If you walk into a room and the floor, walls, and ceiling are all trying to eat you, someone is trying to send you a serious message. Of course it's a serious message told via a killer ceiling, floor, and wall, so really you shouldn't take it to heart.
Opposite to the
Monty Haul Game Master who heaps rewards by the truckful upon his players, the
Killer Game Master has set himself up as a hostile entity playing
against them. To this guy, 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
Game Master subscribes to the
Amber Law
of gaming; the game session is a zero-sum battle of wits between players and DM, and the DM holds all the cards.
Any world in his hands will inevitably turn into a
Crapsack World where
every innocent-looking item will turn out to be a
Death Trap which kills the player without so much as a saving throw, every magic item they pick up
will be cursed, and their every deed will lead to
miserable failure or end up
helping the forces of Darkness (or Light, if your band of adventurers is a bunch of evil doers). They won't be crushing orcs or goblins at Level 1, they'll be getting stomped by ancient red dragons and tarrasques. And frequently, they'll have to make Dexterity checks to avoid
randomly tripping and falling down.
If there are Paladins or other characters who depend on a certain alignment, this may also extend to making Paladins fall for such small things that it effectively becomes impossible to actually stay a Paladin for very long. An example of this would be loss of Paladinhood for even the smallest non-combat interaction with an evil character, whose alignment is only revealed after you lose Paladin abilities, as the Paladin code forbids association with characters that you know are evil. Another common 'Killer DM' response to Paladins is to place them in a situation where the paladin
must commit an evil act or die/cause the end of the world. You can tell if this is the work of a 'killer' if the
Game Master actively torpedoes any attempt to
Take A Third Option.
The simplest and most brazen of these will simply
collapse the dungeon on the players the moment they enter it. The more subtle have a habit of making life for the average
Player Character a living hell where he will
perpetually suck. Going
Off The Rails is your only hope, and even then you should keep an eye out for
falling rocks. If the players are competent enough
minmaxers (or if the group sports a bona-fide
Munchkin), this kind of DM may be necessary just to give them a challenge. Conversely, of course, these kinds of game masters can actually inspire
Min Maxing in their players, as they feel they need to to survive.
Some of the oldest
Dungeons And Dragons modules seemed to encourage this sort of
trial-and-error,
Nintendo Hard gameplay, such as the infamous
Tomb Of Horrors. Gary Gygax, one of the two creators of D&D, has often been accused of viewing the game as a competition between players and DM, when in actuality, he counseled
against the
Killer Game Master approach in the various D&D manuals. Sometimes, entire
game settings lend themselves to games where a
Total Party Kill is not a question of
if, but
when.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- The above scene from the first series of Yu-Gi-Oh! is this trope taken to its ultimate extreme: the DM (Bakura, or at least his dark side) is not just intending for the players to lose, he's actually outright cheating and even goes as far as to invoke evil magic against them. Getting a natural 1 or cheating on their side traps all of the players in their figurines - and by the rules of the game, if their characters run out of HP or the figurines break, they're dead. The trouble for Bakura starts when his good side (a much fairer DM) starts screwing with him...
Literature
- At the beginning of the third book in Peter David's Sir Apropos Of Nothing series, Apropos plays a roleplaying game (though not called that, since it's already in a fantastic medieval setting) with a literal killer game master named...Ronnell McDonnell, of the Clan McDonnel. (Apropos eventually bests him...and blows a hole in the ship they were all travelling in at the time.)
- In Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun, Jay Omega plays Killer Game Master in order to try and ferret out the killer of a famous fantasy author: He kills the hero of the dead author's novels in a crushing and humiliating fashion, causing the obsessive fanboy to tip his hand and confess.
- This Is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams characterizes each of four friends by their habits when acting as DMs. The most antisocial one has every NPC betray the players, and often sets them up to betray each other. The main character eventually realizes that he expects everyone to betray everyone else in real life as well, and hence betrays them first.
Newspaper Comics
Tabletop Games
- Amber
- Palladium's Beyond The Supernatural was tough, but not overtly hard if you weren't fighting a Cosmic Horror. However, the corebook included a suggested game mode where the characters played normal people, and the GM rolled up a horrific monster which they had to survive against. The idea was to simulate the sort of stuff that goes on in a slasher flick. Hilarity Ensues.
- Call Of Cthulhu: Cthulhu devours 1d6 investigators per round. Lose 1d10/1d100 Sanity.
- Don't Rest Your Head plays a strange subversion of this trope by which the GM is basically encouraged to try to kill the Protagonists, but the game rules don't allow for quick deaths, but instead slowly wears the Protagonists down until they die, collapse (a Fate Worse Than Death) or turn into a Nightmare (a Fate Even Worse than Collapsing). The result is that Protagonists are often fairly resilient, but, once the game gets going, always a little to close to the edge for comfort.
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and its 40K variant Dark Heresy: Rules as written, it is entirely possible for a Wizard or Psyker to cause a TPK by using a single spell or psychic power (in the latter case, even at the very start of the campaign). Combat is incredibly unforgiving as well. Fate Points alleviate this somewhat by almost acting as extra lives but this game's combat system wants you to die and a devious GM will be happy to accommodate you.
- Paranoia demands this. The sourcebook makes it crystal clear that this isn't one of those nice RPGs where the players cooperate and the GM tells them a story. In Paranoia, the GM tries to kill the players and the players try to kill each other. Each player is given a six-pack of clones, with more available for purchase, so that character death is a momentary inconvenience. Which it needs to be, since in Paranoia if you don't die early and often you're doing it wrong. (And, of course, it's Played For Laughs.)
- Ninja Burger is similar to Paranoia, in that it's designed to be extremely easy to die. Simply being seen by an NPC could result in an invisible ninja running up and cutting your head off.
- Forget, "An NPC saw you. A ninja cuts your head off." How about "An NPC saw you. You must commit Seppuku." Yes, the game has an actual mechanic for seppuku.
- The World Of Darkness (particularly Werewolf and Changeling)
- In the new World Of Darkness, Vampire: The Requiem is the only non-comedic game this troper knows of where it is entirely possible for the player characters to kill each other on first meeting, simply by playing the rules as written.
- Tomb Of Horrors
- Cyberpunk2020. It's meant to simulate a gritty, dirty, Darker And Edgier city of the future. It encourages the GM to not let the Player Characters relax or rest without being just a little paranoid. Even of each other. Even Shadowrun, in a similar genre, didn't quite go that far in the sourcebook.
Real Life
- Personal anecdotes can be found in Troper Tales.
- The Role Playing Game Association's Living Greyhawk campaign was rumored to have a 25% death rate per table as one of its goals. Even if it wasn't true, their published modules reinforced this belief. This troper has played in modules that have thrown a Lernean hydra at APL(average party level) 1 tables and made the required save versus a disease higher the lower the APL.
- This troper, in Living Greyhawk, has faced both Wraiths and Gauth Beholders at APL 1 & APL 3
Video Games
- Left 4 Dead has truly random spawns, but early in development it was discovered that they needed a way to make it so that things are fairly balanced. They created the AI Director, who usually does a good job, making sure that you don't get a long string of good or bad rolls (via monitoring numerous variables, to know when to step in). Then you play on Expert, and find he stops caring about the bad rolls...
- Mission Force Cyber Storm is rife with this, since your Bioderms have limited lifespams, you are enticed to send them out on suicide runs with some weapons mean to turn Bioderms to living suicide bombers.
- In Final Fantasy XI, the Chains of Promathia expansion was originally set up as an exercise in Killer Game Master tactics. "Hey there level 75 heroes, who is ready for some adventure?! How would you like to go into a dungeon filled with monsters that can see through sneak and invisible and are so strong that you need 18 people get through it? Now, how about we make it so that you are limited to level 30 when you go in there, so you have to buy whole new sets of otherwise weak and useless gear to clog up your deliciously small inventory? And how about we divide the dungeon up into floors, and to progress you have to wade through a crowded sea of deadly monsters find the right portal? And how about instead of just having the portal up, you instead have to kill a monster and make the portal appear, but there will be several of those monsters and only one will open the portal, the rest will only contain despair? Oh, and those portal monsters will shoot smaller monsters at you that will keep appearing after the main monster dies so that the smaller monsters will swarm members of your party causing them to miss the portal, die, and have to homepoint and lose XP? And how about if at the end of that dungeon, you have to cobble together a workable party with the correct jobs from the people who managed to make it to the top and even then there was a chance of horrible death? Oh, and did I mention that since this dungeon was so much fun, that there are two more exactly like it that you have to beat?" And that was only the first three missions. Fortunately the missions were made much, much, much easier since then, but people who did the missions when they first came out quickly came to the understanding that the "Chains" part of the expansion's name was just symbolic for the high-grade masochism that you needed to progress in the storyline.
Web Comics
- Matt from Dork Tower and B.A. from Knights Of The Dinner Table are infamous for this. Their players' constant Off The Rails rebellions largely emanate from their frustration over having a control-freak Dungeon Master.
- B.A. tries to craft elaborate adventures involving roleplay, diplomacy, and intrigue but the players immediately opt for Hack and Slash at the first opportunity. BA started out as a bit of a control freak, but the killer GM tendencies came later after Brian and Bob had trashed one too many of his adventures.
- This Penny Arcade strip.
- Parson Gotti from Erfworld apparently did this to his gaming group at least some of the time. And ended up stuck in one of his own killer scenarios.
Web Original
- Al Bruno III of RPG.Net fame keeps a Binder of Shame in which he gives fictionalized accounts of his time with a truly dysfunctional gaming group. The RPG.Net rant "A Night at the Inn, A Day At the Racists" features Killer Game Master "Psycho Dave," who apart from his habit of having the PCs roll for everything as mentioned in the Quotes page, considered the Arduin Grimoire critical hit tables (which are best described as something out of Hellraiser) to be coddling the players. Oh, and that "racists" in the title? It's not a typo.
- Although compared to the horrors to come, quick death is a mercy.
Western Animation
