I’ve TPKed once and I can’t count the number of limbs characters have lost even if they survive. But it’s all worth it. It is worth it when, a couple weeks ago, the party won a campaign. They were up against an eldritch abomination style horror that I had NO idea hwo they could kill. A clever plan, some luck, and some really wicked stuff they had done earlier to imprison a lesser abomination in a gun, (that I had very little to do with, all player initiative.) Allowed them to beat the final boss.

Everyone went into the last session fully expecting a TPK. Only two players of six had their original characters, and all the marbles were on the table. The universe woul be devoured if they failed and three years worth of campaigns in this dimension were about to be wiped out. When they won, the satisfaction was immense. Very emotional, very celebratory, and the epilogue was moving to the players involved. Their characters were worthy of retiring and it felt like it was time to move on to the next campaign.

Moments like that? I’ve never seen them with easy peasy DMs. I don’t think it is because I am a master storyteller. I think it is because the risk and reward were properly weighed.

Saying a system is broken because you are trying to do something it really doesn’t handle well is like using a microwave to remove fleas from your cat. I’m sorry your cat is dead, but I really can’t point any fingers at the microwave.

And, as far as jumping out of character to invalidate an “I win” button? If you want to run your game that way, it is your game. I can’t stop you and I won’t try. But I will not call that good advice and I don’t want people walking away from my site thinking it is. I think it is a very bad precedent to set.

At this point, we will have to agree to disagree.

Sometimes the four other players at the table wanted to play out a puzzle, but the guy with the wizard wanted to steal the glory with a spell the dm forgot he had. Is that the dm’s fault? Yes. He chose the system, so he should deal with it. But can he ask the other players if they want to have an OOC say in how the story goes? I think that’s fair.

If the players have access to Speak with Dead and the DM decides to run a mystery in which the murder victim’s body is accessible and can identify the killer, the DM wrote a bad adventure. If the DM decides to build an encounter around a cliff and the cliff is all there is when the party has spider climb, the DM planned a bad encounter and better throw a treacherous storm or a winged flock of death harpies or something. And if you, as a DM, cannot deal with that stuff, you need to run a different system because you don’t know how to work with the one you’ve got.

A murder victim is like any other witness. Maybe he didn’t see everything. Or maybe he doesn’t remember properly. Or maybe he says something the party doesn’t understand until after they’ve investigated further. You have to be pretty close to locate the object, so maybe that only helps near the end of the mission after the players have tracked the stolen object to the right neighborhood. Whatever.

Stepping out of the game to say “yeah, you guys figured it out but let’s pretend you didn’t for the sake of a more interesting story” is, in my opinion, awful advice. I’m sorry if that sounds a little heavy-handed, but I am not good at sugarcoating. It is like the director of a movie stepping on screen and saying “yeah, I screwed this scene up and we all know it so let’s just pretend I didn’t and move on.” Worse, it sends a message to the players that when they really do come up with something clever and outsmart the game and the DM, the DM is going to take that away from them and force them to find the solution the DM wants to see. That is saying their cleverness doesn’t matter and that their victories will not be rewarded. At that point, why should your players even try?

Long story short: (1) A DM should know what the players are capable of in the system he or she is running and if he/she can’t keep up with that, he/she needs to pick a different system. (2) A DM should absolutely never, ever step out from the behind the curtain and rob the players of a victory for the sake of telling a more interesting story. That DM is better served letting that story conclude with the players cheering and high-fiving, learning from the experience, and starting a NEW, interesting story.

The “I Win” button is a system problem more often than a GM or Player problem. One — perhaps the main — reason I like 4e over 3rd edition is that 3rd edition D&D or Pathfinder comes with “I Win” buttons at every spell level. Murder mystery? Speak with Dead. Treacherous cliff? Spider Climb. Missing maguffin? Locate object. 4th edition has them, too; but they’re rituals and not as common or powerful; and they cost money — meaning the PCs will try other solutions before pressing “I Win” even if they have access to it.

I agree that the GM just has to roll with it, but it’s not the only option. Another valid alternative is to step out of game and ask the players. “OK, your character wants to solve the problem in one fell swoop, and has the ability to do so. But do you as a player want to play out the situation, or just get on to the next thing?” Or to ask the table “Which would be more interesting to you guys? Magically solving the murder in the time it takes to cast Speak with Dead or going through finding clues, figuring out what they mean, interviewing townsfolk, and so on?”

Hopefully adding such a mark would distinguish when you have multiples of the same type (door/trap/chest etc.) in play.

Was there a previous edition Dungeon Master’s Guide or another book that helped you organize your thoughts this way, or is this primarily the result of years and years in the trenches? People talk about the 3.5 DMG being very good; I wouldn’t know.

You’ve already got a PDF, but once you get through Adventure Design and Campaign Design, you’ll have a genuine ebook. Might be worth getting it edited, laid out, and sold. I know I’d give a copy to anyone who I knew was starting out as a GM – and there’s plenty that veterans might not have thought about explicitly.

Personally, I am not sure I would want to play a game that mandated the use of these ideas and built them into the rules. I think they belong firmly in the place of advice about world and story building, not in the mechanics of the game. That said, I think it is a major flaw that many RPGs do not discuss these concepts and I think a lot of mainstream RPGs could do a much, MUCH better job of helping new DMs figure out how to run and build games.

It also makes me wonder if you’ve found the definition of a “story game”. You can run many games very badly while still following all of their rules; most story games integrate a part of what you’ve written here and about Actions into their DMing advice or even the rules, like the dramatic questions required for a front in Apocalypse or Dungeon World. So a story game would be a game that you cannot play as written without following at least a few of your rules.

I respect your reasons for wanting to avoid the term “story.” I do wonder, though, what a game would look like that was structured so as to mandate following your advice. Admittedly, nothing is foolproof.

What books had the greatest influence on your thinking here, if any?

There is nothing inherently WRONG with encounters that drain resources. After all, it does create a meaningful choice – how many resources does the party expend to deal with the current encounter and how many do they save for their future plans. But DMs screw that up any number of ways. First of all, they forget to make it a choice at all. It is interesting to create an encounter the party WANTS to confront but doesn’t WANT to spend the resources on. It is less interesting to create an encounter where the party just has an encounter jump on them and can’t avoid it. It is even less interesting when they are trapped in the encounter because the DM has decided it must be a combat played to the end and so it will be a combat played to the end.

Remember that, when the party is trying to acheive a goal in a given amount of time, their goal is to waste as little time as possible. If their goal is to defeat something powerful, their goal is to be as strong as possible when they face it. That means, a smart party will want to avoid all distractions and attrition. A smart party will be looking for ways to avoid or evade those encounters. The DM who drops a combat in front of the party to bleed its resources needs to consider that the party probably wants to engage it as little as possible and allow them to find ways to avoid or circumvent it. The dramatic question becomes “can the party continue their journey safely” not “can the party kill the thingy.”

But even if you acknowledge all of that, you still can’t run a good encounter without a dramatic question and a source of conflict. Many “attrition” encounters are about fighting something because it is there. And those are BAD encounters. There is nothing wrong with an encounter that is makes the party decide how many resources to waste, but the party still needs a reason to care about the outcome and the DM needs to understand the party’s real goals and leave it up to the party to decide how to handle it.

Now, all of this is a little above encounter design. This is now getting into adventure design: how a DM strings encounters together. And I’ll get there. I promise. But when I do get there, I am not going to ever say it is okay to ignore these four things. Even an encounter that basically just wastes some random number of resources needs to be a good encounter.

I mean, look at it like this: you have a choice of using a good encounter or a bad encounter to waste resources. Given the choice, which would you rather populate your game with?