Did I overstep my power as DM?

Question

While playing a game with a previous group, in the middle of a combat, I had an enemy caster hidden from general combat, but still casting different spells like heal and other non-damage spells to support the enemies. My PCs never thought to look for him and were becoming frustrated when I would seemingly randomly add health or other effects to the ones they were engaged with.

To make matters worse, I rolled a dice to randomly pick a party member and just told that character to make a will saving throw without telling him why. When he failed, I handed him a note that told him the enemy I was using had just crazed him, and on his next turn before attacking he had to roll a d6: 1-4 was party member he had to attack, 5 was he attack an enemy, and 6 was damage self in some fashion. He rolled a 2 and attacked the corresponding PC. He ended up dealing a critical and killing that PC. At that point anarchy broke out at my table with ensuing fights and eventually two people getting up and just leaving.

The caster wasn't impossible to see; the PCs were just more concerned with beating things up and I tried to indicate he was there. At one point, I did everything but put a giant flashing sign saying "there's someone in that thicket". Three different times, the guy's raven familiar flew from that location, touched an enemy, and returned to thicket. At the end, while explaining to the players, I asked them if they never thought that was suspicious. They all told me they thought it was just a bird and wanted to know how they were supposed to know it wasn't just a regular raven. There was even a sorcerer in the party who had a familiar, who never said anything during the encounter; he just kept spam-casting.

I didn't even intend on this situation to be a combat encounter. The PCs were supposed to be looking for the enemy that was in hiding to obtain some info. Instead, they got to a camp and never stopped to figure out if the people were hostile or not: they just got murder happy. They all knew the spellcaster 1) should have been there 2) was a high powered individual 3) was a recluse who was opposed to conflict.

My question is: was I wrong as DM to force the player to attack other characters? Is that within my power?

Answer 1

Yes, that was fine.

You're the DM: you're there to challenge them and put them in danger, not to keep them all safe.

A lot of this comes down to the kind of game you all play. Statements like "dice rolls should never kill a character" or "you should never have hidden enemies" are total BS. Those are valid agreed-upon social contract items for your group, but they are not generally true statements. Players in my group would recoil in horror at the thought of having either of those rules in place.

Now, some of the problem may be a lack of common understanding of the kind of game you are all in, and it's worth a discussion about what you consider to be the parameters of your campaign - how can characters die, what kind of tactics are fair, etc.

Hidden Casters

This is fine. PCs love to put on Invisibility and cast spells, bad guys can too. I just ran a game two weeks ago where there were melee opponents and then an invisible summoner who was doing a lot of stuff. The PCs figured that spell effects don't just come from nowhere, made Perception checks, cast Invisibility Purge, bing bang boom. Of course, they're smart players... With the familiar, you telegraphed this pretty hard.

Mind Control

OK, players never like mind control, but there's 100 spells that do it and fear you or confuse you or charm you or dominate you. It's a part of the game. Also a valid tactic. Some people claim that this caused the other PC to die with "nothing they could do about it." That's patently false - they have as much as they can do about it as when they get attacked by any other threat (have a higher AC?). There's not always a specific "roll to avoid dying" in D&D. If this was a summoned creature or invisible creature or teleporting-in creature or any number of other things, it would be the exact same lethality.

Maturity

The real problem here is likely one of more of a combination of common understanding of what can happen in the game and maturity. I suspect you're newer gamers and perhaps young. I suspect some of these folks would "flip out" in the same way if they lost a big fight in a MMO or a basketball game, right? That's just general social maturity and what do do about that is out of scope of RPG.SE.

But there's also the issue of newer gamers not knowing all what could happen. If it's the first time they see an invisible caster, then it's quite a shock. Once you've been gaming 20 years that's instead like about the first thing you check for if anything unexplained happens. We have various "if person X gets mind controlled" countermeasures planned out. But for new gamers, the combination of the unexpected with general emotional trouble dealing with loss is a hard combination.

Once you get folks back, it may be worth using this as a teaching opportunity. "Yes, that was hardcore, right? You can do the same thing, be trickier than your opponents! Now roll a new character even more bad ass than the last one!" "Old school" gaming was a continual exercise in this exact thing - requiring you to actually think about what you're doing and not just run forward and grind - and people loved/love it. If they want to play a different kind of game ("I don't ever want to die! I want save points! And nothing should ever hinder my character, mentally or physically!") then you can negotiate the kind of game you want to run and they all want to play.

Answer 2

No, you didn't. Roleplaying as an activity has a default "fog of war", where players are not necessarily informed of things that their PCs wouldn't know. This is true regardless of whether it's a mystery investigation or a fight. What the players don't know could kill them.

In this case, failing to anticipate threats did get one of them killed, and it sounds like it was well earned through ignoring several warning signs, on top of ignoring the intel they did have. In D&D especially, which is a game of skillful use of the PCs' situation, there's only so much the GM can do to save players from their own blunders without playing the game "for" them.

So this isn't overreach... but that doesn't meant it couldn't have been handled better. If your players were used to having an omniscient view of the battlefield during the "combat mode" of the game, then they may have naturally assumed that, during a fight, all opponents and factors would be on the table, literally and figuratively. This kind of implied social contract can lead to people feeling like the shared agreement for how the game runs has been broken when anything about the game changes.

There are two different ways to handle this so that introducing new dynamics into a game doesn't upset the implicit social contract of the group:

1. Make the social contract explicit at the beginning. In this case, it sounds like something like this would have been an appropriate conversation starter for your game:

   "I'm going to run this game as if the characters are real people in a real world. Expect NPCs to be as clever as you are. Also expect that if you start getting complacent, or start assuming you know things that your characters couldn't know for sure, that the game world will not be kind about it. An example would be, say, monster stats: if you get into a fight assuming you know the numbers, prepare to be very wrong."

2. Alternatively, introduce change in ways that are mostly benign at first, to demonstrate that their assumptions aren't correct. Then later you can introduce threats that aren't obvious, now that they know that they are not safe when they make assumptions. Not every group likes having an explicit social contract; this is a way you can lead them toward understanding how you run your game, without immediately punishing them before they have the chance to correct their assumptions.

Answer 3

To summarize:

• Players are to find Yoda who is suspected to live in or near a camp.
• Despite being on a scouting missions, players raid the (up until then peaceful) camp without need or provocation, just for killing fun.
• Defenders are mysteriously being healed and buffed, evidently either by divine intervention or by a high level spellcaster. The DM is figuratively holding up a sign with "Guys, this is senseless, you are not going to win this battle" written on it.
• A raven appears for no obvious reason, attacks a player, and disappears again -- several times in series. At least one party member has a familiar of his own.
• The battle is going nowhere, and it isn't helping with the plot either.
• Finally the DM decides that Yoda probably shouldn't fry the party with a couple of fireball spells (although he could!), but still wants to give a bit of a stronger hint to cease battle.
• The roll goes bad, and the crazed player crit-hits a party member, killing him.
• Now everybody is whining.

Dying isn't fun, but one character dead when the whole party more or less deserved being wiped is still very reasonable, if you ask me. Only because it's a game doesn't mean you are allowed to behave completely jack-ass and still expect to get out unharmed.
You are of course allowed to make mistakes, and if your DM kills you on the first occasion, then that's a bad DM for sure. It's still a game, and it's about having fun.

However, if you purposely get yourself in trouble and then keep refusing to back off even though the DM is sending a very clear message, you've decided for your character's destiny. What would you do if players decide to strip naked and run a frontal attack on an adult dragon, wielding only wooden spoons? Should the dragon not be allowed to use its breath weapon because, hey, dying isn't fun for the players?

In other words, no, this isn't a case of overstepping DM powers. The way it ended was just bad luck, but the approach was good.

Answer 4

Did you overstep the bounds?

Probably not. As long as you were giving the pcs appropriate chances to notice and make any appropriate rolls to spot the hidden character, then it was perfectly legitimate tactic that a smart enemy might use and might even organize their entire squad around exploiting the tactic.

It hearkens to the use of things like ambushes, snipers, and even artillery in real life and it is totally legitimate.

Was it smart?

Well, it was certainly a smart tactic for defeating the PCs, or at least harassing them. But, this is a game about having fun more than competing. And it is most certainly not GM vs. Players.

Given that, it is not smart to use any tactic that reduces fun. The GM should instead be focused on increasing the fun, not just using brutal challenges. (To be clear, some groups like brutal challenges and that is perfectly valid. But the key remains ensuring the group is having fun and exactly what that means varies.)

How to improve.

Creative tactics used by the enemy in combat can add diversity and help make things more fun. With that said, they need to be tactics that the players have a real shot of overcoming and where appropriate a real shot of figuring it out.

As part of that, this might have worked better if it had been foreshadowed to start with. Perhaps before going into the fight they heard that a hostile group exhibited strange behavior like healing and that some of their enemies took wounds without apparent cause.

That way they wouldn't be surprised when it happened, and would start looking for a reason during the fight Also, during the fight you could have dropped increasing more obvious hints that something else was interfering that they should look for. Along with that of course, they need to get their rolls to try to check the caster, who isn't just huddled and observing but is actually doing things. And if you describe the terrain well enough, they might start thinking about where the enemy might be hiding a caster and start doing area denial attacks like dropping fireballs over possible areas to see if anyone screams or reacts.

I would also tread very lightly on any enemy effects that take away the character's agency, like say crazed. In the right type of game with the right setting, using mind influencing powers might be fully justified (this was big in Vampire: The Masquerade), but tread lightly, especially in a tactical game. You as the gm control the whole world, they as players only control their character, and if you take that away you take away everything.

Answer 5

My answer is basically that, depending on what is agreed within a particular group of players as part of the social contract, any or all of the other answers given could be correct. There is an existing question about what a social contract is here.

I have played in some groups where it is has explicitly been agreed that PC death is off the table unless the player concerned is happy for it to happen. However, this is not my personal style as GM, and when I run games I make it clear at the start that I will let the dice lay where they fall and that PCs will get no special protection. Other games rule out the possibility of control being taken away from players. The list of possibilities goes on and on...

So, my answer is that you haven't stepped over the mark, but equally, it would have been better to discuss this type of thing at the start of the campaign and get agreement from all players as to what was and wasn't allowed. As you didn't do it then, I would strongly advise that you have that discussion at the beginning of the next session so everyone understands and agrees the situation moving forward.

Answer 6

To directly answer the question: no, you did not overstep your power. I completely see where you were coming from. Had I been your player, I would hope I would have gotten the note and said, "Ooooh! I should have seen that coming!"

I suspect you might be interested in the related question, "How do I avoid having this sort of group breakdown happen?"

When the players are doing things that appear insane to you, ask them what they're thinking.

It's hard to overstate that. When the players are doing stuff that doesn't make any sense (like ignoring the raven), it often means that your understanding of the game world isn't aligned with theirs. This is particularly common for things that should be obvious to the character, but the player is overlooking. It can be hard to ask a question that flat out points to something you were hoping would be a little subtle, but if the risk is people rage quitting, I think it's worth it. Once you identify the difference, you correct it and with a bit of luck, things move forward better.

In this particular situation, I would have done something like the following, tuning based on earlier answers:

1. Who are you fighting? (Make sure they realize these guys are probably affiliated with the spellcaster.)

2. Assuming you win, what do you expect to do next? (Perhaps the players thought this was a preliminary fight before another fight that included the spellcaster. Such a mindset seems nuts to me as a GM, but I know I've done stupider things as a player.)

3. What's up with the bird? (You might have learned here that the players thought it was background color? A good point to nudge the sorcerer, who presumably would consider the possibility of a familiar being used to manage touch spells.)

Relatedly, you might want to double-check what your players want. Some groups want a roller coaster right, heavily on rails, where they go from entertaining fight to entertaining fight. If that's what they want, and you're running a different game, a problem is almost inevitable.

Answer 7

There are two problems I see here. I wouldn't say that either one really constitutes overreaching, but they were problematic for other reasons.

You shouldn't have introduced "hidden enemy" tactics with a spellcaster. Every player knows that when things happen which you don't expect, you need to investigate why. But mid-combat really isn't a good time to go investigating things, and if the characters have never encountered the tactic before, I can understand why they would prioritize dealing with the baddies they knew were trying to kill them.

Better ways to handle this would have included:

• Make your first "hidden enemy" a sniper with a bow and arrows. Direct damage from an unknown source makes it more obvious that someone is hiding, which will prompt a search pretty much immediately. Once the players know that sometimes baddies hide, then you can try it with a caster in later fights.
• If you have to use a caster and the players aren't looking, flush the caster out overtly. An injured baddie, delirious with pain, might rush the thicket while begging to be healed. Or maybe a wild shot (allied or enemy) goes into the thicket and everyone hears a scream: the caster was unexpectedly hit.

The 'crazed' spell was too powerful. Your problem here was that the die was heavily loaded in favor of attacking the players. Better ways to handle this might have been:

• Assign each character on the field -self, friend, and foe- a number on the die, and roll that to determine the target. This produces something that's still random, but has a balance that the players are more likely to see as fair.
• Tell the player to attack "the nearest creature." This is how the analogous effect on the standard confusion spell works, and may still result in the character attacking an ally, or it might result in the character attacking an enemy. But it gives the PCs a chance to figure out what's going on and mitigate the problem.
• Negate the crit. The character is still in there, and while he can't fight the spell enough to stop the attack completely, he can throw it off just enough to keep the hit from going critical.

But that's all postmortem stuff. How, then, to handle things going forward?

Honestly, I'd retcon the crit down to a regular hit if this would be enough to stop the PC from dying, and say the players heard a quickly-stifled victory cry from the thicket (the caster got excited). It's a small change: the PC isn't dead, and now the players know about the hidden caster, but they're still in trouble. They can move forward from there.

Answer 8

Their characters would likely know more about the world than the players did

Apart from the obvious problems of those particular people being opoposed to being mind-controlled and enemies being hidden, there is a bigger problem -- your players likely didn't know the world as well as their characters were expected to do.

In, for example, urban fantasy, like Vampire: The Masquerade, that could be justified. You are just a modern human somehow brought into supernatural affairs, you are likely to miss a lot of related knowledge, and it's fun to learn it in-game. However, that's not your case.

Player characters didn't start as complete noobs. The Sorcerer could cast spells already, the Fighter already learnt how to swing his weapon(s), the Paladin knows something about the nature of evil... They live in a world where magic is everywhere, and they are not completely new to the thing they are doing.

So you should allow players to use the knowledge of their characters. D&D 3.5e has Knowledge skills, and you could also make the Sorcerer roll Spellcraft to see if he understood what's going on. Some information could be given without any rolls.

After all, if players signed to play the game in hard mode and died, it's OK. But if they are not OK with that, you should probably give them a chance to play easy mode.

The curse of knowledge was a problem too

As a GM who knows the details of the adventure, it is very hard to assess how hard the puzzle actually is. When telegraphing a danger in a game, unless the player is supposed to die and retry multiple times like in old hardcore computer games, you should telegraph strongly. Probably to such an extent that it seems to be putting a giant sign "DANGER: HIDDEN SPELLCASTER", and spotting the spellcaster can still be hard for your players.

You need to adjust your puzzles to match your players current skills, like analyzing the situation, and their difficulty expectations. If they solve your riddles too easily and complain, give them something harder. If they die and complain, give them something simpler.

If your players are clearly unable to beat something, probably nerf it on move

You know your players better than I do, so it should be a part of a social contract between you and them. I would suggest you discuss it while using the Same Page Tool, but if you do not want to kill them and circumstances are going to get to it, change the circumstances!

If you are not ready to kill a character by a roll, don't tell him roll. That's it. Btw, the opposite is also correct -- don't let the character roll if you are not ready for success. The part where you say "He ended up dealing a critical and killing that PC" made me think that you didn't have an intent to kill anyone. To get some mind-control flying around, you could, for example, force the Sorcerer to attack the Fighter with his bare hands -- would be a problem, would be a bit of a challenge, a bit of fun, but no character deaths if you are not ready for them.

I hope that everything turned out well.

Answer 9

My answer will repeat some things already said, but wish to present it from a different slant.

First of all, you did not overstep your power as DM. Everything you did was fine, but I will say it wasn't the best way to do things.

3.5, in my opinion, has too many knowledge skills that hardly ever get used. Your descriptions of what's going on suffer from the fact that you understand everything going on and recognize the importance of the clues you're distributing. The players don't, but their characters might.

Next time, I strongly recommend that you ask your players to roll knowledge checks. Don't require them to spend their action to do so, just permit them as a passive thing. Players spent skill points, a limited resource, into those knowledge skills. If the expenditure of those resources isn't worth something substantial in combat, then there's no reason to not put every point into other skills.

You are trying to show a world to the players. You need to do everything in your power to ensure they see the same world as you and so often I find the best way to do this is to use knowledge skills to help players accurately understand what their characters are seeing. If the players a demigods, their characters are avatars that they're pretty much operating with drunk goggles on, so if it doesn't seem like they understand what's going on, do something to mitigate that.

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For another example, earlier this year in a LARP I play, there was a major battle that resulted in the players being completely destroyed because critical information about the battle wasn't understood by the players. The cast used this ignorance to their advantage and thus were able to straight crush the players in irritatingly swift manner.

I mention this story because I was really annoyed both as a player on the receiving end of the aforementioned buttkicking, but also as a senior member of the club whom has long lamented that number of knowledge skills our game has that so rarely see use. If your entire plan to screw the players hinges upon some casually mentioned information, it's not a fair plan. The players don't know they need to focus on that information, but their character might.

If you are going to put knowledge skills in your game, you need to use them. Nothing is going to make the knowledge junkie feel so validated than when they get to use their skills to figure out key information that was in plain sight, but deliberately placed in the periphery.

Answer 10

The outcome of every encounter is your responsibility as DM. That's why your dice rolls are secret. So yes, you bear responsibility for getting your players into a corner where they ended up killing each other and bad feelings caused a row.

Being a DM is art, and psychology, and downright parenting at some level. What I might have done differently:

1) Asked for perception checks when the hidden spellcaster acted. He was invisible; was he muffled? Was he casting spells with a verbal component? Was he using physical components that could be smelled?

The reason for the perception check is irrelevant; the point is, the players would have known at the meta level that there was more to this encounter than they realized. This is part of your toolkit for managing players.

1a) Heck, if the invisible spellcaster is too effective, make him visible (for a fun and logical reason).

2) If a fight breaks out where you don't want a fight to break out, use your in-game resources to end the fight quickly and smoothly. Ex: The players could wake up a in a jail cell not knowing how they were defeated. Or someone powerful enough to make them retreat shows up. The fact that you let the melee go on, and become lethal, was your fault. Heck, the opponents could have retreated!

3) Not let the encounter escalate to lethality. I am part of the camp of not letting the players die through bad luck. More than that, they should be allowed to try things and fail without fatal consequences. (Gamasutra had a great article on this related to video games last week).

There is a school of thought that characters should always roll their own saves. I find that philosophy impractical. In this case, I might have rolled the player's saves for them against the hidden caster and used my thumb on the scale to keep the hidden caster from dominating the battle.

4) Never, never pit two players against each other (unless it's that type of game from the start). I've used various tricks where characters have to act against their will in combat, but pitting player vs. player in combat doubles the importance of #3.

My personal style would have been, instead of passing a note, telling the player "Your character attacks Tom's character". Since I take the choice away I take responsibility. This might still result in a lethal roll, but at least the players can blame me instead of each other.

Answer 11

In my opinion, you were running an intelligent campaign, the only thing I might disagree with was the critical hit. It seems to me that a critical hit while under any kind of mind control would be nearly impossible as a critical hit would require a degree of near perfection that a typical character would be incapable of under those circumstances.

Answer 12

Never kill a player only because of bad luck

That's far from universally accepted, but I think lame deaths as that anger players.

One player (A) lost a character because:

a) Another player (B) failed a saving throw. b) B rolled a 2 on a D6. c) B scored a critical roll.

Result: he lost his character without being able to do anything at it.

I generally avoid killing player characters because of bad rolls. If a character dies is because:

• He took very bad decisions.
• He got into unnecessary troubles, or went against a powerful enemy without outsmarting him.
• He took great risk in hope of great reward or in an act of heroism.
• He was killed by another player (I try to avoid this, but I can't deny players their free will).

How could you have avoided the situation? Well, mind controlling enemies are logical, and you can't avoid them to use smart resources. But if your player died because of bad luck, or he couldn't do anything to avoid it, simply rule that he is unconscious and not mortally wound.