Quote from: Riordan;643173wait...

Sadistical GMs DO have their place...
... in Paranoia.

I'd like to give you details but it seems you do not have clearance for that information, citizen.

Point taken!

Quote from: Exploderwizard;643181Sadly, the entire concept of player skill is under siege these days. Modern game theory would have us believe that all challenges should be solvable by pushing the right button on the character sheet.

Having a character's survival depend on how well the player can actually think in a given situation is largely absent from mechnics heavy systems.

I'd argue that the push for more tasks resolvable through character skill, rather than player skill, is a reaction to the excessive focus on player skill in earlier editions (talking only about D&D here, not sure how this has played out in other systems through the years).

Obviously both are necessary. If player skill is all that matters, then the character sheet may as well be blank. If character skill is all that matters, then why is the player even there?

I've become a fan of the idea of focusing on character skill as a base, then having player skill modify it. Much as combat focuses primarily on character skill, but rewards player skill (tactics and such giving flanking bonuses, etc), all aspects of the game should function similarly - social interaction should be technically resolvable solely through die rolls, but give bonuses (or even potential penalties) for actual RP. If the party encounters a puzzle, use their character's abilities to temper the sort of puzzle you present to the players to represent it (party of all low-Int barbarians, crazy-hard puzzle; party of all high-Int mages, stupid-easy puzzle, etc).

You need both player skill and character skill to have a functional game, so - rather than try to figure out which end of the spectrum you prefer - why not figure out a way to meld the two into a more enjoyable experience that takes into account the fact that both are required?

Quote from: thedungeondelver;643166I think an adversarial GM can be a good thing (they're being a good opponent, challenging the players' abilities).  But a sadistic GM is just a child.

What is acceptable in being adversarial, and when does it become more "killer GM" in your opinion?

Quote from: Malygris;643213What is acceptable in being adversarial, and when does it become more "killer GM" in your opinion?

What's your own opinion on the matter? (if any)

Quote from: Benoist;643214What's your own opinion on the matter? (if any)

I'm not in competition with my players, as some GMs appear to be. Any adversaries are there to provide heartpounding nail biting action, and a chance for my players to show off their characters. So I find particularly sadistic GMs to be immature, unless they are GMing something like Paranoia. But I won't excuse really stupid behaviour by a player character. If a PC wants to take on ten thousand Orcs with a rusty spoon, then he is asking for a swift demise. But I won't gloat over the demise, as I've seen some GMs do.

Quote from: Malygris;643213What is acceptable in being adversarial, and when does it become more "killer GM" in your opinion?

For example, an adversarial GM will take a random encounter or event at face value.  They may have an adult Red Dragon overfly the party on their way through the wilderness, land, and demand treasure and possibly a couple of horses to dine on.  Whatever age bracket or hit die amount that dragon has as shown by the dice is what it has.

A Killer GM would under the same circumstances have four of them, all huge and ancient and hell bent on wiping out the party to the last living creature, the end.  One is using his vast intelligence to push a sphere of annihilation along and uses it in combat.  Another stays out of any range of anything, casts protection from normal missiles and anti-magic shell and breathes for 88 hit points of damage against everything - and because this is a "special" kind of H.A.R.D., no save for half.  You lose, the end.

To put it in another genre...

The Adversarial GM in, say, Twilight:2000 would have a party and a Soviet motor rifle column cross paths.  OK, it's 1d10x1d10 enemy troops.  There's n vehicles possible, dice for those.  There's x numbers of veterans, x numbers of experienced, x numbers of novice types.  There's z number of "special" weapons (mortars, heavy guns, anti-tank launchers).

A killer GM would run them up against an all-Elite level tank company with T90s, all fully loaded with AP rounds and Stabber anti-tank missiles, every enemy tank equipped with reactive armor, and the whole tank company has an elite infantry screen to prevent the party getting in and getting a satchel charge or swarming one of the tanks.

Cyberpunk:2020 (this is kind of tough as the whole premise of that game seems to be manufactured on the Betrayal Scenario - your boss IS going to screw you regardless) - Adversarial: party goes through a tough situation, fighting gangers, corporate police, enemy hackers but gets the foozle and makes it out through another gauntlet and carries the day.  Killer: every level of defense is maxed out and they seem to know exactly what the party's decker has in his program slots and are protecting against that accordingly.  Defense is all Alpha cyborg replacements in powered armor, etc. etc.

Does that help?

Quote from: Malygris;643219I'm not in competition with my players, as some GMs appear to be. Any adversaries are there to provide heartpounding nail biting action, and a chance for my players to show off their characters. So I find particularly sadistic GMs to be immature, unless they are GMing something like Paranoia. But I won't excuse really stupid behaviour by a player character. If a PC wants to take on ten thousand Orcs with a rusty spoon, then he is asking for a swift demise. But I won't gloat over the demise, as I've seen some GMs do.

I'm a little different in that I do feel that I'm in "competition" with my players in that I'll play the opposite side as if the opposite side is trying to win as hard as the characters are.  However I'm not hell bent on beating the players so I can "win".  Winning, for me, is having challenged the players (and in turn the characters) - I get satisfaction out of seeing them succeed...and entertainment out of seeing them fumble, too!  If a TPK happens I'm not going to say "...it was all a dream!"  But I'm not going to gloat and end-zone dance on them either.  If they win the day in whatever adventure I'm happy for them because we all had fun*.


...

*=fuck you, raggi.

I catch your drift. A measured tough response is adversarial. An all out maximum kill policy is killer GM. The former is good GMing, the latter unequivocally bad, unless everyone in the game is playing for laughs.

I haven't encountered GM sadism since the early days of my gaming. And that was really only when my older brother was DMing. He made a frequent habit of setting up ambushes for our party that routinely resulted in TPKs. And he enjoyed it, maliciously. The bastard!  

Personally, I'm not really that fond of adversary as ascribed to a GM, because the term feels rather loaded (depending on which definition of the term you use). To me, it just implies competition between GM and players, and in a competition the GM has the resources to always win. I prefer impartiality and neutrality - a GM who presents challenges as they are defined, or randomly generated, and lets the dice fall where they may.

Quote from: Malygris;643224I catch your drift. A measured tough response is adversarial. An all out maximum kill policy is killer GM. The former is good GMing, the latter unequivocally bad, unless everyone in the game is playing for laughs.

I'd make a caveat here. Sometimes the PC's opponents will respond with a maximum kill policy depending on the scenario. It is kind of an IQ Test, since the Players should not have engaged those opponents in the first place unless they can be fairly sure to have a fighting chance. Like you should know in D&D that at first level that you will not be able to take an ancient black dragon in its lair, so just avoid that encounter untill you get to a high enough level.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;643223However[/i] I'm not hell bent on beating the players so I can "win".

Then, in my opinion, you aren't in competition with your players.

Quote from: Malygris;643224I catch your drift. A measured tough response is adversarial. An all out maximum kill policy is killer GM. The former is good GMing, the latter unequivocally bad, unless everyone in the game is playing for laughs.

I thik you are bieng too black and white.
Not al Killer DMs cheat the system.
In my Kobold Gauntlet I am a killer DM. The burrows make no real sense as a place for kobolds to live, the time and effort to create the traps are non-sensical in a real setting where a bunch of kobolds live in a burrow. The thing is a deliberate death trap.
However, the rules are the rules. If they used wandering monsters, which they don't as they would set of the traps and ruin everything... they would occur as predicted by the dice.
I don't think a Killer DM would have 4 elder dragons and a sphere of anhiliation. I think a Killer DM might roll for the dragons , determine if any use magic then give them spells at random and then use all of that to kill the party.
As a DM is you want to kill the party you can do so at whim if you set yourself no limits. Doing that is no fun. "when you lift the cup from the alter you get hit by a lightning bolt from Zeus - you are dead" that is no fun anyone can do that.
If you can kill a group of 4 10th level PCs with a 0 level human girl with no special powers fuding no dice rolls then you deserve the title Killer DM.

Oh if I kill a PC in a Kobold Gauntlet I gloat hugely, the cries of Rimmer, Rimmer, Rimmer echo round the room. TPKs are like a fine wine they need to be savoured.

Quote from: Malygris;643149I'd like to ask you all if GM sadism is a sign of immaturity? Or does it have an acceptable place within a game or in certain genres?

In an RPG of the regular variety, a GM who triumphs in defeating the party, no matter how he got there, is missing the point of the game. He can always defeat the party if he really, really wants to. He can simply make their opponents unavoidable and undefeatable. "Victory" to be had so trivially is what the Germans would euphemistically call "self-satisfaction".

But among LARPers, I have known the moniker "Evil" be used as a compliment. Evil Gaz, or whatever his name was, is/was called Evil because he was supposedly a fiendish GM. And I see it no differently for tabletop, save only that lethality must of necessity be lower in games where you depend on a small, tight-knit group of players and CharGen can take an age.

Why does a GM delight in being fiendish? Is he sadistic? Does he take the players to be masochistic? For my own part, I think that's a misuse of language. Sure, I love the thrill of fear for my character when I'm LARPing, and there's scope for that in tabletop too. But it's not masochism. Sure, it's an adrenaline rush. But it's not pain.

Pain would be my character failing horribly. And I don't like that. But the threat has to seem real, for maximum excitement.

Now I'm rambling, but I still have that cold that's left me feeling disoriented. And yes, I can whinge about that with the best of them.

So where am I going with this? Well, I don't trust a player's assessment that the GM is a "killer GM" or "sadistic". Because although occasionally as a player I've seen behaviour from GMs that I regarded as unreasonable, I think, at the end of the day, there's pretty much always been some kind of justification for it. Whereas the amount of unreasonable whinging I've seen from players, including times when I've whinged myself only to realise later I was wrong, is far more substantial. Times when I've had players bitch at me like you wouldn't believe, thinking someone else in the party had an advantage over their character or whatever, and then when the campaign's over and they see each other's character sheets, they all have to agree it was within the bounds of fairness as far as the system and reasonable human capacities allow.

So if you think you've got a sadist for a GM, a killer GM if you will, my gut response is to think that your GM has a munchkin for a player, a whinger who should man up and face the game. I'm not making this criticism without being able to level it at some of my own past behaviour and it's obviously something I strive to avoid. And I'm not saying there's no way I could be wrong. Obviously, the universe has plenty of capacity for douchebags, and some of them end up as GMs. But far, far more likely, given the typical set-up of GM and players, is that it's largely down to misinterpretation on the player's part, or different judgements as to how difficult an encounter's going to be, or the like.

For instance I've got a particular player who regards me in a particularly fiendish light and in the last short-to-medium campaign I ran with that player in, there was one PC knocked unconscious ONCE [in a perfectly avoidable fight with plenty of danger signs in a controlled environment], and not a single player ever captured, killed, possessed or otherwise rendered incapable of participating in play for any great length of time. And at all times the PCs pretty much held the cards, except perhaps at the very, very end, and even then they triumphed (well, one of them did...).

Quote from: jeff37923;643239I'd make a caveat here. Sometimes the PC's opponents will respond with a maximum kill policy depending on the scenario. It is kind of an IQ Test, since the Players should not have engaged those opponents in the first place unless they can be fairly sure to have a fighting chance. Like you should know in D&D that at first level that you will not be able to take an ancient black dragon in its lair, so just avoid that encounter untill you get to a high enough level.

The "attacking ten thousand orcs with a rusty spoon" analogy could be applied here. Though I'm not a big fan of putting uber opponents near low level characters unless there is some damned good reason for doing so, since the outcome of a fight with such opponents is usually outright slaughter.

Quote from: jeff37923;643239I'd make a caveat here. Sometimes the PC's opponents will respond with a maximum kill policy depending on the scenario. It is kind of an IQ Test, since the Players should not have engaged those opponents in the first place unless they can be fairly sure to have a fighting chance. Like you should know in D&D that at first level that you will not be able to take an ancient black dragon in its lair, so just avoid that encounter untill you get to a high enough level.

There's a lot of truth to this. Although, a killer GM will arm his baddies with numbers and weapons and tactics and intellect beyond their in-setting capabilities, while an adversarial GM will stop short of that.

Adversarial GMs may have an entire orc tribe rolled up and be prepared to have every orc fight to the death...but a killer GM will decide that the orcs are numberless until the PCs run or die.

I'm the GM. I don't need to compete against the players, because I can stack the deck however I like. But it's not a dick move if it fits the enemy's capabilities. In my Necessary Evil game, the PCs had been brutally efficient...until they were aided by a V'Sori (the alien baddies of the setting) traitor, and one of the PCs decided to execute the traitor...who was in charge of a communications outpost.

This led to the V'Sori who investigated the outpost discovering the identity of the PC that did the killing, they tracked him down, and they eventually set an ambush with a human black ops squad that was trained to take down supers...and had their base trapped to explode when they retreated back to it in a rush after losing one of their team members in said ambush. That was being adversarial. If I were a dick, I could have had dropped the whole V'Sori army on them, but all that would have been was a pointless grind as the V'Sori eventually wore them down and killed them.