Ah yes, like The Tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo. A classic.
That happened to my buddy Eric
Did not roll perception check ; the chowder was bad and will hit the intestines in a few hours during the dungeon delving.
What school of cuisine is the chowder?
The cursed item was the chair you sat upon when you ate the soup, fool!
Wizard: “I cast detect on the bowl.”
DM: “it’s a bowl.”
Wizard: “I cast detect on the chair.”
DM: “It’s a chair.”
Wizard: “Fine, I eat the chowder.”
DM: “The spoon is a mimic. It latches onto your face and causes 35 points of damage.”
Silly player, the bowl is the mimic.
I know this is just a meme and all but do people still play 'adversarial GM’ games these days? I never enjoyed that dynamic as a player or a GM.
Some DMs are just stupid, assholes, or both. I rarely go back if they’re either. Like forcing the players into an encounter where all their toolkits are nerfed. Close quarters for casters, magical monsters that can’t be harmed by melee, or NPCs that are way OP for the group and they stick to the Monster Manual to the letter.
Internal dialogues like: I guess it still has 1 HP left so I’m going to give it a full round of attacks.
Knowing damn well they could have let it die.
Like forcing the players into an encounter where all their toolkits are nerfed. Close quarters for casters, magical monsters that can’t be harmed by melee, or NPCs that are way OP for the group and they stick to the Monster Manual to the letter.
When I GM, it depends on just how narrow and just how powerful your particular toolkit is. I’m not going to ensure that you can do whatever your thing is at absolutely every opportunity, and if your schtick becomes well known, enemies capable of planning will plan around it when feasible. The more narrow your schtick is, the more scenarios you might encounter where it does not apply simply by chance (for example, if you’re a flying archer every room in a dungeon won’t gain a minimum 30’ high ceiling to maximize your use of that). The more disproportionately powerful your schtick is compared to other party members, the more likely I am to specifically come up with occasional scenarios meant to make it not apply so someone else gets to shine.
Sometimes I will signpost something is a very bad idea, and if you do it anyways (or do something else absurdly dangerously foolish) I’m not going to pop up a guard rail to save you at the last moment - retrieving your body from somewhere adrift on the astral and your soul from the gemstone the archdevil you pissed off is keeping in his treasury to try to save you is the next adventure hook.
You encounter a huge, elaborate tome, on a concealed lectern, in a library connected by a hidden door directly off the bedroom of a powerful wizard, you detect magic and get extremely powerful auras of conjuration, transmutation and evocation maybe “I flip it open to a random page and start reading aloud, I’ll sound out any words I don’t recognize” is not, in fact, a wise decision. The copy of “Words You Mispronounce And Die: A Primer For Apprentice Wizards” you saw on one of the shelves on the way there, the references to a cursed grimoire of terrible power, the book being bound in the skin of an angel covered in burns and scars, etc, etc should have maybe hinted at that.
depends on how you define “adversarial”
I’ve given out powerful items, that had downsides when used, but my players enjoyed figuring out stuff like that.
I’ve also ran dungeons that featured potential lethal traps, but i think thats ok if the presence of such a trap is telegraphed enough that players know they better go slow and ask questions about their environment or describe how they are checking a room. I did not plan that you could get a pressure plate stuck by pouring sand between tiles, but you described doing it and explaining your intention so it became the solution. if you’d chosen to rush through the room filled with gore or strange scratch marks on the floor or obvious vents in the ceiling, then i’d have rolled if you trigger a trap, and then you might die trying to escape poison gas or being crushed by a moving wall, if the dice keep falling that way.
i only create situations (and those are often dangerous, and have a chance of characters dieing), but at the table i am the biggest fan your characters have and can’t wait to see how they crawl out of the dungeon with treasure beyond believe.
I feel like the key to a good game as a dm is to be flexible in how your campaign / game is laid out.
Whether something is dangerous or good it will piss players off if any solution they try inevitably leads to the result you planned out, especially when it clearly makes no sense it would pan out like that.
Whether these are good or bad results they piss people off.
Players actually have fun when you can roll with the punches and they feel like their decisions are meaningful.
It can be fun, so long as everyone is in the same mindset, and it’s actually played to be fun, rather than the GM taking out their frustrations on the characters, or the group just killing and destroying the world. A long campaign like that would probably lose it’s shine, but an occasional one-sort type thing could be a good pallete cleanser.
When I want that style of game, I play paranoia. I agree, that style of game CAN be fun! And sometimes I do want it! It’s just… there’s this whole awesome game based on it, that makes it work. DnD scratches an entirely different itch for me, and I’d rather keep it distinct.
I always tell my players that unlike other TTRPGs, Paranoia is a game that actually has winners and losers at the end. And since I only run it as one shots, we can have some time at the end going over what was really happening at each stage, letting everyone in on all the jokes, and having a grand time with it. While I’m not into kink, I’ve heard it’s similar. Consent is king, and you still gotta make sure everyone is enjoying it.
Paranoia, the game where every character is technically engaged in a crime punishable by death at basically all times, and you’re given a number of clones because you are expected to die…a lot. Also the R&D gadgets, like the personal disintegrator which does exactly what it says on the tin - disintegrates your person.
Not one crime, at least two: belonging to a secret society, and having an unregistered mutant power. Except some secret societies might actually be sponsored by the state— not that the players know that. And you can register your mutant power, except that this will make you a targeted minority subject to massive discrimination, not to mention being forced to use your power in service— and your own power might kill you, and you don’t really know how to use it fully, and being forced to use it also means being put on the front lines of deadly combat…
But that’s not what makes the adversarial play in paranoia so great. It’s that everyone has a different true objective that they are following in secret, while ostensively all being on the same team. That’s what I mean by “there are winners and losers in this game”. You can objectively determine who succeeded and who failed, and a good mission will make those secret missions mutually exclusive. It’s great fun!
It’s like in d&d when you get the asshole player who really just wants to steal from the rest of the party and not get caught, except everyone is in on it and everyone is trying to do something different to everyone else, to very different degrees, and everyone expects to be betrayed at all times, and often is— except you get extra lives so you can keep playing anyway… and then you get to laugh about it together at the end! It’s great!
I think it’s the kind of thing new groups discover and then usually realize it sucks. So it’ll keep coming up as long as new players are entering the hobby.
Like every group has done the “what if we make characters based on ourselves??” trope.
DM: Your bad knees cause you to need to take a break. Skip turn.
Trust nothing, especially cutlery. I have zero sympathy for the wizard who burns every Detect Magic on bowls and chairs, but I also have even less for the DM who treats player tools like a punchline. Detect Magic telling someone “it’s chowder” is a cop-out, same as a DM saying “you failed the skill check because you looked suspicious.” If a spell exists to reveal a magical aura, use it to reveal an aura, not to sass the player.
Play smart, but don’t be that paranoid asshole who thwarts every fun thing. And DMs, if you want to surprise people, do it with plot and stakes, not constant item ambushes. Let spells do their job, let players have some agency, and yes, keep an eye on the spoon.
Detect Magic telling someone “it’s chowder” is a cop-out, same as a DM saying “you failed the skill check because you looked suspicious.” If a spell exists to reveal a magical aura, use it to reveal an aura, not to sass the player.
My answer in that case is “You detect no aura” from the non-magical chowder (or maybe they do detect one if it was flavored with prestidigitation), unless it’s an edition where the effect is a cone, and they are sitting across the table from their friend blinged out in magical gear, in which case they are definitely detecting an aura. Several of them. And they’re going to have to take time, focus, and make checks to recognize that none are coming from the chowder.
And DMs, if you want to surprise people, do it with plot and stakes, not constant item ambushes.
A good surprise has foreshadowing so the players go “ooh that makes sense. We should have thought of that”. If all the corpses in the room look like they died of drowning and there’s scratches on the door, it’s not a total surprise if there’s a trap that locks the door and fills the room with water.
Also, good foreshadowing always creates the possibility that your audience (the players, in this case) will work out what’s really going on before you expected them to. This is not a flaw, it doesn’t “spoil” the experience. It is, in fact, incredibly satisfying to put a bunch of clues together and then see that prediction vindicated when the twist is revealed.
IT’S CHOWDAH YOU IDIOT!
Showwdair!
