I know this is just a meme and all but do people still play 'adversarial GM’ games these days? I never enjoyed that dynamic as a player or a GM.
depends on how you define “adversarial”
I’ve given out powerful items, that had downsides when used, but my players enjoyed figuring out stuff like that.
I’ve also ran dungeons that featured potential lethal traps, but i think thats ok if the presence of such a trap is telegraphed enough that players know they better go slow and ask questions about their environment or describe how they are checking a room. I did not plan that you could get a pressure plate stuck by pouring sand between tiles, but you described doing it and explaining your intention so it became the solution. if you’d chosen to rush through the room filled with gore or strange scratch marks on the floor or obvious vents in the ceiling, then i’d have rolled if you trigger a trap, and then you might die trying to escape poison gas or being crushed by a moving wall, if the dice keep falling that way.
i only create situations (and those are often dangerous, and have a chance of characters dieing), but at the table i am the biggest fan your characters have and can’t wait to see how they crawl out of the dungeon with treasure beyond believe.
I feel like the key to a good game as a dm is to be flexible in how your campaign / game is laid out.
Whether something is dangerous or good it will piss players off if any solution they try inevitably leads to the result you planned out, especially when it clearly makes no sense it would pan out like that.
Whether these are good or bad results they piss people off.
Players actually have fun when you can roll with the punches and they feel like their decisions are meaningful.
It can be fun, so long as everyone is in the same mindset, and it’s actually played to be fun, rather than the GM taking out their frustrations on the characters, or the group just killing and destroying the world. A long campaign like that would probably lose it’s shine, but an occasional one-sort type thing could be a good pallete cleanser.
I think it’s the kind of thing new groups discover and then usually realize it sucks. So it’ll keep coming up as long as new players are entering the hobby.
Like every group has done the “what if we make characters based on ourselves??” trope.
The only idea I even have for such a campaign is one where all the BBGs are dopplegangers of the party and the players are trying to defeat me, playing as their dopplegangers.
I would only be able to do what the players themselves can do. So it becomes a test of who understands the build better. The player or the DM.
Silly player, the bowl is the mimic.
Did not roll perception check ; the chowder was bad and will hit the intestines in a few hours during the dungeon delving.
No magic. No curse. Just your average every day poison.
IT’S CHOWDAH YOU IDIOT!
Removed by mod
And DMs, if you want to surprise people, do it with plot and stakes, not constant item ambushes.
A good surprise has foreshadowing so the players go “ooh that makes sense. We should have thought of that”. If all the corpses in the room look like they died of drowning and there’s scratches on the door, it’s not a total surprise if there’s a trap that locks the door and fills the room with water.
Also, good foreshadowing always creates the possibility that your audience (the players, in this case) will work out what’s really going on before you expected them to. This is not a flaw, it doesn’t “spoil” the experience. It is, in fact, incredibly satisfying to put a bunch of clues together and then see that prediction vindicated when the twist is revealed.
Detect Magic telling someone “it’s chowder” is a cop-out, same as a DM saying “you failed the skill check because you looked suspicious.” If a spell exists to reveal a magical aura, use it to reveal an aura, not to sass the player.
My answer in that case is “You detect no aura” from the non-magical chowder (or maybe they do detect one if it was flavored with prestidigitation), unless it’s an edition where the effect is a cone, and they are sitting across the table from their friend blinged out in magical gear, in which case they are definitely detecting an aura. Several of them. And they’re going to have to take time, focus, and make checks to recognize that none are coming from the chowder.
What school of cuisine is the chowder?
