Friday, August 26, 2022

In Defense of the Killer DM

One of the unique – and often frustrating – things about roleplaying games as a form of entertainment is how variable one's experience of them can be. More so than other types of games, one's enjoyment of an RPG is heavily dependent on the referee. In this, an imaginative, quick-thinking referee is every bit as important as solid rules. Of course, imaginative, quick-thinking players are vital too, but, for the purposes of this post, I want to focus on the referee.

If a good referee contributes to one's enjoyment of a roleplaying game, it stands to reason that a bad one can detract from it. I don't think this is controversial, though I suspect there's likely disagreement over just what constitutes a "bad" referee. Even so, I frequently hear criticism of a particular species of bad referee, the so-called "Killer DM." The Killer DM is the kind of referee who supposedly delights in torturing the characters in his campaign by presenting them with unfair fights and unavoidable traps, not to mention belligerent and unhelpful NPCs. He's a cruel tyrant rather than the impartial arbiter demanded by the role of referee.

Fear of the Killer DM is widespread – so widespread, in fact, that many RPGs not only contain explicit admonitions against the types of behaviors that are the purported hallmarks of the species, but often design their rules in such a way as to give them rather than the referee the final say on how things are to be adjudicated in the game. Lest anyone think this is simply a grognardly rant against "kids today," I am quick to point out that fear of the Killer DM goes back decades and the changes to the presentation of games I mention above are almost as old. 

Nevertheless, I do think that fear – or at least vocal disapproval – of the Killer DM is more commonplace than ever, despite (or perhaps because of) the near-extinction of the species. Roleplayers continue to talk about the Killer DM as if one were likely to encounter him lurking beneath every gaming table, waiting for his chance to strike, but how often is he actually seen in the wild in the 21st century? In my experience, the Killer DM is now mostly a myth and a cautionary tale rather than an ever-present danger against whose sadistic power-trips games must be designed to guard. 

All that said, I'd like to come to the defense of the Killer DM, or at least to that sub-species of him I encountered several times over the course of my decades in the hobby and for whom I retain a certain affection. The most memorable example of the Killer DM of my acquaintance was a childhood friend's teenaged older brother. He, along with their father, would sometimes referee adventures for us and it was always a struggle to survive them. There was also an older fellow who'd regularly show up to the local library's games days and referee an incredibly deadly dungeon crawl for anyone who dared to take a seat at his table. My old college roommate was cut from similar cloth and I distinctly remember many hours spent braving his insidious labyrinths.

Two things unite all these referees. First, they ran their games in a ruthless fashion and definitely took delight in watching characters suffer as a result of the bad decisions of their players. Second, their games were a lot of fun, in large part because they were a challenge. Whereas nowadays I think the emphasis is placed more on the roleplaying aspect of RPGs, in the past it was not at all uncommon to find who referees who emphasized the game aspect. For referees of this sort, an adventure was a battle of wits (and luck) between the referee and the players. Their fun was had in coming up with cleverly fiendish ways to test the intelligence, imagination, and perseverance of the players – and I can attest to the fact that it was indeed fun.

I don't think there's as much interest in (or tolerance for) this style of play anymore. This is the culture out of which things like Grimtooth's Traps arose and, if you know that legendary product, you might have better insight into the kind of Killer DM of whom I am still fond. The games these referees ran are not my preferred style of play, then or now. Yet, I find myself regularly reminded of them and the joy my friends and I took in occasionally besting them on their home turf. I think even they secretly enjoyed seeing us grind out a hard-earned victory once in a while, because they knew better than anyone how difficult it was to do that. 

Tom Moldvay claimed in his Basic Rulebook that "winning" and "losing" didn't apply to D&D – but that's only because he never played with my friend's older brother. Anyone whose character made it out of one of his dungeons alive knew well what it meant to win.

24 comments:

  1. I think the "Killer DM" is a symptom of how one views the game: a competition between players and DM, or a cooperative game with players and DM taking up different roles.

    If one takes the competition format to an extreme, you indeed end up with with the stereotypical killer DM who sets up an unfair and stacked game which no player can survive.

    A "challenging DM" is something different: that's a DM who designs a dungeon that is hard, but feasible. That DM takes into account what his players should be able to do, and presents a game within the outer limits of what the players should be able to achieve, but not beyond those limits.

    There's a parallel with tests that teacher/professors give to their students (I'm a professor myself ;-)). There's no difficulty in giving a test or exam on which all students fail. That's easy, but where's the value or even ethics in that? It's much more difficult to design a challenging test - a test that is designed such that the students who studied and understand the material will succeed, but those who did not will fail.

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  2. No doubt some DMs enjoy killing players. But also some players refuse to run-away from overly tough opponents or when the dice just aren't cooperating.

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  3. I have never been able to shake-off the basic concept that a game is supposed to be fun.

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    1. Some folks like a challenge, and find that fun.

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  4. I think you're right that the Killer DM has died out because the role playing (acting) has become much more the focus and today's players are visualising their PC as the hero characters in a movie. They can't tolerate being killed by their own stupidity.

    I agree that the style where the dungeon is a test - a wicked puzzle overall perhaps - isn't nearly as popular today (a pity as that's the style I like). I think that this style works much better with one-offs and pregens rather than campaign play.

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    1. PCs can be killed by lots of things othen than the players' "stupidity" - totally random dice rolls or bad communication to name a few.

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  5. The DM may be becoming extinct altogether from what I'm hearing. Nobody wants the job at the game table. Conventions can only get DM's if they pay them.
    Meanwhile, it's weird that Dungeon Crawl Classics' whole game model is essentially producing Killer Dungeons and wholesale slaughtering characters.

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    1. so far, I love me some DCC. But I agree, I for one, no longer referee open games, even tho my FLGS is always asking me to. the game has swung too far towards the players, why would I do it for strangers?

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    2. I wonder how much of the DM going extinct has to do with Critical Role and the new waves of games thinking they have to measure up to that DM.

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    3. It's safe to say that DCC is marketed to a niche audience. That niche is large enough to sustain DCC, but not the whole industry.

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  6. It's been pointed out on this blog before that the ease and speed of rolling up a D&D character makes a "killer DM" less a perceived problem than in some other games, where character creation is more drawn-out process. (I'm looking at you, RuneQuest, even though I love you...)

    Plenty of times when I was still playing D&D (one variant or another) I'd lose a character, and sometime thereafter his brother or cousin or whatever would be trying to avenge his death and make it through the dungeon that killed him.

    Not to say that losing a 4th or 5th-level character didn't sting, but we churned out 1st-level characters the way grasshoppers reproduce: thousands and thousands of eggs, maybe a few offspring actually reach adult stage...

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    1. Haha! we had the same imaging, except a giant pool of organic goo that would spawn new characters, and a graveyard that stretch for miles. and thats with 2 players usually running 2-4 characters each.

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  7. When I was setting up a new S&W demi-sandbox campaign recently I took great pains to stress that the lethality would be set to OSR default, ie. PCs can be expected to die. Then I had everyone make 2 characters with three words to describe them.

    I think the tendency toward precious darling PCs came about with the ready-made modules with a plotline to follow. You need the characters to survive in order to continue the plot. This became more pronounced with ever more detailed character construction and even more story-driven "adventure paths".

    Other things that can make the game interesting, like resources (torches, rations, hirelings, encumbrance, etc) are poohpoohed as being too tedious, and dropped from play, mostly because some players are there to "win", I think. For those players, anything that presents a limit or boundary preventing immediate gratification in a "fight-level up-fight" cycle is seen as a waste of time.

    The challenge of going against the odds and surviving an adventure by planning, improvising, and making good choices seems to have fallen out of fashion in the wider world of RP gaming.

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    1. Respectfully, I don't know if it has to do with current fashion. I'm in my 50s and have only played B/X and AD&D 1st edition. The source material for AD&D is Appendix N. Those are the stories I'm looking to emulate when I play, and most of them do have protagonists.

      Role-playing is acting of a sort, I'm afraid; you *play* the *role* of a character, like all those characters in Appendix N. Very few of those stories focus on encumbrance or torches or hirelings or magical traps that change your gender for that matter. These aren't only poohpoohed because they're tedious, but because they bear little resemblance to the source material we're trying to emulate and experience.

      When I'm playing Villains and Vigilantes, I want to emulate comicbook superheroes. Not worry about how much gas is left in the Batmobile.

      It seems like your inspirational source material for playing D&D isn't Howard or Tolkien or Moorcock or Lovecraft, but instead just another game. Don't you like any fantasy fiction, and wish to experience it with your imagination?

      Protagonists die all the time. But they don't often fill chapters with keeping tabs on their inventory. Not exciting chapters anyway. :)

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    2. Magic swords shedding light and Continual Light as a 2nd level spell have always seemed to me to be a tacit acknowledgement that the interest garnered by counting torches tends to wear off pretty quickly.

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  8. For me hating the "Killer DM" was never about someone running a game that felt challenging and high lethality - but about someone running a game that felt unfair. It's not getting picked off by a poison needle trapped chest, more some kind of hide the ball refereeing for sadistic thrills.

    I remember some guy in the 1990's running D&D and blowing up the party with a room full of explosive gas. "When you get to the center of the room your torch ignites the odorless colorless gas and you all need to Save vs. Dragon breath for half damage from this 12d6 fireball" ... we were all 2nd level. He was so gleeful that he'd TPK'd us.

    We pointed out all sorts of things like "wouldn't the torches have flared as we entered the gas, wouldn't we have noted we couldn't breath well, etc?" The guy's answer was "You didn't say you were watching your torches or keeping track of your breathing".

    Fundamentally it wasn't the PC deaths that pissed us off it was the way he'd been so coy about his rather obvious trap and how it didn't make any damn sense. The environment has to earn dead characters the same way the characters have to earn treasure, and that means that at a minimum the referee owes the players good information. Players should make the bad decisions that kill their characters, take the dumb risks, make the mistakes -- because otherwise it's just another sillier kind of railroad.

    The players are trying to move through the game and a reasonable pace without reciting a list of cautions for each movement and trusting the referee to describe the environment in a way that includes dangers or oddities their characters would notice. Otherwise there's nothing challenging, just some little Napoleon feeling smug behind a referee screen.

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    1. Well said. I've experienced this too. Between these sociopaths and rules lawyers and "Business Gary", our hobby disproportionately attracts some really unattractive personality types, which must scare off many potential new players.

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    2. This is a good example of the bad DM and I remember a few arguments similar to this back in the day. You're correct that while the trap itself was fair the DM should've given the players the information that torches were flaring or something similar.

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    3. Yeah I've met that type of GM quite a few times of the decades of playing.. The Adversarial GM.. that needs to have his traps go off and his monsters get at least a few hits in before they die. That gets more and more upset the more the players upstage his plans.. why is this guy even GMing? Seems like he wants to be a player.

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    4. That guy is running a game and running it that way because:
      A) He's a poorly socialized dude with control issues (far more acceptable in a 12 year old) - immaturity.
      B) He read the intro to Dragonlance DL1 that says the referee is a player playing the demigod of history controlling shit - bad/trad advice.
      C) He's some kind of weird sadist (maybe still better he's playing D&D then torturing neighborhood pets) - bad friend.

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  9. The Grimtooth Traps style of RPG game has, I think, largely been replaced with video game RPG-like play. As has a lot of the puzzle-heavy dungeon design.
    When the basic play is about checking every inch of the terrain using a mechanic/counter-mechanic approach.to solving it, having people sitting around the table doing it isn't really a requirement. If you're solving some sort of sliding chess piece puzzle that unlocks a secret door, in many ways not having a bunch of other people around provides for deeper gameplay. In solo play, a decision to go back and search all the other rooms for a clue to the chess puzzle can be done without dealing with the frustration that causes for other people who think the solution is to move the chess pieces to checkmate positions.

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  10. If there is no penalty for poor choices, there is not as much fun in making better choices.

    The resource management game is simply a way to get players to accept when a DM throws a plot hook at them. Otherwise it's:

    DM: "You're out of food, you need to go to a village or hunt."

    PC: "No I'm not, I'm smart and never make mistakes."

    Equipment tracking, an economy, and encumbrance ensues...

    It could be replaced with something like DM Incursions (letting the DM set up a thing that happens. All it really is is a way to drive plot by saying "Here's why you need to go to the dungeon (or town or castle ......)" and getting players to stop arguing for going off the edge of the map.

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    1. "Equipment tracking, an economy, and encumbrance ensues..."

      These belong in the game right out of the starting block.

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  11. Always wanted to make a copy of that image and tape it to the front of my DM screen.

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