How many times have you heard something along these lines?

DM: Ok, you successfully reach into the pocket of the merchant hawking his wares over the busy street. The first thing your fingers touch is a smooth ring and as the man begins to turn, you deftly pull it out.

Player: Cool, I try on the ring.

DM: The ring instantly latches onto your finger with a death grip! You feel weaker every second! You’ve just pickpocketed a super cursed ring of you will die for whatever reason rabble rabble rabble.

I think you all know what I mean.

Every now and then I hear horror stories of, or at times, experience the effects of when a DM decides they aren’t playing for the group and begin to play for themselves. It seems every single item your group finds is cursed. Or every single encounter is incredibly powerful. Your character begins to feel like less of a brave adventurer out to protect the world from the evil lich and more of an incredibly scared fighter who knows that his sword and shield will never stand up to that pack of bugbears with 7 class levels, mithral full plate, greatswords, and more teamwork feats than is reasonable. Yes, I actually had a DM put my group of 4 level 6 characters against that.

It seems like somewhere in every DM’s life, he becomes a competitive gamer and decides he’s going to actively try to kill his players tonight. It’s happened to me, and it will probably happen to you as well. Maybe your group just trivialized an encounter that you painstakingly designed over the course of a week. Maybe you had a bad day and got into an argument with your significant other and need an outlet. Somewhere down the line, you become less of a DM and more of a kid on Modern Warfare looking to just kill everything.

The problem with this style of DM’ing is that it has the possibility of breaking the golden rule of tabletop gaming. Make sure everyone at the table is having fun. That is not to say that you shouldn’t kill a character who just kidney punched the king in his own throne room. By all means, wipe the floor with that guy. But when you make an encounter or scenario downright impossible to succeed at for arbitrary reasons, your players will feel resentful. There is a massive difference between a PC trying to perform a death-defying stunt against an encounter because it just may save the day and a PC doing that stunt because it’s the only chance he will even scratch the monster.

So, with all that in mind, I’ve come up with a small list on how to recognize when you may be playing against your players rather than with them. Also, how you can prevent these scenarios.

1. You find yourself designing encounters with your players abilities in mind.

So, you are sitting down designing next week’s gaming session. You’ve come up with a story, a little background, and a few encounters. You set yourself to designing exactly what sinister beings your player will face tonight. You realize that you wizard likes to use touch spells, so you design the baddie with ridiculously high touch AC. Or maybe, you make sure everything being fought has 10 legs because you are sick of the fighter tripping everything. You are actively thinking of any weakness your players may have and how to exploit them. You may rationalize that you are teaching them a lesson. That they can’t just go around doing x, y, and z.

The problem with this is that these types of encounters are fun for one person. You. The kobolds they were randomly attacked by somehow know every weakness of your players and how to exploit them. They are masters of making this particular set of adventurers weep in fear. They will make these PC’s run with their tails between their legs. So the players do that. They run, feeling slightly cheated that they didn’t even have a chance. It wasn’t even the BBEG. It was a random group of kobolds. See where I’m going here?

My Solution:

Design encounters as if you were the monster/NPC/etc., itself. Think to yourself. What does a kobold do every day? What would this particular tribe’s society be like? Maybe they hunt deer every day. Ok, so archery based abilities would be a natural fit. Maybe spear throwers. Deer usually don’t hunt back, so they may wear hide armor. They will have skills in survival to track and hunt. They may have developed keen senses over time. Who are their enemies? Maybe some bugbears in a the grove over the river. Maybe they’ve fought the bugbears for years over this river. They’ve become great trap makers because of this. They see bugbears as a favored enemy. Who are they ruled by? A fearsome warrior? A wise shaman? A greedy wizard? Is this leader protected by a set of guards? Keep going with this line of thinking. Get into their heads. What makes them tick? Why do they do this, that, and the other? Soon enough, you’ve come up with a nice encounter based on real variables that make sense. They have their skills, weapons, and abilities based on their environment, not the group of adventurers that happen to be traipsing through their forest. As long as the encounter is CR appropriate,

2. You have a strong urge to “teach your players a lesson” and mostly do that by designing a TPK.

Let’s take our kobold example from above. Last session, the group wantonly murdered a bunch of peaceful goblins. Well, they can’t just go around killing everything, that’s just not right. Right? So, you’ve designed this kobold encounter based on their weakness to TPK the group to teach them that some things fight back. Now, reroll your characters and let’s not kill everything this time or you might all die again.

Now the problem here is that the lesson you are teaching your players is that they shouldn’t do things the DM doesn’t like. As a result, they lost their characters. The players generally will not equate this in-game. They will equate it with you as a DM. Their next characters will have even less flair and story and will grow closer to being a min max character because they don’t want to die again.

My Solution:

Keep your consequences in-game. Just like it isn’t reasonable for a group of people to run around killing everything in your world; it also isn’t reasonable to groups to be running around actively killing them.

I personally like to work all consequences into roleplaying scenarios that have detrimental effects on the life of the character, not the player. So, last week our make-believe group of adventurers killed a group of peaceful goblins for no reason. (Even though we all know what the reason was. More sweet, sweet experience.) This week they are moving further into the forest and encounter our kobold village. The one we designed as a hunting society ruled by a shaman that is having an ongoing territory feud with the bugbears next door. Let’s say the group’s collective eyes light up at all the walking bags of experience here and set about an old-fashioned rampage. More loots! More experiences!

Ok, now take a breath. Let’s not try to teach the group a lesson by TPK’ing them. We’re going to take the high road here and actively think about what kind of real-time repercussions this could have. Let’s say with the kobolds out of the way, the bugbears can now freely seize the kobold lands and enslave or eat any survivors. Maybe the bugbears ride this easy expansion further than they intended. They have quite a nice plot of land and command of a section of river to boot. These bugbears are greedy. They want more. They set their eyes on a nearby town of humans and all their goods. The humans; not having a clue about what is in store for them, are taken unaware by the massive bugbear attack on their town. Many women, children, and innocents are killed or taken away. Rape, plunder, and death is everywhere. While a small cadre of rangers goes off to get their wives back, the town’s wise old cleric (who used to be an adventurer himself) takes time to commune with his god about how such atrocities could befall his tiny little town. His god tells him of the evil genocide your group of players took part in and how the balance domino’d to the loss of his precious daughter. The cleric, using his ties to his church, brands your players as vagrants and outlaws. A bounty is placed upon their heads.

The players don’t know any of this. This is all happening while they are happily slaying anything that crosses their path. They get to town and no one will buy their loot. People cross the street wherever they walk. Suddenly, a group of guards seizes them and they get to spend the next session convincing a court justice that needing more experience is a perfectly reasonable excuse for genocide. Everyone keeps their characters and consequences to their actions play out in a manner that could actually happen. Instead of stepping outside of the game to punish your players, you like the world punish them for you. And believe it or not, roleplaying of this nature will bring your player/character disconnection gap a lot closer.

3. Negative DM Fiat

This is a tricky one. I’ve said in a couple of places that when I DM, I fiat all the time. That being said, I take extra care to never, ever fiat in a manner that is detrimental to the game’s sense of fun in any way for any player. If I fiat, it’s usually because I really, really, really think it would be awesome for you to try to throw your halfing buddy onto the back of that dragon. So, I will make up some on the fly rules and fuzzy figures to get you a chance of making that happen. Why? Because it’s fun. Everyone will talk about that time that Bob threw a halfing onto a dragon’s back. And in the end, that’s why we DM. To create and design worlds, people, and conflicts that are fun and engaging.

My solution:

The hardest part about not running a fiat in a negative manner is recognizing that you are even doing it at all. So, first off, when you fiat, ask yourself why. Are you trying to teach your players a lesson? (See above.) Are you railroading the encounter to go the path you thought all week about? Do you find yourself racking your brain to find ways to make a situation just a bit tougher on your players? If you are running a fiat and can answer yes to any of those questions, then you are most likely being negative. And worse, if your player find out that you are doing that, they are going to be pissed.

So now that you’ve recognized what you are doing, try to actively turn your fiat into a positive one. Let’s go back to our example game. This week, our players are in court facing the local justice for their crimes against humanity. They have stated their case. They’ve rolled the diplomacy rolls, they’ve begged and pleaded. You may be very tempted to say “Nope! The rope for these men!” and make them re-roll. Unless they truly gave a horrible argument accompanied by terrible rolls, you probably shouldn’t do this. Why? Because you are missing out on a positive fiat that could open up a hub for many, many quests. Screw the rope. Find them guilty and force them to become indentured mercenaries to the city until their crimes have been atoned for. They will have to sweep the land cleaning up dung, escorting the lowliest of prisoners, dealing with the worst jobs this justice has to offer for their actions. In the end, they might even learn a little humility. On your side, you have a base for any number of quests you may have to send your characters on without having to design an overly intricate back story. Works out for all parties involved.

Conclusion

So, next time you’re DM’ing, think about these three scenarios. Are you guilty of any of them? I know I have been. But also think back to that one great DM who was just awesome and you had all the fun that could be had in his games. We all have one in our lives. That’s the kind of fun you want your players to have. To do this, play with them. Not against them. Just because us DM’s are on the opposite side of the table doesn’t mean we are on the opposite team.

Until next time, good gaming.