Dave: Damn! I rolled a one.
B.A.: A one? Excellent! That gives me a chance to use the new Critical Mass rolls I just picked up.
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.
As you can see I soon realized that Psycho Dave ran a game in roughly the same way that Warwick Davis in the film Leprechaun
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 Call Of Cthulhu. You haven't lived until you've had a character go mad because he saw a nightgaunt sitting in a restroom stall reading a copy of the Necronomicon.
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 place 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 maintain Paladin status. 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.
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, his advice in the Dungeon Master's Guide cautioned
against this line of thinking. Sometimes, entire
game settings lend themselves to games where a
Total Party Kill is not a question of
if, but
when.
Examples:
Tabletop Games
- Amber
- Call Of Cthulhu: Cthulhu devours 1d6 investigators per round. Lose 3 Sanity.
- 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.)
- 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.
Examples from fiction
- In one Fox Trot storyline, Jason convinces Paige to play a game of Dungeons And Dragons with him as the DM. After a week's worth of strips of Paige creating characters for her party, Jason causes the cave to collapse, killing everyone, on her very first turn.
- Jason also creates equally sadistic dungeons for his friend Marcus in several strips. Only Marcus actually enjoys it.
- 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.
- 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...
- At the beginning of the third book in the 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.
- Dexter from Dexters Laboratory did this in one episode, but Dee Dee took over and was a more benevolent DM
- 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.
- 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 quote from him above is from the RPG.Net rant "A Night at the Inn, A Day at the Racists" which is part of the Binder of Shame and which features a classic Killer Game Master called "Psycho Dave." Besides the classic killer DM tack of having the players roll for everything, he also considered the Arduin Grimoire critical hit tables (which are best described as something out of Hellraiser) to be coddling the players.
- How bad does he get, you may ask? Not even the arrival of Hastur is enough to stop the pain. And just in case you're wondering, the "racists" in the title is not a typo.
Examples from 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.
- 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.
- 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...
