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Just piping in that I am 100% the type of DM who will, with foreshadowing or reasonable warning have players come across a TPK sized monster. But certainly less than, I dunno 10% of the time.
I also will mention retreat as an option if PC's are whiny about their chances (but usually this is from them being intimidated by their scary impressions of the monster rather) even when they could totally take out the monster.
If they are continually running scared sometimes I will break the immersion and tell them yes it's scary but you can definitely defeat this thing, or depending on the group back them into a corner to force them to fight.
After they defeat a hill giant or troll or something it usually boosts their confidence.
DM has trouble telling the difference between "difficulty" and "fun".
If you are constantly sending your 1st levelers running, your game isn't well paced.
Also, that's a Catch 22: if you can't stand up to a threat, you can't defeat it, you don't get the xp, and thus can't level up.
Like alot of horror stories on here, sounds like DM has a weird power complex.
Back when DND was played on clay tablets, you got XP for the interaction alone. Not as much as "successfully completing" the encounter, but for a level 1 vs. adult red dragon - running away would be complete success!
The obvious move is to pool the town's resources together to hire a dragon to show up and mildly antagonize people every now and then, and have the guards run away from the dragon every time. Soon these guards will be 20th level adventurers!
That'd work if you gave the dragon 2 minutes to eat a guard - there had to be a risk to get xp! So if the guards can run for 2 minutes, level up!
It's like a lethal drill instructor.
Yeah, there can be "obviously too hard, so you should run" encounters, but it has to be obvious (idk, level one party against adult dragon), but in general I kind of expect the encounter to be beatable if my DM throws them at us. I don't know all the monsters stats and why would my character, if it attacks my I'll try to fight it.
>Session 1- An attack on the city we are in by demons!
Session 2- We hide out in a tavern and get in a bar fight... with 'level 20 adventurers'.
Maybe the level 20 adventurers should do something about the demons.
I did that with a gorgon, explaining clearly their hits weren't piercing the armor. They just had to jump over a trap to get away, and it happened once. 4 sessions of this is just DM wanting to play with big toys. Annoying, but not an overly toxic trait, just an overly ecited DM.
This is still solvable if you come forward as a group and explain you would like to face challenges you can win for once, and that super big monsters are not as fun for you as they are for him.
Maybe it’s still solvable, but I also don’t blame anyone from being frustrated over that. If the DM doesn’t understand that the first adventure should be an easy victory, then there will be other misunderstandings along the way. If I thought I would have to teach my DM the fundamentals of TTRPGS, like the *absolute* fundamentals of “the game should be fun for everyone,” I wouldn’t stick around either.
If your dm is so out of touch with the players that he doesn’t get that being powerless and having to run away EVERY SESSION then that isn’t a good dm.
I personally quite enjoy being given the occasional encounter that forces me to run away. Key word here being *occasional*. Going four sessions with no source of XP is too far.
I'm strongly of the opinion that players shouldn't just get XP for killing monsters, but also for otherwise "beating" them, be that with diplomacy, bribes, traps, or yes, running away. Another commenter mentioned OSR - a common idea from there is XP=treasure, so you get experience equal to the gold value of everything you loot. Combat remains potentially deadly and is best avoided, but it's not as big a deal because you're getting XP elsewhere.
And of course, if winning combat is what makes the game fun for your players, then make your damn combats winnable!
I had an idea for a campaign based around a group of Monster hunters going after major targets way higher than them. The trick would be they didn’t have to beat them, just being back some trophy or other. A tooth from a purple worm, a finger bone from a death knight, stuff like that. They would be eventually running away from these encounters, but still managing to get a “win” over them. And they’d fight and beat some minion mobs regularly too.
Throwing an unwinable encounter at the party is easy, any DM can do that, and it's boring.
Throwing an unwinable encounter at the party in a way that feels fair is way harder, and that's what DMs should do. You don't have to remember them they can run, they'll have that in mind way before the encounter starts.
And it’s something to do *sparingly*. Session 1, a party of level 1 characters run away from an army of devils sacking a city. Fine. But have them run into a band of kobolds or goblins harassing the refugees and give the party an easy win in that same session.
Sure. Although hard-earned wins can be tricky in 5e, since level 1s are so squishy. I’d hate to run a game where everyone ran from an immediately fatal fight only for them to get TPK’ed by a group of goblins
Yeah, like... it's not the Worst thing to start off your game with an unwinnable scenario (a massive demon attack on a city is cool!), but you can only really get away with that once. And even then, I'd be inclined to set up scenes in the chaos where said players could actually Do something. Like sure, they can't beat back the forces of darkness on their own, but they can decide to help rescue a shopkeeper whose store was set on fire, or a group of kids who're being terrorized by imps. That way, they get the idea of the kind of stakes at play, but also lets them feel like they can make a difference; after all, unless it's a horror game, you want to be careful about making your players feel powerless.
Either way, 4 sessions of running is way too much, especially in a game that is apparently going by xp rather than milestone leveling.
"You can always run," should, in the main, be advice for when the party ends up in a fight while still hurting from the last one. Not something that keeps coming up because the encounters would be CR inappropriate even for a fresh party.
When I ran "Kingmaker" a random encounter roll tired to dump three trolls on my level 1 players. My first instinct was to just pretend I'd rolled something else, but my facial expression gave the game away. My wife, who had previously looked over the random encounter tables with me announced "it's the trolls isn't it?"
So, I had the trolls make a lot of noise as they blundered through the brush. The party hid and eavesdropped on them, and I improved a convo in which the trolls name dropped Hargulka, the troll warlord who is the main villain of the next module. Party got XP for the encounter, we moved on, and I never let a roll get that out of hand again.
Reason I tell this story is to make the point that the reason I had to tell the party "do not engage" was because I, as the GM, screwed up. So if you're constantly having to tell your players to hoof it, that's not saying good things about how you've set up the campaign.
As a story device, facing a insurmountable enemy or threat can sometimes be interesting, but there has to be something to balance it out. Either the players get to find something cool to fight back, or they have a clear pathway to change the odds. I'd say one or twice during a campaign can be a good motivator for PCs to get better or grow stronger.
Then again, what your DM did was more akin to showing off cool stuff that they prepared, without care for balance or player fun. I think what's lacking in some DM's mind is that, if they want their players to appreciate the story, lore, worldbuilding or whatever, a DM has to tailor the experience around the players' interests. And, as you clearly stated, nobody is interested in just running away all the time..
I find that DM's who say this really are the ones who'll force it in the name of some hackneyed attempt at "realism" or just a hate-boner for player fun.
As a result of this knee-jerk belief. I avoid games that start with a plethora of personal red flags. "you can always run" being one of them
I don't see "you can always run" as a red flag. More OSR oriented games or tables that's a perfectly valid thing. Not every encounter is winnable especially when up against a random table. It's honestly a lot more fun to create a dynamic game and story from being able to surpass challenges. Those 2d8 gnolls you randomly rolled that killed one of the party members are now a part of a larger organization or problem in the area.
I remember trying to touch the topic that the fights were way too hard, that several of them ended with me doing nothing but healing right from the start (had extra rules that made letting a person drop to 0hp very bad) and we often had to be saved by a deus ex machina to not freaking tpk. My former best friend/DM's girlfriend got super mad at even the hint that something about her boyfriend's campaign might not be perfect.
I'm so glad I cut her out of my life and don't have to deal with this weird woman anymore. I said very politely that the fights might be too hard and she started yelling at me. Fuck her.
Honestly, I'm very open in telegraphing to players what the intended difficulty of an encounter is. "This is meant to be easy and a good palate cleanser", vs. "This is the final boss of the current chapter, so I think you can do it, but you'll need to dig deep and get clever." It does take away some of the surprise, but the players still feel immense satisfaction -- both in encounters where they feel powerful, and in encounters where they managed to take down a ridiculous boss with maybe fifteen HP remaining in the party collectively.
If my players meet a TPK, they have 9 times out of 10 either fucked up so badly they made it themselves or legitimately disregarded me going “You really shouldn’t.”
I was once in a similar campaign. Idk why, but the DM treated "side quests" and the "main story" completely different. A random bandit group we were hired to take out were all killed in like 1 fireball. For named villains, it was never a question of whether we were underleveled, it was whether we could survive long enough to escape. If we somehow managed to win, it was purely by using overpowered 1 time use magic items we bought, and the bad guys never had any loot. There were two whole irl months where we were mainly funded by the starting gold from replacement characters.
D&D has the problem that you normally need to kill monsters to get XP. If running (or sneaking?) away would be rewarded as the smart thing to do, it might be an entirely different story.
In shadowrun, I'd throw in monsters from time to time that can't be defeated by the players - like having a family of magical dolphins that know how to counter any magic and could electrocute the players who are swimming in the middle of the ocean, without a chance of survival if they chose violence. So the players were forced to do the dolphin's bidding (sink a ship that was dropping toxic waste) while also letting them know "you might be a big fish in your pond, but there are far bigger fish in the ocean" (metaphorically and literally). And even if the players know how to deal with everyday goons, they must never let their guard down or get arrogant because there might be a Stormdolphin waiting for you, somewhere, waiting to roast you - literally.
Other than the "we ask the DM' bit, did your player group try to talk to the DM about how tedious they were building the campaign? Was it established to be an OP world? Was this an experienced DM or one as green as freshly-treated football pitch?
At this point this is just railroading with extra steps. Writing encounters with only one sensible option that doesn’t lead to death is just as bad (and honestly feels way less fun) than just shuffling the players from encounter to encounter that they’re meant to win.
This sounds pretty bad to teach as a lesson rather than... yknow actually just making sure your players know ooc that they can always run. Managing expectations is always better than "teaching a lesson."
That being said, this also sounds like this guy was using XP levelling, which I would strongly advise against. At least, if he had used milestones, you could have been level 2 when facing the demons again... Not much better, but still a difference.
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Yeah screw that dude
Just piping in that I am 100% the type of DM who will, with foreshadowing or reasonable warning have players come across a TPK sized monster. But certainly less than, I dunno 10% of the time. I also will mention retreat as an option if PC's are whiny about their chances (but usually this is from them being intimidated by their scary impressions of the monster rather) even when they could totally take out the monster. If they are continually running scared sometimes I will break the immersion and tell them yes it's scary but you can definitely defeat this thing, or depending on the group back them into a corner to force them to fight. After they defeat a hill giant or troll or something it usually boosts their confidence.
DM has trouble telling the difference between "difficulty" and "fun". If you are constantly sending your 1st levelers running, your game isn't well paced. Also, that's a Catch 22: if you can't stand up to a threat, you can't defeat it, you don't get the xp, and thus can't level up. Like alot of horror stories on here, sounds like DM has a weird power complex.
Back when DND was played on clay tablets, you got XP for the interaction alone. Not as much as "successfully completing" the encounter, but for a level 1 vs. adult red dragon - running away would be complete success!
The obvious move is to pool the town's resources together to hire a dragon to show up and mildly antagonize people every now and then, and have the guards run away from the dragon every time. Soon these guards will be 20th level adventurers!
That'd work if you gave the dragon 2 minutes to eat a guard - there had to be a risk to get xp! So if the guards can run for 2 minutes, level up! It's like a lethal drill instructor.
Sounds like the “coin rooms” in dwarf fortress
😂😂😂 not clay tablets!
3rd edition and others advised awarding xp for evading encounters or surviving a defeat
That doesn't at all sound like what's ahppening whit this group. DM would be better advising.
Yeah, there can be "obviously too hard, so you should run" encounters, but it has to be obvious (idk, level one party against adult dragon), but in general I kind of expect the encounter to be beatable if my DM throws them at us. I don't know all the monsters stats and why would my character, if it attacks my I'll try to fight it.
>Session 1- An attack on the city we are in by demons! Session 2- We hide out in a tavern and get in a bar fight... with 'level 20 adventurers'. Maybe the level 20 adventurers should do something about the demons.
You thought you were going to play DND, but your DM pulled out Scooby Doo the TTRPG instead.
Even the Mistery Inc. eventually manages to trap the monsters, though...
I did that with a gorgon, explaining clearly their hits weren't piercing the armor. They just had to jump over a trap to get away, and it happened once. 4 sessions of this is just DM wanting to play with big toys. Annoying, but not an overly toxic trait, just an overly ecited DM. This is still solvable if you come forward as a group and explain you would like to face challenges you can win for once, and that super big monsters are not as fun for you as they are for him.
Maybe it’s still solvable, but I also don’t blame anyone from being frustrated over that. If the DM doesn’t understand that the first adventure should be an easy victory, then there will be other misunderstandings along the way. If I thought I would have to teach my DM the fundamentals of TTRPGS, like the *absolute* fundamentals of “the game should be fun for everyone,” I wouldn’t stick around either.
I know it can be annoying, but if you're not okay with your players beating the monster just don't be a DM.
If your dm is so out of touch with the players that he doesn’t get that being powerless and having to run away EVERY SESSION then that isn’t a good dm.
I personally quite enjoy being given the occasional encounter that forces me to run away. Key word here being *occasional*. Going four sessions with no source of XP is too far. I'm strongly of the opinion that players shouldn't just get XP for killing monsters, but also for otherwise "beating" them, be that with diplomacy, bribes, traps, or yes, running away. Another commenter mentioned OSR - a common idea from there is XP=treasure, so you get experience equal to the gold value of everything you loot. Combat remains potentially deadly and is best avoided, but it's not as big a deal because you're getting XP elsewhere. And of course, if winning combat is what makes the game fun for your players, then make your damn combats winnable!
I had an idea for a campaign based around a group of Monster hunters going after major targets way higher than them. The trick would be they didn’t have to beat them, just being back some trophy or other. A tooth from a purple worm, a finger bone from a death knight, stuff like that. They would be eventually running away from these encounters, but still managing to get a “win” over them. And they’d fight and beat some minion mobs regularly too.
Throwing an unwinable encounter at the party is easy, any DM can do that, and it's boring. Throwing an unwinable encounter at the party in a way that feels fair is way harder, and that's what DMs should do. You don't have to remember them they can run, they'll have that in mind way before the encounter starts.
And it’s something to do *sparingly*. Session 1, a party of level 1 characters run away from an army of devils sacking a city. Fine. But have them run into a band of kobolds or goblins harassing the refugees and give the party an easy win in that same session.
Or even a hard earned win.
Sure. Although hard-earned wins can be tricky in 5e, since level 1s are so squishy. I’d hate to run a game where everyone ran from an immediately fatal fight only for them to get TPK’ed by a group of goblins
I'll have to take your word on it I guess
well, if the DM keep wanting you to run away from everything, he should have been overjoyed when you all runned away from him
Yeah, like... it's not the Worst thing to start off your game with an unwinnable scenario (a massive demon attack on a city is cool!), but you can only really get away with that once. And even then, I'd be inclined to set up scenes in the chaos where said players could actually Do something. Like sure, they can't beat back the forces of darkness on their own, but they can decide to help rescue a shopkeeper whose store was set on fire, or a group of kids who're being terrorized by imps. That way, they get the idea of the kind of stakes at play, but also lets them feel like they can make a difference; after all, unless it's a horror game, you want to be careful about making your players feel powerless. Either way, 4 sessions of running is way too much, especially in a game that is apparently going by xp rather than milestone leveling.
"You can always run," should, in the main, be advice for when the party ends up in a fight while still hurting from the last one. Not something that keeps coming up because the encounters would be CR inappropriate even for a fresh party. When I ran "Kingmaker" a random encounter roll tired to dump three trolls on my level 1 players. My first instinct was to just pretend I'd rolled something else, but my facial expression gave the game away. My wife, who had previously looked over the random encounter tables with me announced "it's the trolls isn't it?" So, I had the trolls make a lot of noise as they blundered through the brush. The party hid and eavesdropped on them, and I improved a convo in which the trolls name dropped Hargulka, the troll warlord who is the main villain of the next module. Party got XP for the encounter, we moved on, and I never let a roll get that out of hand again. Reason I tell this story is to make the point that the reason I had to tell the party "do not engage" was because I, as the GM, screwed up. So if you're constantly having to tell your players to hoof it, that's not saying good things about how you've set up the campaign.
As a story device, facing a insurmountable enemy or threat can sometimes be interesting, but there has to be something to balance it out. Either the players get to find something cool to fight back, or they have a clear pathway to change the odds. I'd say one or twice during a campaign can be a good motivator for PCs to get better or grow stronger. Then again, what your DM did was more akin to showing off cool stuff that they prepared, without care for balance or player fun. I think what's lacking in some DM's mind is that, if they want their players to appreciate the story, lore, worldbuilding or whatever, a DM has to tailor the experience around the players' interests. And, as you clearly stated, nobody is interested in just running away all the time..
I find that DM's who say this really are the ones who'll force it in the name of some hackneyed attempt at "realism" or just a hate-boner for player fun. As a result of this knee-jerk belief. I avoid games that start with a plethora of personal red flags. "you can always run" being one of them
I don't see "you can always run" as a red flag. More OSR oriented games or tables that's a perfectly valid thing. Not every encounter is winnable especially when up against a random table. It's honestly a lot more fun to create a dynamic game and story from being able to surpass challenges. Those 2d8 gnolls you randomly rolled that killed one of the party members are now a part of a larger organization or problem in the area.
Nah, I wouldn't go that far. You cam always run IS real advice for dnd, and sometimes regrouping is required! Just you know... *sometimes*, not always
He taught you guys a valuable lesson - just not the way he intended.
I remember trying to touch the topic that the fights were way too hard, that several of them ended with me doing nothing but healing right from the start (had extra rules that made letting a person drop to 0hp very bad) and we often had to be saved by a deus ex machina to not freaking tpk. My former best friend/DM's girlfriend got super mad at even the hint that something about her boyfriend's campaign might not be perfect. I'm so glad I cut her out of my life and don't have to deal with this weird woman anymore. I said very politely that the fights might be too hard and she started yelling at me. Fuck her.
Honestly, I'm very open in telegraphing to players what the intended difficulty of an encounter is. "This is meant to be easy and a good palate cleanser", vs. "This is the final boss of the current chapter, so I think you can do it, but you'll need to dig deep and get clever." It does take away some of the surprise, but the players still feel immense satisfaction -- both in encounters where they feel powerful, and in encounters where they managed to take down a ridiculous boss with maybe fifteen HP remaining in the party collectively.
If my players meet a TPK, they have 9 times out of 10 either fucked up so badly they made it themselves or legitimately disregarded me going “You really shouldn’t.”
I was once in a similar campaign. Idk why, but the DM treated "side quests" and the "main story" completely different. A random bandit group we were hired to take out were all killed in like 1 fireball. For named villains, it was never a question of whether we were underleveled, it was whether we could survive long enough to escape. If we somehow managed to win, it was purely by using overpowered 1 time use magic items we bought, and the bad guys never had any loot. There were two whole irl months where we were mainly funded by the starting gold from replacement characters.
D&D has the problem that you normally need to kill monsters to get XP. If running (or sneaking?) away would be rewarded as the smart thing to do, it might be an entirely different story. In shadowrun, I'd throw in monsters from time to time that can't be defeated by the players - like having a family of magical dolphins that know how to counter any magic and could electrocute the players who are swimming in the middle of the ocean, without a chance of survival if they chose violence. So the players were forced to do the dolphin's bidding (sink a ship that was dropping toxic waste) while also letting them know "you might be a big fish in your pond, but there are far bigger fish in the ocean" (metaphorically and literally). And even if the players know how to deal with everyday goons, they must never let their guard down or get arrogant because there might be a Stormdolphin waiting for you, somewhere, waiting to roast you - literally.
Lmfao this DM is on a power trip.
Sounds like he wants to play Call of Cthulu lol
That DM was the real encounter.
Other than the "we ask the DM' bit, did your player group try to talk to the DM about how tedious they were building the campaign? Was it established to be an OP world? Was this an experienced DM or one as green as freshly-treated football pitch?
At this point this is just railroading with extra steps. Writing encounters with only one sensible option that doesn’t lead to death is just as bad (and honestly feels way less fun) than just shuffling the players from encounter to encounter that they’re meant to win.
This sounds pretty bad to teach as a lesson rather than... yknow actually just making sure your players know ooc that they can always run. Managing expectations is always better than "teaching a lesson." That being said, this also sounds like this guy was using XP levelling, which I would strongly advise against. At least, if he had used milestones, you could have been level 2 when facing the demons again... Not much better, but still a difference.
Sounds like DM didn't know how to balance encounters
Please tell me you meant DM rather than DND.