You need a bit of both. I don’t want a cakewalk for my storytelling, but I want some break from the pain train every now and again.
Like, i’d love a good story, but I wanna work for it and risk things to get the reward at the end. I don’t want the game to be a formality, I wanna roll dice and worry about whether or not I’m gonna die sometimes
I want my characters to die. I didn't realize until recently how alone I am in this, but the idea of playing a campaign almost more like a roguelite (or maybe a Pokémon nuzlock?) is so appealing to me. I want the consequences to be so real that a decent player might need 2 or 3 backup characters, where a happy ending isn't garunteed in the slightest and the DM is fine to end the campaign in total tragedy. then the victories and successes would feel so much more earned, and campaigns would feel much less like on-rails experiences. plus failures can encourage creativity. a story where everyone just wins each task after the other is boring
[I want a game] where a happy ending isn’t guaranteed in the slightest and the DM is fine to end the campaign in a total tragedy.
100% this. While I don’t think meat grinder campaigns are the only way to achieve this, I’m enamored by running a game like this. I’m currently thinking about my next game, and I’m torn between a VtM game set in Ukraine during the Russian revolution, or a PF2e game set in a civil war of my own creation, and I think that would be one of the best situations to run a game like this. I want there to be loss, and I think the brutality of civil war is perfect for it.
You should look into Mork Borg. Very grim and easy for everything to die, oh and the world is ending.
I feel like this comic embodies the personalities of Aabria Iyengar and Brennan Lee Mulligan
I absolutely read the lower half in Brennan's voice.
To be fair they break Brendan frequently
I think they have a little bit of both, which is important! One of the best Brennan quotes was "people think I'm nice, but I just conform to the genre"
ŸES! I immediately heard Aabria!
My first and only dm was a huge dick
The start of the campaign village is being attacked, I picked a swordsman cus swing sword is easy probably good for a beginner
Anyways I roll a 20, DM hypes it up saying I have impeccable footwork, draw the blade from its sheath perfect, doing this epic buildup for about a minute or 2. Then he flatly says I miss my perfect swing because every enemy was 200 feet away
That was in middle school and now my GF is trying so hard to get me into Baldurs Gate and now it’s just a matter of me doing some DnD homework about classes and other stuff so I’m not going in 100% blind
You don't need to do that with baldurs gate. Just dive in.
Yeah the real secret about 5.0 is that all classes are broken and OP, and the nice thing about BG3 is that they do the math for you.
Oh well that’s nice
I'm not trying to kill my party, but I also won't stop them from being stupid and getting themselves killed. I design my campaigns like an open world video game. Everything is going on and just reacts to the players. They can find bits of information about things and then act on it, doing whatever they want until they start finding clues about the big bad because I like to try and make it more natural with the characters just existing in the world and not the stereotypical call for adventure a lot of modules and stuff do. But this also means balancing out the world by having the encounter zones being somewhat static. Over here shit is low level, but over there stuff is high level. But like, they will have clues. If they hear the rumors of a Balrog at level 3 and want to go fight it, that's on them.
DM 1: "We're going to have a magical just-so adventure and everything will be on rails! I've got a bunch of art I'm going to show you and I expect everyone to do voices and play in whatever vague medieval fantasy pastiche passes for In Character. I want everyone to have a good time, but also cry when my NPC gives a twenty minute monologue. This game is my entire personality."
DM 2: "Here's a stack of character sheets. I found a dungeon in a magazine called The Infinite Rectal Immolator that looks cool as hell. You have a 25 point buy and three magic weapons of less than 15k gp each. Just ordered a stack of pizzas and a five gallon jug of Mountain Dew. Let's see who makes it through. If we get bored, I've also got the new Halo game on XBox."
And then there are the cyberpunk DMs that do both.
"Dang, my character has some sweet augs, I'm a one man army, time to take on the corpos!"
corpos bring a real army and then hit you with an orbital particle weapon
Whelp, should have had a better firewall there bucko.
Eclipse phase does even better
You wake up in a resleeve pod, you start to slowly get the feel of your new body, you're a thin girl with butterfly wing? Looks cool you never got used to the smell of that Gorilla hybrid morph you used before. Looking at your arm you see a large tattoo Wang body rental and start to think about how the triad will make you pay while wondering what you do here. You're muse tells you that they restored a backup from last month, as you&ve been missing for over 2 weeks.
In EP, a TPK isn't the end, but the start
DungeonCast School vs Gygax School.
One comes from the influence of tabletop streams that focus on narrative building because it's got a broader audience appeal and they're usually close friends with the players at the table and want to hype up their characters.
The other comes from the generational trauma Gary Gygax inflicted on nerdom by insisting that the DM wins by killing all the PCs.
It's not the GM trying to break my spirit, it's my frickin' dice. Those little death polygons want to humiliate me by proxy. This is why I bought a creme brulee torch, you little fuckers.
Roll for intimidation
sigh Making CHA my dump stat is gonna fuck me, isn't it? I roll...
...a natural 20. 😳
I'm dming my first campaign soon wish me luck hope I'm number one
I wonder if DMs start as the first and slowly transition into the second one.
They get broken with time
Just remember, and make sure to let your players know: you aren't out to kill them, your monsters do.
And if the monsters fail we have after the session to/s
A good DM is both of these. They want you to feel that the danger is real, because higher stakes means the narrative payoff feels earned. They want you to feel like the world is wonderous, so that it feels like a thing worth fighting for.
ITT: discussion about BDSM using codewords and allegories in every comment.
ಠ_ಠ
The second one is definitely me. I've had so many players cry during games that I've lost track.
To be clear, always the good "This moment really emotionally resonated with me" kind of tears. I do very narrative heavy games, and I like to really crank the drama to 11.
I am (was to be more correct) more in between
You can be the first type, and some players will still see you as the second.
Like, they attack the king's castle for no reason and are upset the guards don't lie down and die, then refuse to surrender when things are entirely hopeless and they're offered mercy. Such a mean DM!
I'm a big fan of the "wisdom " check before players do something that seems, to me, completely stupid. Like, hey, before you set out to storm the castle, roll your highest knowledge skill.
Tactics, architecture, history, etc, all good. But any success on any skill (or even, literally, Wisdom if nothing else) gets you a little hint that this is a terrible idea.
"OK well, as a Baker, you understand that the huge wagon pulling 500 loaves of bread into the castle means there must be an enormous amount of guards. Since you got a natural 20 on your Cooking check, you can estimate the number precisely to around 150. Even if they weild the baguettes as weapons, you are certain they will defeat you."
And then, most parties I've played with will then begin formulating their plan to sneak in on the bread wagon, which is a much funnier story. Or they'll complain that they meant the druid should cause a storm to distract the guards or something like that. It's kind of amazing how often these bad plans arise from a miscommunication.
From the campaigns I've DMed, I've gone for a bit of an in-between. My primary focus is to have a fun, shared narrative. I'll always let players do stupid things that get them into grave danger. But at most, I'll usually only ever kill a few of the PCs.
If they act carefully, they can avoid getting into that situation all together. If they act stupid, they may have some deaths on their hands, but never a TPK. I don't want that kind of narrative dead end.
The other thing, is that I will never put the players in such a situation in which there isn't a way out of it. Usually this comes down to abusing the rule of cool a bit. Maybe they use a well aimed shatter to collapse a cave and separate themselves from their enemies. Maybe they jump down the cliff into the river below. Maybe the enemies have taken such a beating themselves that they find they aren't willing to fight to the death.
