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ShadowDark

“Bringing a light to the dark side of gaming.”

Welcome back!  This week I’m going to talk about another experience I had when gaming that I think has occurred in many people’s games, albeit this was taken to an extreme.  In D&D and role-playing games in general the vast majority of people would prefer to be players than the DM.  Whether it’s the increased responsibility or fear of failing to run the game successfully or inexperience, there is a great deal of anxiety surrounding the Dungeon Master’s or Game Master’s role.  I’ll admit than when I first started DM’ing in 3.5 edition D&D I was nervous myself, but after a few times of doing it I soon grew to love it.  However, I find it invaluable to continue to inhabit both sides of the screen.  Being a player helps keep me in touch with what’s important and that my goal is to deliver a great experience for the players when I’m DM’ing.

I’ll admit I have run combats where it seems the players are having little challenge and my monsters are dropping in droves.  It’s helpful to have the player experience fresh in my mind to remind me that this is okay.  Sometimes the players do have any easy combat and sometimes from my omniscient view of how many hit points, special powers and action points the monsters have left I may know the combat is close to being over but the players, without that same knowledge, may be feeling stressed or anxious.

While I tend to run my encounters without any modification, I do know DMs out there who like to silently bump a monsters hit points or add a bonus to their attack rolls to give the players more of a challenge.  I can see that done in moderation and with the goal of providing the players an exciting and fulfilling experience, this could be okay.

Unfortunately I think some DMs get carried away and lose perspective on what’s truly important.  This happened to me one time when group I was in had a new member join.  I’ll call him Phil, though that is not his real name.   He was definitely a power gamer, knew the character optimization possibilities inside and out.  As a player he was great to have on your team because his PCs could really lay down serious pain on the monsters.

After a few months of playing our current DM was growing tired and wanted a break and Phil volunteered to run.  This was during 3.5 and he chose to DM us through the super adventure City of the Spider Queen.  Things went well for the first few sessions.  He added a lot of flavor as a DM and great descriptions during combat.   Since he knew the rules well he was able to use the monsters to best advantage.  However, this being an adventure featuring drow in 3.5, their challenge ratings were much higher than the actual threat they represented. 

After a couple of months of the campaign I can only surmise that Phil was getting tired of having his monsters handily defeated.  Afterall, he was the guy who was use to running the PC who could run circles around the monsters.  Anyway, the fateful session came when Phil introduced an enemy NPC into the adventure that wasn’t part of the published material.  He created him as the same level as our PCs but pulled out every trick in his bag.  There were only two of us playing that night and the other guy tended to play and build very defensive PCs.  He was able to flee the “combat monster” that was destroying us.  I was not so fortunate.  After Phil’s NPC killed me he then cut my head off and took it with him.  For those not familiar with the rules on raising the dead in 3.5, missing my head meant the cost to bring my character back to life was going to be thousands of gold pieces more expensive. 

Anyway, it wasn’t long after that the rest of the group took a vote and Phil was ejected from the gaming group.  So, D&D is supposed to be a cooperative game.  The DM is not pitted against the players but has the job to run the adversaries, though hopefully cheering alongside the heroes when they are triumphant.  That is not always the case.  Competition can be a difficult beast to tame.

Have you ever been a player or a perhaps a DM in a game where the cooperative goal seemed to get blurred or lost entirely?  How did your group deal with it?  Were you able to work your way through it and continue on, or, like in my group, did someone lose their membership rights?