It’s not the GM trying to break my spirit, it’s my frickin’ dice. Those little death polygons want to humiliate me by proxy. This is why I bought a creme brulee torch, you little fuckers.
I am (was to be more correct) more in between
You can be the first type, and some players will still see you as the second.
Like, they attack the king’s castle for no reason and are upset the guards don’t lie down and die, then refuse to surrender when things are entirely hopeless and they’re offered mercy. Such a mean DM!
I’m a big fan of the "wisdom " check before players do something that seems, to me, completely stupid. Like, hey, before you set out to storm the castle, roll your highest knowledge skill.
Tactics, architecture, history, etc, all good. But any success on any skill (or even, literally, Wisdom if nothing else) gets you a little hint that this is a terrible idea.
“OK well, as a Baker, you understand that the huge wagon pulling 500 loaves of bread into the castle means there must be an enormous amount of guards. Since you got a natural 20 on your Cooking check, you can estimate the number precisely to around 150. Even if they weild the baguettes as weapons, you are certain they will defeat you.”
And then, most parties I’ve played with will then begin formulating their plan to sneak in on the bread wagon, which is a much funnier story. Or they’ll complain that they meant the druid should cause a storm to distract the guards or something like that. It’s kind of amazing how often these bad plans arise from a miscommunication.
From the campaigns I’ve DMed, I’ve gone for a bit of an in-between. My primary focus is to have a fun, shared narrative. I’ll always let players do stupid things that get them into grave danger. But at most, I’ll usually only ever kill a few of the PCs.
If they act carefully, they can avoid getting into that situation all together. If they act stupid, they may have some deaths on their hands, but never a TPK. I don’t want that kind of narrative dead end.
The other thing, is that I will never put the players in such a situation in which there isn’t a way out of it. Usually this comes down to abusing the rule of cool a bit. Maybe they use a well aimed shatter to collapse a cave and separate themselves from their enemies. Maybe they jump down the cliff into the river below. Maybe the enemies have taken such a beating themselves that they find they aren’t willing to fight to the death.
ITT: discussion about BDSM using codewords and allegories in every comment.
I’m not trying to kill my party, but I also won’t stop them from being stupid and getting themselves killed. I design my campaigns like an open world video game. Everything is going on and just reacts to the players. They can find bits of information about things and then act on it, doing whatever they want until they start finding clues about the big bad because I like to try and make it more natural with the characters just existing in the world and not the stereotypical call for adventure a lot of modules and stuff do. But this also means balancing out the world by having the encounter zones being somewhat static. Over here shit is low level, but over there stuff is high level. But like, they will have clues. If they hear the rumors of a Balrog at level 3 and want to go fight it, that’s on them.
