The Care Bear of DMs
ShadowDark
“Bringing a light to the dark side of gaming.”
Okay, this week I've decided to turn the flashlight on myself and explore a little of my own Shadow. I don't subscribe that one's Shadow has to be completely unknown to one. While it usually may reside in our unconscious or at least large parts of it, sometimes we are all too painfully aware of our Shadow.
In my particular case I have a definite philosophy that D&D is squarely about the player characters and they should be the heroes, or in same cases anti-heroes of the game and not only win the day but also rarely, if ever, die. Yet, taken to an extreme, if there is no danger of the character's dying or significantly failing, then where is the drama, the tension in the game?
You see, I also want to have pulse-pounding, exciting adventures where not only the characters but the players themselves are wondering if they will be able to succeed. I have had some of these adventures on both sides of the screen and they remain some of my most memorable sessions.
However, the avoidance of character failure or death, taken too far by the DungeonMaster can quickly leech all excitement from the game. I had an incident when I had first started DM'ing (this was shortly after the release of 3.5) and the characters had come across a roper; a hideous creature far too powerful for their level. This was a professional adventure and the purpose of the creature was to create an obstacle the characters had to negotiate their way past instead of addressing with combat. The players chose the combat route and soon all but one of their party members had been reduced to a helpless state as the monsters used its long tentacles to suck the very strength out of them.
Now, they had clearly made the choice and were knowledgeable enough to know this monster was above their capabilities but tried anyway. In hindsight I wish I would have left them to their fate but I allowed the remaining PC to negotiate with the monster for the release of his comrades.
In a current game I am running this same pattern has reared its head when I gave the party extra action points for an upcoming encounter where there existed the possibility of character death, at least in my mind, in a fight near the edge of a tall cliff that could easily kill a character if one of the monsters threw them off. In the end someone did fall but I nerfed the damage and the party clearly didn't need the extra action points to successfully defeat their enemies.
I think this comes down to me viewing D&D through the lens of a cinematic movie. When was the last time you saw the hero fall? However, what makes movies interesting is the suspension of disbelief and the drama revolving around the potential failure. I do believe that as a DM I need to allow for the possibility of character failure and even death to maintain the excitement even for myself as the person running it.
Part of what makes D&D fun for me as the DM is being surprised at what might happen next. Often this is through the choices my players make as well as the random chance factor the dice bring into the game. I do believe that not allowing the characters to fail, whether through their own choices or random luck deflates some of the energy of the game and yet I find myself struggling to allow it to occur.
I suppose another view to take of D&D is that it is a game and as such there is nothing sacrosanct around the characters always succeeding. After all, the game allows for the possibility of death and has rules built into the game, such as the Raise Dead ritual, to allow characters to come back from the grave and continue to still adventure.
I'm curious about the opinions of others. As a DM, do you fondly remember the glory days of 1st edition where it was almost a rite of passage for the DM to kill as many PCs as possible? As a player do you ever intentionally put yourself in harms way as an excuse to get killed off and roll up someone new? Do you prefer your DM to call the dice as they roll or would you appreciate a little leniency when you're about to fail your third death save?
Coincidentally, this topic is one of the top three reasons why I've stopped playing LFR games.
1) Death is certainly the more obvious topic, but failure is the more pressing issue. If a GM hasn't figured out how to include meaningful failure in their games, they shouldn't go anywhere near character death (unless they're running a character-of-the-week style game). Sure, every GM allows failure into their games; players can always roll low on their dice and miss an attack or fail a skill check. But how many times are characters allowed to fail significant plot points? How often are they even allowed to fail a single battle, or a skill challenge? I can probably count the number of times I've experienced it in LFR on one hand.
2) Railroaded plots don't count. Failure is only meaningful if there's tension, a missed chance to succeed. In the cliff example, the death would've been meaningless because it was not failure: there was nothing the players could've done differently to avoid it. As a counterexample, there was a basilisk petrification earlier in that game where it took two failed saves before permanent petrification, and I was kicking myself later for allowing a party member to get petrified since I had ways to get him out of it that I failed to use.
3) Failure should not be the opposite of success. Failure can be at least as interesting as success; however, most often, games are set up such that failure is boring. "You failed, try the same thing again." "You failed, wait while everyone else finishes playing." "You failed, game over, no more fun for you." Is it any wonder players have such an aversion to failing? And modules just compound the problem. The GM has interesting stories to tell when the PCs succeed, but usually no direction when they fail. As a GM, I'd want the players to succeed too.
I could go on for a while. Like I said, this is in my top 3 RPG gripes, and there are a lot of tangential issues that fall out of this one.
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This comment is very inspiring to me and I'm curious to hear what your other two reasons are for having stopped playing LFR. For right now, I'm going to write my next blog entry and use this as a jumping off point.
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Dear Care Bear,
There is nothing worse than a GOD intervention or a cheese dick "favor" from a DM when a PC has died. Let the game play out and let him/her die. The players can pay to raise him from the dead or he can give us a report from the afterlife. Maybe the PC will meet their god or maybe they will return as a vengeful ghost.
I recall something from the 3.5 DMG about player death that worked for me. You don't want players to die pointless deaths but you can't always expect a PC to die killing a dragon. It's always nice if their sacrifice can bring the group something meaningful though. You may pull punches to avoid player death but it should not be known to the group. Add a meaningful story element to explain the nearly invisible spider web with the lurking predator below or something cool. (Out of the frying pan and into the fire!) The players need to know that there is risk in the game or it looses tension/dramatic flare. I play Resident Evil a lot differently than Lego Indiana Jones because of the extreme differences in the risk associated with my choices.
Always go back to what makes the story more meaningful.
PS: I also make players bring back up characters so they don't feel the need to rush out the door. Players get attached to their characters so a little redirection can help everyone avoid the drama and rules lawyering that often comes out with a PC death.
Ruby Stern
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"As a DM, do you fondly remember the glory days of 1st edition where it was almost a rite of passage for the DM to kill as many PCs as possible?"
I remember playing Melee and then Wizard? I think they were called. Then the first edition boxed set showed up in our book store about 1977.
I remember it took what seemed hours to roll our characters and get set up to play. Twenty minutes into the first game, most of us died. Really NOT a good intro to a new game format. All the work to set up and then get killed by a gelatinous cube. Out of six of us, all six did not take up playing D&D.
Fast forward about 30 years. I've been playing 4th edition with a character for enough quests to level up at least once and get familiar with the game and what is expected from the players in terms of imagination and how to add to the drama of the game and develop friendships and history with other characters.
Having had a few adventures under my belt - if I did die and not be able to be recovered or healed, at least now I have enough familiarity with the game to know sort of what to expect. I could see as playing progresses and a character gets quite skilled and a higher level, if the chance to die was gone, it could kind of detract from the emotion and drama of the game.
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As a DM, I try to let the dice fall where they may. Usually I find myself erring on the side of too easy, and don't provide an adequate challenge for the party. I've been told I can add more monsters. I can think of one occasion in which I fudged things in favor of the characters:
I had written a skill challenge that involved evacuating people from a collapsing structure. I had explained to the players that their characters were not really in any danger themselves, that the point of the challenge was how they comported themselves and the efforts they took in saving the civilians. This was a hard complexity 3 (8 successes) challenge, and they were doing pretty well, but then the picked up a second failure with three successes left to go. One of the players informed me that he felt that there was essentially no way to win, and I sensed frustration. I had what I thought was an interesting path for failure to take, but I blinked. I reduced the complexity of the challenge to 2, essentially dropping two required successes, so that it came down to a final roll.
I have regretted that situation ever since, and cut all ties with that player who was so concerned with failure. I no longer worry about whether skill check DCs or complexities are too high (or too low, but that's a different story) and concern myself with coming up with interesting success-failure pairs for skill challenges, and with describing the effects of the PCs' rolls.
That's with skill challenges. Combat encounters are harder to make interesting in both success and failure, because one common failure mode negates PC actions entirely. The first step, then, would seem to be to avoid that failure mode. Look for other goals the monsters might have in combat besides the deaths of the PCs. Look for "alternate victory conditions" such as the monsters getting past a certain point, completing a ritual, killing an important NPC, stealing or destroying a specific item, infecting a PC with a disease, delaying the PCs, etc. The monsters can still fight and wound the PCs, but once they've knocked them out, there's no reason to continue and the monsters simply leave. This happens all the time in movies and shows. I'm running Delve 11 right now, and if the monsters got the upper hand and dropped all the PCs, they'd just storm past them and attack the townsfolk. Some PCs might die from failed death saves or too much incidental damage, but eventually they could rest again to come back and deal with their failure - if the players wanted.
Or monsters can beat characters down and then talk. Even bloodthirsty monsters might not relish killing an enemy outright, especially when a bruised and bloodied hero might spread their reputation. You can use this to let the PCs know that they can run and drag away their wounded, or they can press the fight, knowing that the monsters are confident of victory. This is the tack I'll probably take in King of the Trollhaunt Warrens, should the need arise.
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