Gamemasters, Please Kill Your Characters

Ah, I love it. About once a month, when I see a devilishly good idea, like throwing something as nasty as Warduke from the halcyon days of D&D's history directly into my players' path, someone has got to tell me how awful my ideas are. It is like they feel my month is not fulfilled unless I hear a rousing chorus of "you're destroying your players' fun!" Let me repeat this, again - if your players are not worried about whether their characters are going to live or not, the game is boring. Without tension, without challenge, you may as well narrate to your party what they did and how they did it, and then roll right into rolling for treasure and doling out XP. Why bother rolling dice or trying to figure the best tactical plan to overcome a foe if your victory is assured? Why even play the game at all, wouldn't it be more efficient to merely read The Lord of the Rings trilogy to them with their characters' names in place of Frodo and the rest?

I see the glazed look in your eye. Yes, yes, I have trod upon these boards many a time, worked a veritable rut in this subject I have gone over it so frequently and often, but here we are again. Yes, I like to find those monsters that annoy my characters. It was not my find, but part of the adventure I was running recently, to throw a night hag at the party, and they have a nasty ability that denies one party member the benefits of a long rest, plus knocks down their max HP until they receive some major healing most parties don't normally have immediate access to. And the only way to stop it from happening is to kill the hag or chase her off the plane you are on. It is quite nasty, and the players, while frustrated at the time, enjoyed the encounter and still talk about her. Now, I didn't pile her and enough of her sisters to deny a long rest to the whole party, plus other big nasties they wouldn't be able to overcome, just one at a time that presented a different challenge from the standard "see bad guys, roll bunch of dice, bad guys die", rinse, repeat, ad nauseum. That is what I am trying to convey to you, worrying your players is what you want.

The Wardkue thing that started this whole rant. I mentioned I liked throwing challenges at my players where it is so tough that I don't even bother starting up the big nasty at all, just put in my notes "if the characters fight this, they die". Warduke, for those of you who did not grow up in the 80s, was this awesome evil character who was famous for showing up in the D&D cartoon. He was a badass fighter who didn't fear anyone. I would totally throw him against my party, and picture him, at least in 5e terms, as something of a high teens/low twenties CR. But I would not stat him up, because as overwhelming a fighter that he is, the party would be TPK'ed if they fought him, or they would get lucky and kill him. Neither of those outcomes is what you want from that NPC/monster, so don't do it. No, he is not there to fight the party, he is there to intimidate them and cause them to work around him, get him to go somewhere else either by sweet talking him, paying him, or taunting him into being led away via a chase. But he is also not THE big bad, he works for the big bad, and is just a roadblock of an encounter set between the party and the big bad that the party cannot solve by fighting it. Puzzles and traps do the exact same thing, minus the intimidation factor, but still makes the party worried and stressed, plus they have to do something other than roll a bunch of dice. Plus, because he is not the big bad, the party can feel satisfied once they "defeat" him and he gets to show back up at a later date because he was not killed, which is win-win: I get a repeatable character and because he gets even scarier as the PCs level, they stay scared of him. Will this encounter be the one where he snaps and kills us all? We got him to go away last time by bribing him/pointing out the squirrel (SQUIRREL!!) outside/jingling our keys, will that work this time or will we have to come up with something new? Why does he giggle and say "stop tickling me!" when we hit him with our swords?!

Come on, my fellow DMs, don't be afraid to at least threaten to kill off your PCs (just the characters, mind you, you don't want to face the trial for killing a real human being in our world), it makes the game more interesting.