The DM always wins

I love the Penny Arcade comics about Dungeons and Dragons, such as today’s. Here is another. I enjoy Penny Arcade generally, but I find the D&D comics particularly amusing. Tycho and I were trained in the same school of dungeon mastering that taught us that the game should be played as the DM against the players. Story-telling be damned! If I was going to be up all night preparing a hideous dungeon full of elaborate traps and individually-created monster NPCs, I wasn’t about to have the PCs simply tear through my beautiful creations.

Here are some highlights from old D&D games I ran:

• One character was thrown into the middle of a war of succession between several brothers. One of them was a vampire. The only magic item this character had was a box that could turn into a tower upon command. He had a NPC that helped him, but I killed her off.
• I charged a level one kobold fighter with rounding up all the local kobolds tribes under his banner to fight oppressive human overlords. He had some magical javelins, but I never told him they were magical or how they worked. I also don’t believe I ever let him get higher than level three.
• One of my brother’s characters died. There was no one around to raise him, so he was resurrected instead. In the old days, the latter spell brought the character back to life, but potentially as a different creature. He got returned as a deer. He played as a deer (no battle powers, no spells, etc.) for the next few months before the party found somebody to revert him to human form.

These are just a few examples from the top of my head. My traumatized players (my brother and best friend from childhood) could most likely give you many more. Needless to say, my PCs were always frustrated, low-level, fighting impossible odds, and never in possession of the magical item necessary to hit the monsters I sent against them. I figured this made their adventures epic, because who ever had an easy epic struggle? They figured I hated them. In truth, it was probably both.