[D&D]DM Difficulty

[arguskos]

I'm curious, how many of you out there are rough with the players? This stems from the "What's the Best Save?" thread, where it was mentioned that a general Gentleman's Agreement prevents some DM's from using scary effects like Confusion, Hold Person+Coup de Grace, Disintegrate, etc...

I personally inform my players that I don't pull punches in combats, and that they WILL die if they are foolish (and sometimes through no fault of theirs or mine). Battles are always lethal, and no enemy who knows what his powers do will pull punches if he can avoid it. Most people will probably decry me as some sadist bastard, though, in my own defense, my players not only are fine with this, but expect it, so I feel fine about it (oh, and they don't pull punches either).

Does anyone else do this? If not, how do you deal with powerful death effects/Will-save effects/whatever? Do you avoid them totally/ban them? Do you just handwave them away? Make them easier to deal with?

Oh, and let's keep this civil (it might get out of hand, so let's all be friends here, yah?).

[RTGoodman]

I don't really pull any punches, but I don't actively try to kill off players either. That stems from a DM I had once who on multiple occasions would have monsters use hold person and then coup de grace the helpless player (including one of my characters), and that never seemed like it was fun for anyone except the DM.

I try not to use save-or-DIE spells against players, but occasional save-or-sucks (blindness/deafness, confusion, etc.) provide some suspense without being an automatic death sentence. Same thing with ability drain, death effects, poison, and stuff - it's just not fun for anyone if you've got stuff like that flying all over the place.

[Fiery Diamond]

I don't use save-or-die's, but occasional save-or-suck spells like confusion are ok. I try to wear down the characters as much as possible (make them waste spells, healing potions, etc.) without killing them. I will almost always fudge things if they would die so that they are in the deep negatives instead, unless the damage was so overwhelming that it wouldn't make any sense, such as being fireballed by a 9th level wizard when you have 10HP and failing the save.

I don't think character death is very productive, but I'll let it happen occasionally, so that they think there's the possibility.

[Zanatos777]

I personally try not to kill players before level 6, that doesn't mean they don't find ways to do it. Otherwise I wait for them to use death magic first. Other than those the enemies fight as I interpret their intelligence scores and cultures. Devils for instance coup de grace as soon as possible for instance. Always make sure only to use the information that the monsters have about the players too. I also do punish horrific stupidity.

[ZeroNumerous]

As long as my players don't break out Save-or-Dies or Save-or-Sucks then I don't use the same. If they do, then they do so fully understanding that any intelligent enemy would respond with the same.

[Mushroom Ninja]

Our DM started pulling punches after he killed all but one party member with a single wail of the banshee. But, then again, we really should have thought to get the Deathwards running before attacking the Lich Queen...

[horseboy]

When I play it's usually Rolemaster. I'm used to 9th level characters dying to 3' falls.

When I run it's usually Earthdawn. There's no Save or Dies in the system, but if the die explodes on you then, well...

For 3.x, well, a friend of mine got the nickname "The Bloody" in the RPGA because of his PC kill record. According to him: "I don't kill players, their own stupidity does. Not my fault there's so many stupid players out there." We play test some of his stuff before he published it (No, don't know what title he published them under, even if he told me, I was drunk enough to stand 3.x, so don't remember).

[Mando Knight]

Devils for instance coup de grace as soon as possible for instance.

Really? Of all the fiendish creatures, devils seem to be the ones most likely to gloat about their plan Bond-villain-style rather than simply finishing off their foes...

[Mushroom Ninja]

Personally, I tend not to coup-de-grace downed PCs (assuming that there's no healer around) because it seems like a waste of a full round action. However, I am not above readying actions to attack downed PCs. Using -4 Hp PCs as hostages against the rest of the party is great fun.

[Ire]

Its all or nothing. My DM and I when I DM usually go all out with NPCs trying to kill PCs. NPCs (with appropriate intelligent scores) are expected to fight with tactics as good as or better than our own. All of our characters are ridiculously powergamed so generally spells like wail/disintegrate/finger of death don't do much, but our fights are always vs CL 3-5 higher than party and are damage heavy and we usually end battles in 2-3 rounds.

With that being said, all our characters are designed to dish out damage at a very quick pace (+15 or higher to initiative, with powergamed DDs, Frenzied berserker as "tank" and no healers). Sometimes we do have trouble with encounters and a common strategy for us is to run or hide. In some cases PCs do die (roll 5 fort saves DC 55 at lvl 17...oh, you're dead) and we end either saving up for true res or just fudging rolls to say they're at -9.

[Oracle_Hunter]

Well, a lot does depend on the system. There is no mercy in Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia!, but it is bad form to explode a PC in a WoD campaign without a very good reason.

Personally, I aim for my PCs to come through alive, but I do have some hard and fast rules:

(1)No Deus Ex Machinia
Enemies don't run away for no reason, knights in shining armor don't run in to save the day, etc. That does not mean I won't use everything available to avoid a TPK, but if it ain't happening, it ain't happening.

(2) Never save a PC, but do try to save a party
If a PC is bleeding out in the middle of combat, he's on his own. No fudging of stabilization die, no saving him from collateral damage - that's his own problem.

But if a TPK situation pops up, I'll do my best to stop it... unless it really is just my player's fault. I'm not going to burn PCs because I made a mistake, so I'll do my best to fix it (if possible - see Rule 1), but they will burn for their stupidity.

Between those two, we do alright. I never played 3E to the point that save-or-die became a problem, pretty much for that reason. Coup de Grace-ing the fallen is seldom good tactics in a battle (you could be stopping the jerk with a sword instead) so my bad guys never used it.

I did kill a PC out of spite, once, but he had just nuked my Plot Hook with a Lightning Bolt. To be fair, I killed him via the 2 half-orc barbarian bodyguards of my Plot Hook so it wasn't exactly a bolt out of the blue

[Satyr]

The consistense of the narrative and the versimilitude of the campaign world are always more important than the survival of the characters. I rarely force the players into a fight, but when the steel is drawn, people die. Since I normally emphasise the importance of outsmarting stronger enemies, direct, open battles are just plain stupid in many cases, but as the PC's opposition are almost always thinking, feeling individuals with own agendas and ideas (and a strong will to live), non-violent solutions of confrontations are viable options.
So, when the players play smart, come up with a plan or talk their neck out of a noose, I am lenient, as long as it makes sense within the campaign universe. If they act stupid, I don't see any need to spare them.

[Who_Da_Halfling]

I've pulled punches on two previous occasions, but I feel that one of those was appropriate (I threw an Orc with far too many class levels at the party, and I pulled over half of his attack rolls once i realized he was averaging half the HP of the best PC and hitting on higher than a 3). The other was a critical that would have dropped a PC to -35 from 25 HP, which was something that I felt deserved some warning that it was possible (I think I dropped him to negatives but didn't kill him, and I did warn him afterwards that I had pulled the critical). However, after the party wizard decided it would be a fine idea to run directly into the middle of melee, I realized I was being too nice and decided not to pull any more punches.

I try hard to make reasonable challenges, and I intend to not use save-or-dies except after the party uses or discovers them. For instance, the most recent battle against a Cleric 10 necromancer, the party cleric had just gotten Slay Living, so I deemed it reasonable for the Cleric to have it. However, I made it clear that he had it by having him use it on an NPC (she was a Vampire so it didn't kill her but they all saw it), and he actively avoided closing with the party (using Sanctuary and buffs). However, when the Duskblade ran up to him and bashed him with his sword (when he could have thrown spells), I did not hesitate to try to Slay Living him. I did make sure not to optimize the Necro so that the Save DC would be doable (the Duskblade did make the save).

Ultimately, that situation worked out well (the cleric Slayed him, he made the save but fell to -19 from the damage anyway, so I narrated an epic negative-energy death). But, the party wizard did die due to contracting Ghoul Fever and falling to -8, then dying from losing HP to Con damage, and two other party members failed saves against the homebrewed Fever (which is incurable). I ended up allowing them to save two of the three of them (complicated explanation regarding special rites of Wee Jas), but I think I got the message across that a campaign with an epic, world-saving plot may have consequences. Additionally, I showed them that often, in D&D, death is more an inconvenience than a true tragedy.

For what its worth, the next mission is going to be much more amusing and less deadly.

-JM

[OneFamiliarFace]

I tend to agree with Oracle on this one (which seems to happen a lot). Neither player deaths nor TPKs have ever seemed to be much fun to my players, so I really don't use either. In fact, in my memory of 13-14 years of DMing, I have never killed a PC (but petrified one), and the PCs have lost a number of combats I can count on one hand.

Granted, when I was younger and playing 2e, that required a great amount of deus ex machina, which I quickly learned my players did not appreciate either. So I balanced it out.

In 3e, most of the punches pulled were save or die stuff. And I never had a villain coup de grace a downed character. In addition, there were many times when the CR system just didn't play out the way I thought it would. I don't have time to playtest combats before-hand, so occassionally I would have to tweak a monster mid-combat to make sure the players actually had a shot at winning.

In 4e, I feel more free to not pull punches, since players have more ability to recover on their own, and there are simply far less effects that can immediately burn them for one small mistake or failed roll. If a player dies in 4e, it seems, they had it coming from a long way off. On the other hand, I do feel the desire to just reduce enemies hps when the combat is clearly won, because some 4e combats can drag on for awhile after the players have clearly taken the field.

So I guess I am an easy DM whose number of punches pulled varies greatly with the inherent lethality of the system. To sum it up, I want the players to die because of a mistake they made, rather than a short spurt of blind unluck or a clerical error on my part.

[bosssmiley]

I don't need to hurt the characters; the players are happy enough to put them in harms way for me.

I'll always try to play an NPC or monster to the limit of its natural abilities and intelligence. To do anything less wrecks immersion in the game. A zombie shouldn't be able to arrange complex tactical plans, but you're not doing a villainous mastermind like an Aboleth justice unless you exploit its domination and illusion abilities to the hilt. If creatures hold off from using their full abilities there's usually a good in-game reason for it.

One thing I have been thinking about recently is the idea of DM as referee rather than as storyteller. I'm thinking of rolling all dice (attacks, damage, saves, skill checks) openly from now on. Let the players see the result on the dice, and let them appreciate that it's their choices that govern their character's fate, rather than DM malice or die-fudging pity.

[Ire]

One thing I have been thinking about recently is the idea of DM as referee rather than as storyteller. I'm thinking of rolling all dice (attacks, damage, saves, skill checks) openly from now on. Let the players see the result on the dice, and let them appreciate that it's their choices that govern their character's fate, rather than DM malice or die-fudging pity.

This is a bad idea unless you have really really disciplined players. If you show NPC attack rolls, players usually can alter their tactics via metagaming.

Example: You roll a 5 attacks for NPC1, you show that he hits the monk only on a 18. The monk now knows he can stand next to NPC1 pretty much forever.
This might not be the case for your group, but in mine we take combat pretty seriously and try to gain the utmost advantage we can by figuring out opponent classes/abilities scores/attack bonus/AC/hp etc as soon as possible and open rolls would give a huge advantage.

In my games we trust the DM enough to pretty much never fudge rolls, and basically gain all of our combat "knowledge" via statistics to narrow down opponent stats etc.

[Skjaldbakka]

I don't tend to use lots of shut down spells, the exception being to secure monologue time and establish an NPc as 'not someone you can take yet".

I like wearing my group down. So HP damage, ability damage, negative levels, that kind of stuff.

There is a gentleman's agreement in my games. I don't pull out certain combos first. My players don't whip them out either. Although I did seed a item of 3 times ever celerity at one point. Which lasted three boss fights. Who would have guessed?

[Tengu_temp]

I don't kill my players in combat - the PCs die only if they do something stupid or if the story requires it and the player agrees, not because they had bad luck and rolled poorly. Getting incapacitated is fair game, though - and it helps that I tend to play games where you usually lose consciousness when reduced to 0 HP (or equivalent) and dying is hard, like M&M or DND 4e.

I'm trying to keep combat challenging and not to fudge rolls, but if I had to choose between adhering to those principles and creating a good story, then the story goes first.

[Greymane]

I do whatever the players' adversaries know they can do, hands down. However, I have them act their personality in a fight, too. Sometimes that works in the party's favor, and sometimes it doesn't.

A game that is now on hiatus that I was running... There was an ancient evil dwarf king that was brought to life, and so before fighting, wanted to see if he could get the party dwarf's loyalty to him in tow. That also meant when the dwarf said NO, the old king focused on him in the fight.

I use Save or Dies as a player, and a DM. As a DM, however, I consider the players to be 'special'. A save or die doesn't kill them. Their fate is just too strong for that, and so can knock them anywhere to half their max HP (assuming their at full health) to Staggered, to -7. The same, however, goes for BBEGs and MBEGs...

[Reaper_Monkey]

I run a free roaming world, where anyone of significance tends to be gestalt, where as the common folk (including guards and generic monsters) are regular vanilla. I pretty much ignore WBL as well, giving items and gold where it'd logically be and allowing players to be ripped off by merchants. This approach does tend to make them under geared at times, but means they have to priorities tasks to ensure they are donned in best shineys. This gives a lot of freedom to my players, and allows them to take on any challenge they deem fit to apply themselves too, for any goal they wish to peruse.

I do stress however, quite frequently, that if they choose to take on a dragon, they'll be taking on a Dragon (with massively pay off, as dragons actually have hordes in my campaign regardless of what 3.5 says). Death is always a possibility if they choose to pit themselves against more dangerous foes, but as they are completely free to do something else it lets them plan and specifically gear up towards short term goals and scenarios, and know that when they are running low on supplies that its not a good idea to go wondering about the more dangerous areas of the world.

The only lenience I give is I tend to avoid save-or-die spells as often as I can, as they tend to be very anti-climatic and a kill-joy for players. But if a player wants to go blow for blow with something out of their league, then they'd either learn to run or find themselves with a squished character. I do try to make it obvious about power levels though, punting NPC's or other random targets before PC's to show just what their up against, but my players tend to be cautious against new monsters anyway.

[Neithan]

My policy is, that PCs are only get killed, if they are aware, that they are taking a potentioally high risk.
Or rather make it "if any peorson with the least ammount of common sense should be aware of a potentially high risk".

Open a door and the ceiling comes down and crushes the whole party would not happen, because there was no way the players should have assumed that opening the door could be deadly.

I also make it depending on which of my players is doing something. There are two people in our grup, who have never played any rpg before, and I will be pretty nice to them. But there are some experienced rpg-veterans, whom I know of, that they like the thrill and know what they are doing. If they try something reckless or dangerous, I will run the game much more like the dice are falling.

On the other hand, failing their quest, is always possible. Not every encounter I set up is meant to be overcome. Sometimes the players have to face it, that they can't win this day and have to retreat. Sometimes they can't rescue the princes, retrieve the scepter or keep the evil duke from escaping. Such is life. Even as a hero, you don't succeed in everything you do.

[ken-do-nim]

Let me add that if, as a DM, you don't kill characters when it is obvious you should, you lose credibility with the players. They stop viewing what you send against them as a threat, knowing that you the DM will pull them out of the fire. This is what happened in a long-running 3.5 campaign I was in. Every time someone died, the DM fudged it:

- the ranger went down to -15 hit points. On the spot, the DM decided to make a new rule that people can go to negative con in hp before dying, and this ranger had a 16 con. Well, okay, but he had also been under the effects of a cloudkill spell for several rounds and his current con was only 13.

- the paladin died from hit point loss. Plain as that. She was dead, but the player was pouring over the hit point record she was keeping, and about 5 minutes later starting questioning whether she double-counted something or not back a few rounds. The DM decided to err on the side of caution and said she was -9 and stable.

- a similar thing happened to the cleric. Died of hit points, but the DM ruled that he was only -9 and stable. In this case, it was kind of fair because we had just switched over to 3.5 and the DM hadn't let us buy new equipment yet and threw a monster at us that couldn't be hurt with adamantine weapons.

- my monk was paralyzed in fear from approaching a nightwalker. The nightwalker didn't take the coup de grace, instead concentrating on the foes attacking it. A borderline case I admit, and I'm not complaining!

- the ranger, facing the same nightwalker, failed a save vs. slay living, rolling a 1. The player assumed his character was dead, but the DM decided to overrule that as -9 and stable. I asked him about that later and he said it is no fun to die from a failed save.

So overall, this DM has lost the fear factor in my eyes, because no matter what he throws at us I'm pretty sure we'll live. The campaign ended, but I learned a lot of lessons on how to DM from it. Funny thing is, raise dead is not a rare spell in 3.5 once you reach high level, and you only lose 1 level; I don't see why the DM worries so much about saving each character.

[Totally Guy]

I can't seem to challenge my group consistently to the same level without it feeling contrived. A bit like the concept of the "Dungeon of monsters that are just tough enough to really challenge you".

So I've been experimenting with the encounters being "climactic" and "anticlimactic" in a kind of cycle but I guess that's kind of contrived that it keeps ending up in that pattern.

[Zanatos777]

Really? Of all the fiendish creatures, devils seem to be the ones most likely to gloat about their plan Bond-villain-style rather than simply finishing off their foes...

Yeah I was surprised too. The Fiendish Codex 2 said it so I went with it in my devil campaign. Now my players fear devils, specifically abishai for their wrack spell-like.

[Tengu_temp]

So overall, this DM has lost the fear factor in my eyes, because no matter what he throws at us I'm pretty sure we'll live.

Dunno about you, but I'd rather be known as the guy who creates great stories with his players, not the guy who's feared by them.

[valadil]

I make the fight just hard enough that the players think they might die. No harder than that though. I don't throw a lot of death effects, but anything else is fair game. I fudge a lot of rolls, but I'd rather fudge up than down. What I mean by that is that I'll use an enemy that's a little weaker than necessary, but inflate his hitpoints over the course of the fight. This kind of fudging is more transparent than dropping an enemy a little too early.

[Kantur]

I doubt that ken-do-nim meant fear of the DM, but fear of a dangerous combat or situation. After all, if you're at two hit points and the dragon's starting to look beaten, what does it matter if you stand there and attack it again? You'll be ok after the fight anyway, even if the dragon should have killed you by taking you to -23 hit points because the DM won't let the character die unless you specifically say you want it to.
The whole party's been killed? Well, you're probably going to expect that it was actually all non-lethal damage and you've woken up in a prison guarded by the monster's minions instead...

Taken to an extreme - if you hear about a mountain of solid gold guarded by denizens of the nine hells, will you care about the guardians? Or go for it knowing there's not really a risk to your character?

[ken-do-nim]

I doubt that ken-do-nim meant fear of the DM, but fear of a dangerous combat or situation. After all, if you're at two hit points and the dragon's starting to look beaten, what does it matter if you stand there and attack it again? You'll be ok after the fight anyway, even if the dragon should have killed you by taking you to -23 hit points because the DM won't let the character die unless you specifically say you want it to.
The whole party's been killed? Well, you're probably going to expect that it was actually all non-lethal damage and you've woken up in a prison guarded by the monster's minions instead...

Taken to an extreme - if you hear about a mountain of solid gold guarded by denizens of the nine hells, will you care about the guardians? Or go for it knowing there's not really a risk to your character?

That's what I was referring to. There was also a railroading factor; he had the exact events of what was going to happen in the campaign worked out in his head, and bad dice rolls and player mistakes were not going to derail it.

[Satyr]

Dunno about you, but I'd rather be known as the guy who creates great stories with his players, not the guy who's feared by them.

Especially if you put a strong emphasis on the narrative side of the game, a strong feeling of threat is invaluable. Nothing is more poisonous for the narrative as the feeling that the own actions - including mistakes - have no influence on the game world or that the setting's versimilitude is sacrificed for a player. Yeah, the subjective impression of the players is herefore more important than the real danger, but it is hard to maintain the illusioon of a dangerous world full of adventure when there is no substance behind this threat.

[Atelm]

In combat NPCs/Monsters don't hold back, and I never try to avoid killing my players, but neither do I save them from it whether it is caused by their own actions or not is irrelevant for me. (no lying about dice roll results, etc.)

The only times I've had NPCs refrain from killing downed PCs were either 1) they switched their focus on the remaining standing PCs who were blasting away at them (the downed NPC is no danger to them anymore) or 2) it ran contrary to the NPCs goals for the PCs to die. Both have happened in games I've DMed.