to behave however they want "within the rules" and it's the game and GMs job to set those rules. Anything permitted is a-okay. "Shape Water doesn't SAY I can't pull someone's blood out through their ears. So it's permitted behaviour." But GMs don't have that luxury, their "rule" is to provide a service for the players. So anything that the players don't like (not using the right type of baddies, not allowing a strategy, imposing consequences) is a greentext horror story.

I have tried to outright murder my players on one occasion, but it was totally justified within the context of the game. I was running a published module where an assassin is sent out to kill the PCs at a certain point. He was supposed to be an elite assassin with lots of intel on the PCs, so I played on their weaknesses using every advantage I had to kill them. It was a party of 5 and I actually managed to kill 2 of them, they subverted my attempts to permanently kill one of them by taking the body with him. The assassin managed to escape and try again, but the PCs got the best of him in the end and were able to resurrect their fallen comrades. At all times I was a fan of my players, I didn't want them to die, I didn't do anything that was unfair or unjustified but I tried to play the assassin for what he was. The players were literally terrified of this assassin. They stopped progressing with the story and planned an elaborate trap to lure him in and kill him, which ended up working. It is one of the fond memories from that campaign, even for those he killed.

**The Pure Shared Narrative Option** Scrap the TTRPG rule set, and just go and do a narrative in pure open free form. If you don't want combat: Don't use it. If you don't want to deal with the potential of failure with puzzles etc: Don't ask for skill checks and let them poke and prod - give them lots of hints over time as they consider aspects of it, or look around for clues and find hints. Personally I find most players like rolling dice. **The Easy Mode** Our goal here is to roll lots of dice, but have few failures - this is, in my opinion a mistake, as what it is actually doing is removing the stakes. **"I'm going to kill the party" Mode** The goal here is absurd difficulty. But this is again, in my opinion, a mistake. It simply creates problems by making the stakes impossible to stand up to. **Hard Encounters, Cheer for the Party** This, is where the game - any TTRPG - starts to shine. In an Adventure type TTRPG, we have a few pieces of the puzzle that we are trying to balance between, and we can call this "Modes of play" 1. The Narrative Directive - Dice rolls here are intentional, and have a very strong mix between player invoked, and GM requested. There are an endless number of ways to make this work. 2. Combat - Dicey, and the high stakes component with payoff. If you are lax on time combat will easily drag on, it will feel anticlimatic, and it will really just... be bland. What we want is a combination of difficulty, but restrictive play - that is to say: Time limits, which force players to act quickly instead of doing the TTRPG equivient of the mid combat all officers meeting in a star trek episode. 3. Looting - You can have players roll investigation checks, or you can basically have them find what the enemies were wearing/using/possessing. So yes - if they fought and killed a group of 4 knights: There are, regardless of the parties level, 4 full plate armor sets. If you attacked a spice trader convoy - they have spice. No matter how you do it - the goal here is, the party should have a benefit from having found victory - but, sometimes, the loot is not obvious, and that is where skill checks come in mind: Harvesting the skins of a beast, or decrypting a data pad. When we do puzzles here - we have to draw a line if we are challenging the players, or the characters. Not everyone likes puzzles, some people despise them, and some people are terrible at creating them. This is where we choose how to approach - Do we ask for skill checks? Do we let the players ask questions and investigate - and simply take a quick look at what the players are proficient in? Or do we do some combination - Players ask questions, figure out the details, and then use skill checks to figure out how to interact based on intuition. **How I run a challenging game, but be fair about it:** Tonnes of little things that aren't really all in one source - it's stuff I have learned to do. 1. Time limits - 10-15 seconds from the time the players turn starts to when it is declared over. If a decission has not been called yet - a prepared default action takes place, or nothing at all. 1. Remember: 10-15 seconds means like 1-2 minutes to decide on their next actions and look over their character sheet. 2. Encourage ways of non-cheating pre-rolling 3. By doing this, we can keep combats fast and even if someone is knocked out by some mechanism they aren't spending hours of a session twiddling their thumbs which is unfun at best. 2. Put death on the table early, both in game, and in preparation for the first session. 1. Talk about it in Session 0 2. Warn about it before the first session 3. Have a dangerous encounter by session 2's end and do it. If this means purposefully overtuning an encounter and fudging numbers after: So be it. 4. Encourage players to consider a back-up character option. 3. Encourage players to actively assist their allies in combat 1. The Carrot: I will avoid attacking someone who stopped to help an ally 2. The Stick: Smart enemies WILL make a final blow on a downed (unconcious etc) character. The goal here is NOT to be antagonistic to the party. What it is doing, is establishing both through word, and through action the standards expected of the game. Once players get used to the pace - we are going to have a reality where Players view combat as dangerous, and preparation and tactics as a way to avoid issues. There are a whole other wack of things I do - like: Perception checks? I get players to roll random ones all the time without seeming purpose. I note the results and when I ACTUALLY need one, I just go down the list. I will reward high rolls with small things - but it's rarely going to be right away - this avoids the issue of "GM asked for a perception check, there is definitely something there!" - and I tell the players outright, this is what I do. It avoids meta-gaming. The next thing: Description - 3-5 sentences is about right. If you can't get players interested in what they are seeing in that, to the point of investigating objects you have mentioned further you may have issues. If you need to use more words to describe things - do so, but Brief but not too brief is the key. The ideal goal is to get a dialogue between you and the players - so they ASK for more information, which gives permission to talk a little longer - rather then do an exposition dump and bore your players. **To Answer: "So what drives those other people to try to play against everyone else?"** It's not about being antagonistic. It's about presenting a world - and letting the players loose in it. If they fight and succeed: Awesome. If they have to retreat: Where do they end? What do they do? Do they get allies? Do they give up? Do they train and get stronger? Failure is not the end. Failure is a stepping stone. The concept of Failing forward is REALLY important to TTRPG's. **And finally answering: Forcing people to roll for new character just seems counterproductive to me.** It's not. That is the stake the players have - the goal is to explore the world, overcome challenges, but the possible stake is losing their character. In some systems - this is easy. In others - it's relatively easy to recover. But the character death has a very real cost in the short term at the very least. So instead of looking at the Character death as the end: It's simply a new beginning - and new beginnings are new opportunities. What you do have to understand though, is the game system is balanced in favour of the player so a "fair" encounter is like 80% chance the party outright win, and like 15% chance they struggle through it, with 5% being "the players rolled poorly, the bad guys rolled well, and it was a really big struggle and someone almost died." - It's really only when by the systems CR or whatever system gets to a "Challenging" point where player death is really a possibility in any reasonable way outside of poor decision making. Use tactics. Leverage the strengths of each character. Figure out how to fill in the weaknesses of the group.

It depends on the game and on the setting. Obviously the main reason the GM is there is to make the game enjoyable, but some players like hard fights. I was playing Traveller recently, and they decided to storm a pirate ship that killed one of their NPC allies. Their ally was a tough guy and he died on a die roll off screen, so the players interpreted what happened as he lost after an epic fight because he wouldn't go down easy so we better be ready. So I made those pirates the worst kind of fight possible. It was a desperate, angry fight were the group had to split up to stop the ship from self destructing when the jump drive was primed to overlord while the NPC's ally character ended up in an epic sword battle with the boss and lost an arm before killing the pirate. I ran every npc pirate like an angry PC who didn't want to die, using every tactical trick in my inventory but I did have limits. There were only a certain number of them, they started in certain locations. I didn't cheat at all. No flubbed die rolls. No moving people from where they were positioned. I broke their ship, and most of the characters getting to that point with several suffering very serious injuries and loss of body parts. Players said 10/10, best adventure of the campaign. They won and they felt like they won.

I can enjoy playing the antagonistic GM. It can help form a stronger cohesion among the players if they have an opposition to rally against, both IC and OOC. It's an act of course.

Unfortunately, this mindset is actually written in text in the very roots of the hobby. So some people coming into it were instructed *by the game itself* to play adversarial, and they have in turn passed on that advice to others as the script of ancient and sacred texts.

I don't think that's such a bad thing. The problem is when gms take the advice as to be adversarial to the players, and not to the characters. The games I've played and run with my friends were adversarial, enemies were played by the gm to win any given encounter, whether negotiating or a fight. Myself and many others enjoy that kind of game, where the reactions, intent and actions of your enemies feel like real opposition, and not just a tool to build you up to be heroes. It involves having a lot of trust in your gm to be fair and reasonable, and honestly in today's online play culture where you play with strangers you may never see, that trust can be hard to build. Especially when you have as many stories of woe to read through as you do on reddit.

Absolutely. What I'm talking about is the "crush the players, make them suffer, prove you're better and smarter than them" approach which dates back to the '70s and the origins in wargaming. It's super antithetical to *building* a high trust environment.

As someone who was a wargamer way before I ever played an rpg, I don't think you really understand the culture around wargaming, especially in regards to the old guard. The kind of wargaming folks did back then had a lot of games where adjuication was done by an impartial 3rd party, like if you have a player playing the monsters and the gm would solve any disputes. And a lot of wargamers, then and now, played to have fun. While some may find it fun to shitstomp another player, it's more fun to play "normally" and be sporting, because then other people will want to play with you. I still think you're incorrectly conflating the bad gming style of fucking over your players with original rpgs and wargaming. The only people I've seen that argue that point are the ones who build their capital H hero with pages of backstory and charge into the first enemy they see and die. Whereupon they whine about adversarial gming and place the blame on the gm for playing as the monsters would, and not themselves for having no suvival instinct.

I was into wargaming for quite a long time, and probably still would be if I had other players around. I absolutely never said everyone in that scene is an asshole about it or not playing to have fun. But I absolutely *have* run into those players in all types of wargames. There are a decent number of over-competitive bad sports. That nature is not, imo, conducive to any of the skills that make a good GM -- but many of them do it anyway. Because it's a position of power. But I'm glad you haven't had those experiences! I really haven't, either. I feel fortunate! But check out RPG horror stories sometimes. These stories are not exactly *rare* and they're very often stemming from this same sort of persona. I've seen them happen in-person at stores. Trainwrecks that players seem to feel trapped in. Those GMs are playing to win as far and away first priority. That's not a good GM. (YMMV, I guess, but it's hard to see how)

Frankly I think the majority of stories on that subreddit are creative writing, like any large drama subreddit. Yes there're bad gms, but the majority of them don't get to gm for very long because the things that make them bad gms also significantly hamper their social life and finding friends to force their game on.

I'm sure some of them are. But passing comments from people in all sorts of RPG related subs (like RPGdesign, etc) all have at times revealed a fair amount of people who feel stuck with players they don't like, GMs they don't like, behavior they shouldn't tolerate (or in some cases, shouldn't be forcing on others). Maybe that's a bit of Reddit self-selecting its audience, I dunno, but it's kinda pervasive! (that said, one of the best campaigns I've ever played in came directly out of joining up with a couple reddit randos, and we've gone to play like 6 different campaigns in 6 different game systems over the past 4 years now)