Killer Game Master/Playing With

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Basic Trope: The Game Master believes that the point of an RPG campaign is to kill the players' characters, and does everything in his power to do so.

  • Straight: The adventuring party is frequently beset by monsters several levels beyond their ability to fight them, and deadly traps around every corner.
  • Exaggerated: The Dungeon Master collapses the dungeon on the characters the moment they enter it.
  • Justified: The players are Min-Maxing munchkins who need an unforgiving campaign in order to pose a challenge.
  • Inverted: The Game Master goes out of his way to avoid killing the players' characters, fudging die rolls and pulling punches to avoid a Total Party Kill.
  • Subverted: After a hopeless battle against an army of half-dragon tarrasques, the party is saved by the timely intervention of the great wizard Mondo the Magnificent.
  • Double Subverted: Mondo then attacks and kills the party for no reason, using a spell with no saving throw. The whole encounter was nothing but a cruel Hope Spot.
  • Parodied: The Game Master keeps a set of tally marks for every Player Character that gets killed in one of his campaigns.
  • Deconstructed: The players get fed up with getting killed all the time and decide to walk out en masse, leaving the Game Master without a game.
    • Or, through some sort of magical plot device, the Game Master ends up being zapped into the world of his own campaign and gets to see what a Crapsack World it is first-hand.
  • Reconstructed: Bob the sadistic DM is ditched by his friends after a couple of sessions. Later, his closest friend Charlie finds out that Bob has some social issue, and killing parties was his anger management. Charlie gets the group back, and after some costructive critics, Bob softens a little. Only Dick refuses to play again with Bob, saying that he "violates" him, and instead start GMing himself, killing characters by the tons.
  • Zig Zagged: Bob kills a party every sessions, with peaks of twice a night. When players start complaining loudly, he became a Care Bear GM, never letting anything bad happen to the party. Until the players start complaining again, and so on.
  • Averted: The Game Master plays the game fairly, making no special effort to kill or save the party.
  • Enforced: "This will be the last session I'll GM with you guys, and I'm going to have some fun. Brace yourself."
  • Lampshaded: "I think we could escape the void blasting gods and we can possibly outsmart the psionic demon Smurf, but I know it would be useless. Somehow, the planet will find a way to explode"
  • Invoked: "Suck it GM! You can't kill me here! IN YOUR FACE!!!"
  • Defied: When the party is going to get an undeserved bashing, a player stares the GM and spells No. The dragon-riding Chthulus titans steer away for no apparent reason.
  • Discussed: ?
  • Conversed: ?

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