History Main / KillerGamemaster

[[folder:Webcomics]]

* [[http://web.me.com/magwier/albruno3/Welcome.html Al Bruno III]] of RPG.Net fame keeps a Literature/BinderOfShame in which he gives fictionalized accounts of his time with a [[DysfunctionJunction truly dysfunctional gaming group]]. The RPG.Net rant [[http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?13446-A-Night-At-The-Inn-A-Day-At-The-Racists "A Night at the Inn, a Day at the Racists"]] [[ThoseWackyNazis (sic)]] features Killer Game-Master "Psycho Dave," whose style of running a game is described as follows:
--> ''As you can see I soon realized that Psycho Dave ran a game in roughly the same way that Warwick Davis in the film ''Film/{{Leprechaun}}'' [[JackassGenie granted wishes]]. Everything you said your character did was scrutinized for some way to screw you over and the dice ruled all. He was the only guy I know who used a random monster encounter chart for ''TabletopGame/CallOfCthulhu''. You haven't lived until you've had a character [[GoMadFromTheRevelation go mad]] because he saw a [[EldritchAbomination nightgaunt]] sitting in a restroom stall reading a copy of the [[ArtifactOfDoom Necronomicon]].''

** The Leaping Wizards incident, where a team of three Level 1 wizards caused a TotalPartyKill. The official rules said the wizards had only one spell each, Magic Missile; Spoony felt this was moronic because Magic Missile does piddling damage at low levels and once spent they had nothing but their staves. So he made what he felt were common-sense alterations to their spell lists.[[note]]One got Sleep, one got Charm Person, and one got Ray of Enfeeblement.[[/note]] Good rolls on his part plus bad rolls on the party's part lead to the TPK, and to Spoony being thrown out of the RPGA.

-->'''Matt''': ''(to Pike, the cleric, after a particularly hard fight)'' I was ''so worried'' you were going to die again!
* ''Roleplay/WeAreOurAvatars'': The Dungeon Master, a TabletopGame-themed super villain from Silver City. He narrates the actions of the heroes coming after him and uses giant dice to determine their rolls. He invokes RuleZero too much and angered Starlight. The group fought back by becoming annoying {{Munchkin}}s.
* ''WebAnimation/BabyCakes'': "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2XGp5ix8HE Role Play Tournament (Be Aggressive)]]" takes place during an RPG tournament. Baby Cakes declares, "The dungeon master is the bastard known as Creamy Be Ill." Baby Cakes is the only character left standing, though the game itself seems to be a deathmatch anyway.
* T The Writer usually isn't one of these when he runs D&D games, but he does have a few stories where he did kill several player characters.
** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2BdTCDE6ZE The Scroll Mistress]] story was about the players rescuing the men of a town from being enslaved by a succubus who was forcing them to make magic scrolls. After defeating the succubus and freeing her slaves, one of the players decided to check what the scrolls they were making did, and it turned out that all of them were explosive runes, which all went off at once and killed the players in a huge explosion.
** In the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4--CHzFyig Enter the Labyrinth]] campaign, the player characters are death row inmates forced to fight their way through an endless maze for a chance at freedom. What he didn't tell the players is that he was using the Tomb of Horrors for the dungeon containing the only way out of the maze. However, almost all of the deaths that took place in the campaign were the players' own fault. One particularly stupid player died so many times that T couldn't remember all of the characters that he used. Another player walked into a KaizoTrap after the boss which was set to kill anyone of Chaotic or Evil alignment, thinking it wouldn't affect him because he was LawfulGood, but it killed him anyway because T had decided that he had lost his LawfulGood alignment due to the choices he made in the story.
** And then there was the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOGb0TfzRes Zombie Town]] campaign. T had all of the players play as paladins who worshiped a god with very strict rules, including a rule that any paladin who lost their powers due to breaking those rules must be killed. He then had the villain of the campaign purposefully put them into situations where they would be tempted to break the rules. By the end of the campaign, three out of the four players lost their powers and got killed for it, and the [[KarmaHoudini villain completely got away with it]].
* ''WebVideo/PuffinForest'': Ben can sometimes be a Killer DM
** In "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b87D1eGSp0 Miscellaneous Monsters and Bears of Sand]]" Ben killed two of his players and forced the others to retreat by having them fight a permanently invisible beholder. To be fair, the beholder was from a module.
** In the first Malikar video, he admits that he sometimes adds in monsters just because he thought they looked cool, without concern for CR.
** In the video about the first time he was a dungeon master, he has an annoying player character killed for complaining about the story and being too GenreSavvy, but it turns out to only be an ImagineSpot.
** Something similar happens in ''Last Orders At The Yawning Portal Tavern''. When a player makes an IncrediblyLamePun that nobody found funny, Ben has the monster instantly kill the player's character, but then he changes his mind and declares that the character is ok, but the monster has instead [[TheFourthWallWillNotProtectYou killed the player ''in real life'']], so the player is now metaphorically dead to them.

* ''Videogame/{{Rimworld}}:'' The Storyteller system works rather like a GM directing what events your colony faces. Naturally, for harder difficulties all of them can qualify; Phoebe Chillax least of all, since she gives you long breathers, but will still hit you with a deluge of bad stuff all at once when it's time to suffer. And Cassandra Classic just gradually squeezes you dry until you can't keep up. Randy Random can be the worst of them by hitting you at the start with the worst events of the game, or he can be the opposite; he's [[RandomNumberGod moody]] like that.

* ''TabletopGame/LamentationsOfTheFlamePrincess'' is criticized for being very cruel to the players in ways that may be amusing to the game master but are not fun for the players. Modules by the original author Raggi are filled with [[MoonLogicPuzzle]]s and unavoidable traps. Many of them are impossible for the players to win, or can only be won by [[GuideDangIt doing very specific things that the players are unlikely to think of]]. The supplements and modules by other authors are better though.

* The ''TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}}'' Second Edition playtest module ''Doomsday Dawn'' has a side mission called ''Heroes of Undarin'' that is designed end in a TotalPartyKill by having the player characters face waves of enemies that are way more powerful than what they can reasonably be expected to beat at their level. Since it is part of a playtest module, it was written as a way of testing the game's combat system by putting the players in an unbeatable scenario.

** In addition to making the players roll for ''everything'' as described above, he also considered the ''Arduin Grimoire'' critical hit tables (where it is not uncommon to lose three limbs, among other things) to be ''coddling'' the players. All things considered, a quick death might have been mercy.

* ''TabetopGame/DescentJourneysInTheDark'' follows the ''[=HeroQuest=]'' model in actually pitting the Overlord against the PlayerParty. In a nice touch, Overlord victories in Act I of a campaign result in [[StoryBranching completely different scenarios being played]] in Act II, compared to if the heroes had won, further incentivizing the Overlord to win.

** Some viewers especially complained about the death of Lord Vane I, WebVideo/AngryJoe's original character in the [[WebOriginal/SpoonysCampaign Dethklok Campaign]]. After a battle which ended with TheGoodKing trapped in magical amber, the castle guards arrived and demanded that everyone present surrender. Everyone except Joe complied (and the other players strongly urged him to do the same, but Joe refused), so the guards attacked ''en masse'' and killed Vane. Spoony responded to the protests by pointing out that as far as the guards knew, the party had assassinated the king, so their reaction was entirely justified given the circumstances.

** Something similar happens in ''Last Orders At The Yawning Portal Tavern''. When a player makes an IncreadiblyLamePun that nobody found funny, Ben has the monster instantly kill the player's character, but then he changes his mind and declares that the character is ok, but the monster has instead [[TheFourthWallWillNotProtectYou killed the player ''in real life'']], so the player is now metaphorically dead to them.

** The campaign recapped in ''[[RefugeInAudacity The Adventures of Herr Schnitzelnazi]] rolls with it,'' with, as the name suggests, the players deliberately coming up with [[AssholeVictim unlikeable assholes who are intended to be crushed to paste at the earliest opportunity]] (to whit, a JerkJock with an indeterminate ammount of identical brothers, a republican senator who is openly hostile to Green Energy Initiatives and poor people and his bodyguard, and a 92-year old, thoroughly bonkers [[BoomerangBigot afroamerican nazi]] who was Hitler's chauffer). Schnitzelnazi lives a surprisingly long time, surviving his carload of dakka being eaten by a monster, a plane crashing into a gas station, a fight with the army, and finally, making a HeroicSacrifice to nuke the Great Old Ones power nexus.

* ''TabletopGame/CallOfCthulhu'':

** The campaign recapped in ''[[RefugeInAudacity The Adventures of Herr Schnitzelnazi]] rolls with it,'' with, as the name suggests, the players deliberately came up with unlikeable assholes who are intended to be crushed to paste at the earliest opportunity (to whit, a JerkJock with an indeterminate ammount of identical brothers, a republican senator who is openly hostile to Green Energy Initiatives and poor people and his bodyguard, and a 92-year old, thoroughly bonkers [[BoomerangBigot afroamerican nazi]] who was Hitler's chauffer). Schnitzelnazi lives a surprisingly long time, surviving his carload of dakka being eaten by a monster, a plane crashing into a gas station, a fight with the army, and finally, making a HeroicSacrifice to nuke the Great Old Ones power nexus.

* ''TabletopGame/CallOfCthulhu'':

** The campaign recapped in ''[[RefugeInAudacity The Adventures of Herr Schnitzelnazi]] ''rolls with it,'' with, as the name suggests, the players deliberately coming up with unlikeable assholes who are intended to be crushed to paste at the earliest opportunity (to whit, a JerkJock, a republican senator, and a 92-year old, thoroughly bonkers [[BoomerangBigot afroamerican nazi]]). Schnitzelnazi lives a surprisingly long time, surviving his carload of dakka being eaten by a gug, a plane crash, a fight with the army, and finally, making a HeroicSacrifice to nuke the Great Old Ones power nexus.

* ''TabletopGame/CallOfCthulhu'':

* ''TabletopGame/CallOfCthulhu'': In its purest form, this game has the trope built into it, as the player characters are all human investigators who grapple with eldritch abominations. The characters can only succeed in the short term, as the more they interact with monsters, the more Insanity points they acquire. Surviving monster attacks only prolongs the inevitable. The most powerful abominations are many times more powerful than any possible group of player characters. Cthulhu himself infamously eats 1d6 investigators each round automatically. There's a reason why you never hear about groups playing the same ''Call of Cthulhu'' campaign for more than a few sessions.

** ''Series/KamenRiderExAid'' has three different game masters in charge of ''Kamen Rider Chronicle'' over the course of the show, and ''all'' of them are this trope. The creator of the game, a raving lunatic with a god complex, is the ''nicest'' GM, because in his version you could beat the game if you played it every day for sixteen years and survived. Both other people who take over the game have no intention of letting ''anyone'' win.

* ''WebVideo/PuffinForest'': "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b87D1eGSp0 Miscellaneous Monsters and Bears of Sand]]" shows that Ben can sometimes be a Killer DM. Ben once killed two of his players and forced the others to retreat by having them fight a permanently invisible beholder.

* ''Series/KamenRiderExAid'' has two literal examples:
** Kuroto Dan/Kamen Rider Gemn is a [[AGodAmI self-proclaimed]] GameMaster, and he's more than willing to kill anyone that gets in his way, [[spoiler: as Kiriya Kujo/Kamen Rider Lazer and Burgermon find out the hard way]]. Any [[TransformationTrinket Gashat]] not created by him is a certain BerserkButton.
** Kuroto's father Masamune Dan/Kamen Rider Cronus is even worse in this department as he uses his position as the ruler of ''Kamen Rider Chronicle'' to abused his rider powers, such as his [[TimeStandsStill Pause]] ability to gain the upper advantage against the heroes.
* ''Series/KamenRiderRyuki'' had Shiro Kanzaki, who's more than happy to choose people at random to participate in the Rider War - which included characters like [[BloodKnight Takeshi Asakura]]. [[spoiler: What makes it "killer", however, is that he's used Odin's [[ResetButton Time Vent]] to reset the rider war multiple times, meaning that not only do the riders in said war die multiple times, but so have numerous civilians due to Mirror monster attacks]].

** The infamous Fanfic/OldManHenderson, a.k.a. "the only character to ever '''win''' ''Call of Cthulhu''" was created as a response to a particularly sadistic Killer Game Master in order to deliberately send his campaign OffTheRails as revenge for killing Henderson's player's previous character in a completely BS manner (dropping a horse out of an airplane right on top of him).

** The infamous [[Fanfic/OldManHenderson]], a.k.a. "the only character to ever '''win''' ''Call of Cthulhu''" was created as a response to a particularly sadistic Killer Game Master in order to deliberately send his campaign OffTheRails as revenge for killing Henderson's player's previous character in a completely BS manner (dropping a horse out of an airplane right on top of him).

* The DM in the [[ComicBook/ChickTracts Jack Chick]] tract [[http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.ASP "Dark Dungeons"]] is evil to the point of declaring a player character dead without even giving the character's player a saving throw. This will remain true in the live-action movie based upon the comic. ''[[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/295102457/rpgs-are-evil-dark-dungeons-the-movie Dark Dungeons: The Movie!]]'' is being funded on Kickstarter. The [[http://blog.fantasyheartbreaker.com/2010/04/21/whatever-happened-to-elfstar/ "good version" fanfic]] [[AlternateCharacterInterpretation actually gives her a motive]]: she's only a Killer GM to that ''one'' player, because she's jealous and wants to drive her away.\\\
She has a motive in the tract, as well. She's using the game to find out whether or not the players are worthy of learning "real" witchcraft. The player who let her character die was too weak. Note that since these tracts are designed to teach the truth about non-Christian (i.e. "incorrect") lifestyles, the logical conclusion of this is that Jack Chick thinks witchcraft (as it's portrayed in ''Dungeons & Dragons'') is real.

* T The Writer usually isn't one of these when he runs D&D games. However, he did kill several player characters in his [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4--CHzFyig Enter the Labyrinth]] campaign. The premise of the campaign is that the character are death row inmates forced to fight their way through an endless maze for a chance at freedom. What he didn't tell the players is that he was using the Tomb of Horrors for the dungeon containing the only way out of the maze. However, almost all of the deaths that took place in the campaign were the players' own fault. One particularly stupid player died so many times that T couldn't remember all of the characters that he used. Another player walked into a KaizoTrap after the boss which was set to kill anyone of Chaotic or Evil alignment, thinking it wouldn't affect him because he was LawfulGood, but it killed him anyway because T had decided that he had lost his LawfulGood alignment due to the choices he made in the story.

* Monokuma from ''VisualNovel/DanganRonpa'' is trying to get his captors to kill each other as part of their Mutual Killing game, especially since whoever "wins" becomes the SoleSurvivor. He's even willing to cheat to do so [[spoiler: like using the corpse of someone he killed as a victim to frame someone he doesn't like or drive people into madness.]]

Opposite to the MontyHaul GameMaster who heaps rewards by the truckful upon their players, the Killer Game-Master has set themself up as a hostile entity playing ''against'' them. To this person, it hasn't been a good day until the players have been forced to roll up several new characters in a single session. In short, this GameMaster subscribes to the [[http://web.archive.org/web/20080212091754/http://atrocities.primaryerror.net/rpgcliches.html Amber Law]] of gaming; the game session is a zero-sum battle of wits between players and GM, and the GM holds all the cards. In short, this is the {{Munchkin}} on the other side of the GM screen - equally obsessed with winning, and in this case winning means a TotalPartyKill. For exactly this reason, the Killer Game-Master is in most cases considered the biggest example of what a GameMaster ''shouldn't'' be. Since the GM has the ability to [[RocksFallEveryoneDies kill off the entire party at will at any time]], them "winning" such a battle [[CurbStompBattle is hardly an accomplishment]].

Opposite to the MontyHaul GameMaster who heaps rewards by the truckful upon their players, the Killer Game-Master has set themself up as a hostile entity playing ''against'' them. To this person, it hasn't been a good day until the players have been forced to roll up several new characters in a single session. In short, this GameMaster subscribes to the [[http://web.archive.org/web/20080212091754/http://atrocities.primaryerror.net/rpgcliches.html Amber Law]] of gaming; the game session is a zero-sum battle of wits between players and GM, and the GM holds all the cards. For exactly this reason, the Killer Game-Master is in most cases considered the biggest example of what a GameMaster ''shouldn't'' be. Since the GM has the ability to [[RocksFallEveryoneDies kill off the entire party at will at any time]], them "winning" such a battle [[CurbStompBattle is hardly an accomplishment]].