Well Gents, I killed 3 out of 4 players. >lvl 3 characters

>>50140399
>the 2 who retreated go oh shit lets fight and engage
>the 2 who engage go oh shit lets flee and retreat

Pretty sure them dying is entirely their fault. Clearly there's a lack of proper communication or at least foresight.

>>50140399
That is some of the best Yakety Sax gameplay I've seen in a long time.
Killing 3 out of 4 PCs is a fair result from that debacle.
Killing the players seems a little over the line.

>>50140399
You're that DM for killing players and not their characters, yes.

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>>50140726
>>50140862
lol oops, too high. No worries they all livin, I'm not a murderer

>>50140862
Now, see, I don't know if that necessarily qualifies him as That DM.
Clearly murdering players is a touch over the line, but imagine the learning experience for the player left alive to tell the tale to new players.
It might be a good system for keeping players in line.

I mean, it's not like he had a DMPC or anything.

>>50140399
Our parties tend to die often, one died the same session they were made due to a kind of unfair fight. But nah, you're good duder.

>>50140940
Thats just what a murderer WOULD say!

help help, call the guards!

>>50140399
>party splits
>unable to coordinate
>remain split
This incident doesn't make you a that-DM. Your players earned those deaths fair and square.


This kind of self-inflicted death or loss can serve as a motivator for your players to attempt to play smarter in the future. If you try too hard to shield them from their own bad choices, they'll grow complacent and will only get dumber. Like everything else, the path to success is paved with failure, so you need to let those failures happen so your players can walk that path and eventually become good.

>>50140399
This is why when I DM I have the Benny Hill theme queued up on my phone as an audio signal that the players are acting stupid.

>>50141119
>Benny Hill theme
see
>>50140726
>Yakety Sax

Just FYI

>>50140399
Pssh, that's nothing. In the span of 4 months, I managed to kill 37 different PCs with the same exact module. Mind you, at least 10 of them were from the same two players having salty runbacks against the encounter.

>>50141369
That sounds wonderful, anon.
Do you have some more details? In my group of friends, I am the only somewhat-harsh GM, the others are way too soft.

>>50141040
This sounds like Matt colville advice. I think you're right in your theory on hammering the players to force them to think and coordinate, but killing characters is basically the nuclear option. I think there are better ways to steer the party in the right direction before you escalate to near-TPK.

New players run the risk of getting discouraged if they invest time and effort into a character and they get fucked for a poor decision. After that they might say fuck it and roll a CN rogue that likes to murder hobo

>>50141428

Well, the most surprising thing was that it was an Adventure League module. The first ravenloft one, AL 4-1. If you're not in the know, usually the first module of each season is a five-part mini-adventure fest with lots of long rests designed to get peoples feets wet in the game. They're basically one or two piss easy encounters, and then a long rest, and repeat 5 times. For some bizarre reason, though, this module just ground people up.

Let me see if I remember all of them.
First group
>Had two characters take instant death on the first section. Revived them both through their AL Faction Freebie.
>Section 4 has a scene where they get jumped by a group of wild forest elves that have gone insane.
>Lots of in-game clues about the fact that they were insane and blood thirsty
>Elves: "Drop your weapons"
>The Usually-Cautious Genre-Savvy Player: ". . .yeah, okay. We should just do what they say guys."
>All 6 of them disarm themselves
>The Elves surprise attack them all, manage to drop 4 of the party within the first round, dropping the other 2 in the next round and finishing them off
>UCGS Player: ". . .oh. Whoops. Maybe we should just not count that?"
>Strangely, most of the group never shows up again
8, technically 6

Group 2
>Get to second 3, involving a trade with an unscrupulous character in a forest
>Vine Blights and Needle Blights ambush
>Rolling in the open
>Vine blights manage to recharge their vine burst every round, players are rolling shit on the saving throws
>They absolutely clobbered
>Kill 4 of the 5 in that fight. 5th runs away
12 / 10

Cont

>>50141575

Group 3: At this point, I've stopped DMing for AL. Decide to run module for a few friends
>Friends decide to be dicks
>Rile up the people in the Roleplay Section who are scared, angry, and superstitious
>2 of them are going to be lynched and the 3rd one fucked off for safety
14
>Rewind the scenario so they don't have to make new PCs
>Roleplay the "correct" way this time
>They get to section 4 involving an Orc outpost
>First player has left because he's pussywhipped by girlfriend
>Other two players are insanely competitive
>Ask them if they would like NPCs or for me to adjust the difficulty for them for the encounter
>"What! No! You run that shit at the highest difficulty, AND we'll still beat it!" "YEAH!"
>So as it turns out a Warlock and a Sorcerer at level 1 cannot take on 3 Orcs and an Orog.
>Like ever
>They die, demand a rewind, try again
>They both do this 7 times.
>Each time again refusing my offer to make it easier for them
>Eventually they give up and quit
28

Group 4: Just a change up of 1 player for another one, and then the addition of another friend to the prior group
>One player is the group troll
>Makes a "Joke" character that's a mockery of an SJW who gets triggered with characters taking actions, all tongue-in-cheek like
>They start to go into section 1
>Character has annoyed other characters just enough that they get into an argument after an arrow with a rope tied to it to "help" her got suspiciously near her head
>They didn't notice the Ice Cats sneaking up on them
>It's absolute murder
31

Group 5: Different group of friends, decided to run module against
>Group of 6
>They're doing fine up until the needleblight and vineblight ambush
>Players are struggling, but it looks like they're going to win
>Suddenly, mage decides it's a great idea to cast fog cloud against plant enemies with no eyes without double-checking with me first
>Dead
37 total.

The only time a PC death is a DM's fault:

>The DM makes a fight of too high a challenge rating/difficulty with no possibility of exit, and then presses that advantage without allowing the PCs to gain the upper hand
>....

Nope, there's no other case.

If the fight is beatable and the only reason players go down is bad choices, that's no one's fault but their own.

>fight vs a lone high level yuan ti
>he's on a small hillock firing arrows at them
>they do a great job by avoiding his traps and by letting the tanky cleric tank all the AoO
>they are beneath him and they notice that he's sorrounded by vines so it will be hard to climb up the hillock
>the cleric has less than a quarter of his full hp
>"i climb" he says
>without healing first
>get in melee
>get bitten by the yuan ti and by the snakes hidden in the vines
>he dies
>the whole party goes in to get their AoO
>the yuan ti dies
>his last words
>"at least nobody got hurt"

>>50141496
It's not about forcing them fail or die on on purpose. That's just as bad as coddling them because it removes their agency. It's about allowing them to fail as a natural part of the game's events.

I think that failure is an expression of agency. It helps people realize that their choices determine their future, both for better and for worse. It can let them know that their decisions matter.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, when solid reasoning and game mechanics tell you that the players didn't succeed, allow that to unfold logically so that players can realize how things went wrong. If they never lose, they'll never learn.

>New players run the risk of getting discouraged if they invest time and effort into a character and they get fucked for a poor decision
I'm starting to think that players shouldn't invest so much time and effort into their personalities and backstories during chargen. The community has strongly encouraged that kind of heavy emotional investment in characters, and it comes at a significant cost: it becomes difficult to have credible threats against PCs without desolating their players. Also, a character developed during gameplay will tend to be much better tailored to the specific needs and style of the campaign.

>>50141496
>killing characters is basically the nuclear option
It *can* be.
The core concept that needs to be understood here is that the GM should NEVER kill player characters.
But players characters should die when death inducing events happen.
There is a significant difference.

I suppose there could be some kind of game, likely highly narrative, where nobody ever dies unless it's agreed upon, but that holds zero interest for me.

>>50141978
This.
Just all of this.

>I'm starting to think that players shouldn't invest so much time and effort into their personalities and backstories during chargen
This is why rolling characters randomly was nice back in the day.
You weren't playing a character that you were emotionally invested in or had plans for, you were developing the best character possible from a collection of random numbers.
I like both, but I generally run games where PCs generally don't die if there's a way to save them, but death is absolutely on the table.

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>>50142087
I'm with this guy except for that last bit. You shouldn't strive to kill the PCs unless you're running the game at a convention or the PCs take a vacation to rappan athuk. But if the PCs just happen to die when presented with a scenario capable of killing them, they should have considered taking a level in git gud before tackling it. Maybe their god gives them a second chance or some devil offers them a deal that brings them back with a drawback or two (and another six or seven in fine print), but otherwise generally people die when they're killed.

I like making in-depth characters and getting emotionally invested in them, even if they die. It's easy to forget that RPG stands for role playing GAME and not just role playing. Sometimes that's what's good for the story anyway, like Gladiator probably wouldn't have been a very good movie if Maximus had just gotten to walk away from it at the end.

>>50140399
Pretty sure that's illegal nigga