Becoming a Killer DM: Enough Rope to Hang 'Em

 "H is for Hallways" by Jeff Easley, featured in Michael Curtis' The Dungeon Alphabet

The worthy GM never purposely kills players' PCs. He presents opportunities for the rash and unthinking players to do that all on their own.

Gary Gygax

Running a very deadly game practically requires a lot of player choice, e.g. a sandbox approach.

If you are railroading a party through a series of meticulously planned encounters they had damn well better be balanced.

(Aside: Today, 'balanced' is usually implemented - if not honestly interpreted - as "The PCs will succeed unless the players make fantastically bad choices or rolls". I was brought up differently: When my first AD&D character, a fighter, used a wish to "fight a worthy opponent over a fat purse" (so as to recover his honour with a duel and get some gold), the DM sent a guy actually slightly stronger than my fighter. My fighter died. Ever since, I've interpreted "worthy" as "stronger" and "balanced" as "has a 50% chance of killing you". If I forced my party into a series of really 'balanced encounters' - and without a chance to tip things in their favour through clever play - they'd be dead by the end of the session.)

If you are letting a party run loose in a sandbox, 'balanced encounters' are not much of a concern. As Gygax points out, the idea is to give the players enough rope to hang their characters with.

To wit:

Corridor A opens into a room marked with goblin graffiti and contains a large chest.

Corridor B opens into a room reeking of undeath and features a priceless* gem on a pedestal.

*Okay, not 'priceless'. Let's say 'worth one level each', by the calculations of the thief.

If the players choose corridor B you can run whatever deadly trap or encounter you have prepared. Flood the room with negative energy, teleport a dozen wights into the midst of the party etc. - knock yourself out!

And if the players figure out a way to get their grubby little hands on that gem - and there should be a way, not to mention clues! -, by all means: let them have it and level up. Great risks should yield great rewards.

If you are starting out as a Killer DM, take care to let the players choose which challenges to take on and which to back away from. You'll have far less compunctions about killing off PCs if they chose their own doom.

Death, Dying and TPKs

Poring over the excellent Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG I came upon rules for saving ostensibly dead characters:

Bleeding Out: There is a chance of saving a dead character by healing him very quickly (such as with a cleric’s ability to lay on hands). […]

I’m sure you are all familiar with similar rules. As the Swords & Wizardry White Box notes

[...] many referees allow characters to be ‘unconscious at 0 hp and not actually die until they reach some pre-determined negative number.

Whether one uses the ‘death at 0 hp’ approach or ‘dying’ rules has serious ramifications.

Most notably, ‘dying’ rules decrease individual risk but actually increase the chance of a TPK.

If the party’s fighter goes down after a brutal crit the best strategy might very well be retreat, i.e. cutting one’s losses and running. But if Bob’s character can still be saved the other players may want to continue fighting in the face of unfavorable odds.

In the latter case, the decision to fight or run is a tough one. I like confronting the players with tough choices but it bears pointing out that in this case, social pressure (whether overt or not) may well be involved.

The upside is that if the other players try to save their fallen comrade the players will almost certainly bond (or deepen their bonds) - regardless of whether they succeed or end up losing their characters as well.

The downside is that the atmosphere at the table might be seriously impacted if the player of a PC left behind harbours hard feelings.

The DM has to make some tough calls, too. Realistically, many monsters will concentrate their attacks on a fallen PC. A pack of ravenous wolves, for instance, will likely try to drag off the body of a not-quite-dead PC or tear him apart on the spot (i.e. start feeding).

But Bob’s already having a hard time and if the DM decides the monsters go after his poor PC he might feel picked on.

I think the best practice is to decide on – and communicate! – such behavior beforehand and/or to let the dice decide.

I'm not condemning 'dying' rules at all, but for DCC, I’ve cooked up the following house rule:

Damage and Death p. 93

PCs die at 0 hp. Period. 

More precisely, PCs are fatally wounded at 0 hp.

A PC who is not yet at -10 hp may continue fighting for a number of rounds equal to his level. He is considered to be fatally wounded. Neither medical attention nor mortal magic can save him. When his time is up, he dies.

For more of my DCC house rules, click here. 

My Trinity of Old School Gaming (Part 4)

After explaining the relationship between a game’s mortality rate and its method of character creation, how the former leads to simple and exciting combat, and why all of this makes it easy to form or find a gaming group, I finally get to analyze how it all relates to challenging and creative roleplay.  

Random character generation results in quirky characters (an intelligent warrior, a nimble wizard etc.) and, perhaps more importantly, in characters one might not have chosen to play otherwise.

A high mortality rate leads to a much, much more intense roleplaying experience. Consider the following scenario:

Peasants ask the adventurers to help them against a terrible monster. It’s a sandbox campaign, so the monster might indeed outmatch the characters and it’s up to the players to decide whether to tackle it or not.

If the players know that the DM will let them escape in case things go wrong, or will adapt the monster to the party’s strength, or fudge, then the choice to play the heroes is an easy one.

(And that’s exactly what the players will do: play the heroes.)

If the players know - from actual experience - that PC death is a very real possibility and a TPK is not out of the question, then the choice to play the heroes is a tough one.

(And if the players go through with it, they are the heroes, at least to the extent it’s possible to vicariously experience such a thing through fiction.)

In the former case, you’re emulating a genre and creating a story (with high drama and heroic deeds).

In the latter case, you’re putting yourself in a character's shoes to make challenging choices and suffer the consequences, for good or ill.

Of course, similarly negative consequences for the players also work to some extent. If the risk is real, the play is intense. Choosing to enter a tomb when you know it’s full of level-draining wights takes guts on the part of the player. Choosing to save an NPC’s life instead of escaping with gold worth 3000 XP requires that the player is really invested in the in-game fiction or his vision of the character.

(Risking a -1 penalty for the next three encounters or getting those 3000 XP or whatever from the ‘story award’ for saving the NPC – well, that’s just not the same.)

Oh, and then there’s simple combat. A simple combat system frees up mental space for creative solutions or evocative descriptions. In complicated games, players are so busy tracking multiple variables and weighing (preconfigured) options that there is hardly any time to appreciate the fiction or think outside the box. It was a running gag in one of my Rolemaster campaigns that, after a long fight, the players and DM would enumerate all the mechanical advantages and bonuses they had forgotten about.
 

That's it for now with My Trinity of Old School Gaming. Next, I'll start a series on Becoming a Killer DM, but I plan to throw in some rants and reviews as well.

My Trinity of Old School Gaming (Part 2)

Last week, I examined the relationship between a game’s mortality rate and its method of character creation. Let me expand my diagram to look at some ramifications of my trinity of old school gaming. This week I’d like to focus on one of the main effects of a high mortality rate among player characters: Simple, yet exciting combat.

One of the foundations of old school gaming is killing things and taking their stuff, so a satisfying combat system is of paramount importance.

A high mortality rate allows for just that. If those dice clattering onto the table just now might spell your character’s death, you’ll be fully invested in the action regardless of the complexity of the rules. When I roll monster damage in WFRP, for instance, all my players’ eyes are glued to the dice, even if they concern another player’s character.

If, on the other hand, you take away the risk of death, you will either end up with boring combat (DSA3, I’m looking at you!) or you will have to compensate for the thrill of danger by offering tactical depth (the D&D 4e approach), evocative tables (the Rolemaster approach) or whatever—at which point combat will no longer be a simple affair.

(Admittedly, things other than your character’s life might be at stake. Maybe an NPC could die, your character could be traumatized etc. I maintain that the threat of character death is the key, though. In-the-moment, the inevitably occuring deaths often suck but that’s the price you have to pay – and a topic for another day.)

I'll explain more of those arrows next week.