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Your players consider hiring a small army to shove into the dungeon ahead of them just to set off some, most or maybe even all of the traps.
Your players set up life insurance policies IRL for thier characters, then try to collect.
Your only memories of all the games you've ever run ... are the screams of anguish from the players every time you messily dispatched thier characters.
Your idea of a good game involves more than 4 replacement characters ready and available to each player in thier red folder. Or, at a minimum, 4 crisp clean blank character sheets.
Your player rotation is on par with your player characters' death rate in the game.
Your players, upon realizing that they cannot collect IRL insurance policies on mere pieces of paper, spend significant amounts of time (presumably by way of IM and/or e-mail) debating on whether or not to engage in charity drives in order to raise enough cash to bribe you into not killing any of thier characters for at least 12 levels of advancement.
Your players, having finally bribed you and gotten you to honor the above agreement, forgot about the precise wording of thier agreement ... and find thier shiny new 13th level characters stomped on by a randomly-determined Epic level monster "that just happened to fart in thier general direction" at the very end of the session in which they achieved 13th level.
You get into more brawls because of how you run your game than the player characters do in the taverns IN your game.
Your home-brewed carefully-crafted villains rather conveniently have, at all times, the precisely memorized, known, prepared or otherwise available and ready for use spells, magical and alchemical items in effect at all times to deflect and defend against all possible avenues of attack available to the player characters.
Your home-brewed carefully-crafted villains generally show a tendency to have one simple weakness or vulnerability that is almost certainly - in the hindsight of thier messy demise at the hands of the PCs - due to your lack of due diligence. " Next time this will not happen !! " *Cue cheesy music of choice*
Your home-brewed carefully-crafted villains, 95% of the time, are able to achieve surprise on the entire group of PCs due to equally careful-crafting of the tactical environment to specifically suit the strengths of the villain or villains intent on doing grievous bodily harm to the PCs.
Your idea of after-game conversation is to go online and post - in gruesome detail - the brutal and messy deaths of the characters you spent all or most of the day killing over and over again.
You might be a killer GM if....
Character backstory in 10 words or less if your players' goal.
Everyone plays a barbarian at 1st level, because no one can afford anything less than a d12 for hit points
Your party runs from angry shopkeepers
No one buys camping gear for their characters because if they do happen to make it to the first night alive, they're not going to sleep anyway
Players bring 14 pre-generated characters to the game
Youre Steve Greer :[
Just kidding, Steve! I wub joor games! :]
You might be a killer GM if...
Your players verbally threaten you.
Youre Steve Greer :[
Just kidding, Steve! I wub joor games! :]
You might be a killer GM if...
Your players verbally threaten you.
So now I'm a killer GM, huh? Hmm. Seems to me one Mr. Alford hasn't had any character deaths recently >:)
::BTW, am I just part of the first line, or am I supposed to be included in the bottom line, too? Cuz I don't recall any verbal threats, just a lot of alligator tears.::
How strange... When I quote Savaun there's an extra quote in there in my preview box that doesn't appear in the actual submitted post. Like Savaun left me a secret little message, for my eyes only. Anyway, secret message received, Savaun.
Im not sure what happened but some of the stuff I tried to type in there didnt actualy show up. The : was supposed to be :[
No secret message, though :p
RPG Superstar 2013 Top 32
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You might be a killer DM if...
...you scoop up every d10 you own into both hands, frown, and say 'I guess I'll just have to roll all these twice,' when rolling for the red dragon's breath weapon.
...you conclude every command of a player to make a saving throw with 'not that it will matter.'
...you substitute your refridgerator for a mini for the colossal golem that you custom-made because the television 'didn't accurately portray the size of this thing.'
...players start to crumple their character sheets up to throw them away after you declare 'he swings at you with his flaming greatsword' and before you've even rolled.
...your game includes substantial ad hoc XP awards just for surviving.
...you use a handful of rice to depict how many orcs come pouring out of the cave, all with bloodlust in their eyes.
...all of the magical traps in your dungeons have a contingency which casts finger of death on anyone who disarms the original trap.
...you employ incorporeal undead who can use harm and power word: kill at will.
You might be a Killer GM if ...
your idea of a fair fight starts with a random PC being sniped by a meteor swarm directly targeting the character's face. Oh, and the energy type substituted to deal sonic damage...
your players don't name thier characters until they've survived at least 5 levels of advancement after creation. Oh, wait, that's what I do on general principle ...
ymbakgm if...
You tell somebody to "roll initiative" and they pick up three six-sided die and ask, "do one's go over? I can't remember, it's been 1/2 hour since I rolled up a character."
lol, that's a good one, *chuckles while narfing on a leg from a useless critterbeastie*
ymbakgm if:
you send a group of 16 zombies after the 4-man party for their very first encounter.
They recognize 4 of the zombies as their previous characters who you sent 12 zombies after for their very first encounter.
ymbakgm if :
the goblin they've been encountering since they were 1st level mysteriously proves capable of whooping thier kiesters time and again ... until they finally realize that same goblin who earned beaucoup xp from the first encounter with the party has been continuing to earn xp and class levels since that fateful first encounter ...
nice zombie encounter btw ... especially if they recall that thier first level first campaign was 4 zombies ... then after those 4 characters died, the next group was with 8 zombies ...
ymakgm if :
Your idea of roleplaying the NPCs consists of two things :
First, is all the smack your bad guys talk (or otherwise communicate to the players) before scattering thier various appendages and vital organs everywhere;
and Second, is reading thier eulogies, headstones, epitaphs or perhaps the dialoug they hear as they fade into the blackness regarding division of the spoils found so scattered.
Your players consider hiring a small army to shove into the dungeon ahead of them just to set off some, most or maybe even all of the traps.
Your only memories of all the games you've ever run ... are the screams of anguish from the players every time you messily dispatched thier characters.
Your idea of a good game involves more than 4 replacement characters ready and available to each player in thier red folder. Or, at a minimum, 4 crisp clean blank character sheets.
Your player rotation is on par with your player characters' death rate in the game.
Your home-brewed carefully-crafted villains rather conveniently have, at all times, the precisely memorized, known, prepared or otherwise available and ready for use spells, magical and alchemical items in effect at all times to deflect and defend against all possible avenues of attack available to the player characters.
Your home-brewed carefully-crafted villains generally show a tendency to have one simple weakness or vulnerability that is almost certainly - in the hindsight of thier messy demise at the hands of the PCs - due...
How did I miss this thread?!?
I've done a number of these things, specifically those that are listed above (those which didn't apply, I removed). And I have no shame in admitting them. I do however avoid the villains that are specifically tailored to grease PCs using the PCs weaknesses against them. That i suppose constitutes my 'compassion towards my players.'...
Huzzah!
There's a blast from the past.
You might be a killer GM if:
You laughed maniacally while making crib notes from this thread.
You might be a killer GM if:
The players go "bowling for traps" by sliding monster corpses down corridors to set them off because the thief couldn't possibly make every roll necessary to find them all.
Sadly, this actually happened in one of my games. :P
Lol, we threw goblin corpses everywhere in our games. Then, it was goblin corpses attached to sticks. Good times.
As a player, I followed lord Robilar's example, and sent live mook Orc minions down the corridors to show me where the traps were.
While playing in Castle Greyhawk Ruins, I hired an entire Orc tribe to carry out numerous cursed treasures, resulting in the demise of most of the tribe...
You might be a killer GM if:
you think wandering encounters with trolls are a great way to move low-level characters in the "right" direction.
Hell, wandering encounters with trolls are a great way to move characters of any level in the "right" direction....with the "right" application of templates.
You might be a killer GM if:
...You're reading the lists on this thread, going "Oh, I remember that one!"
Does arbitrarily throwing a Power Word: Kill on a player count as being a Killer DM?
Does arbitrarily throwing a Power Word: Kill on a player count as being a Killer DM?
Did you kill the player?!
...
Carry on!
-- C.
....your first Iron GM win was with a TPK.
....the current Iron GM champ was introduced to the sport after you TPKd his party in the DnD Open.
.....you have basically memorized Return to the Tomb of Horrors.
Does arbitrarily throwing a Power Word: Kill on a player count as being a Killer DM?Did you kill the player?!
...
Carry on!
-- C.
I killed him for calling an NPC a b**** for no good reason. :U
When your players try use their charecter class resources IE magic, items, class features etc and at random the epic roaming anti-magic feild of doom decends because you want your players to go through the same team building exercises that you had to go through and magic is cheating.
players miss clues that to you were so obvious that nobody should have missed them and no divination spells or any other type of magic can be used by the players to find what was missed because magic is cheating.
you let 5 out of your 6 players play maigc based charecters druid,cleric,mages,walock etc and then reveal your magic is cheating attitude to them as the game progresses.
(not a rant just an observation)
...if you like to "prep" your players before game time by calling them up and asking them to bring extra character sheets with them to the next session.
If a player who has been away for awhile due to work decides he'll stay away even after he gets his free time back.
Somehow I suspect one or more of my past players probably fit this description... wimps! They're probably off to find a touchy, feel good GM who lets them play any class or race, gives them any power or magic item they want, etc., basically something other than good old fashioned d and d. them's the breaks...