Hey y’all, I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I was wondering if there was any advice here, perhaps people who have been through something similar.
I’ve been DMing 5e for a while; I started maybe 7 or 8 years ago in college. I ran LMoP for my roommates to begin, and I had a campaign that lasted two semesters for a different group of friends. That second one was super homebrewed, and hugely successful in that it seemed like everyone had fun. But throughout that campaign I realized there were a lot of things in my game I wasn’t satisfied with, especially in regards to combat and the “difficulty” of the game. PCs blew my encounters out of the water and took long rests whenever they felt like, and I wanted there to be stakes, dilemmas, etc. That stuff has been pretty widely discussed online and I have learned a lot since then.
Since then I’ve only had one group stay together for a reasonably successful campaign, and I thought I could do more or less the same as I had done before, but better. I had one player from the previous campaign as well, which I thought would be a boon. He’s my best friend and I love the guy, but I realize now he just doesn’t like the way I have evolved my DMing. He doesn’t like how there’s not always time to take a long rest or fighting without all his resources, he doesn’t like encounters more complex than running into the fray to swing swords and cast spells, and he doesn’t like that the characters might die now. He’s been pretty open about this, and he’s told me that in his opinion, the way the game should go is the players face some obstacles but they overcome them, and it’s unsatisfying if they don’t, and character death is unsatisfying and unfair, and imo if I read between the lines he basically wants to be able to run his warlock into an Annis Hag and know that he will come out the other side alright.
To be clear, this isn’t a bash-my-friend post or a problem-player post, I appreciate his honesty and how he knows what he wants from the game. The problem is I am having a lot of fun with the things I’ve learned, and I don’t wanna go back in the playhouse. So the question is how do I handle this and AITA? Would I look for a new group, or is that me thinking the grass is greener with folks I don’t know very well? I don’t want to run a game that my friend will get tilted in, but I am so bored with running simple encounters that get exploded by a party that gets a long rest between every fight. Help please.
For me it’s a question of balance.
Most smaller encounters are easy for my PCs, but major encounters should be tough, have a risk of PCs dying and also have the rewards be epic.
This is all just my opinion though, but seems my group likes it.
Yeah, absolutely. I don’t want to be the DM where everything is a deadly encounter.
Maybe I could satisfy myself by upping the difficulty, but changing the consequences? Like the typical consequences to losing an encounter would be death, hostages taken, etc. But maybe it would be a good compromise to have encounters where the failure condition isn’t death. I’m thinking about Shaolin Showdown all of the sudden…
Yeah, if you can come up with a consequence that does not involve the death of the PCs that would be a nice variation. Maybe they get banished to another world. Maybe the bad guy makes them jump through time.
Other consequences could include death of NPCs, destruction of nature or some landmark that the characters care about (e.g. an ancient temple), loss of possessions/money, or permanent scars and injuries which can’t be fully healed except with the most potent magic.
Are there any rules for injuries like that anywhere?
I don’t have any specific resource for you, but I think xp to lvl 3 mentioned it in some of his favourite homebrew videos. If you search his videos for “injuries” you get a few hits.