Stories like those in movies and books thrive on setbacks. Everyone relishes a tale where disaster complicates the heroes’ predicament, leaving them facing seemingly impossible odds. Perhaps a trusted ally betrays the heroes or they become trapped and imprisoned.
Gamers love when sessions deliver similar twists, so dungeon masters feel tempted to set up matching situations. What if the characters must use their wits to escape the dungeon? What if merchant who hired the party is the true villain? All dungeon masters set up similar situations at least once, and we all learn that some setbacks that make exciting fiction just make angry players.
Here are five story tropes that game masters should never try to reproduce at the game table.
1. Taking the characters captive
In adventure fiction, heroes get captured regularly. So DMs dream up similar stories, and then try to force a capture despite the players’ determination to never get taken alive.
To engineer a capture, DMs need to hide an encounter’s threat to the players, block the characters’ attempts to flee, beat any signs of an unexpected rally, and so on. During all this, if the players see signs of the DM bending the odds to thwart their characters’ escape, they feel railroaded. DMs can’t plan for a capture.
D&D players will embrace threats that they understand and that choose to face. But if a dungeon master surprises the party with an unwinnable encounter, then the players will rightly see the situation as unfair and refuse to buy-in. Never surprise characters with threats they cannot either defeat or avoid.
Setting up the party for capture means setting up exactly the sort of encounter that players find unfair. (The same dynamic of using your power as a DM to ensure the players take a loss reappears through the rest of this list.)
Players will accept escape scenarios in two situations:
- With new characters at the start of a campaign. In this premise, the group starts as prisoners and escapes during their first adventures. Nobody feels like they played through an unfair loss. Instead, they just play a challenging opening hand.
- When the players rush into danger despite knowing that they face difficult odds, predictably get beaten in battle, and then their foes choose to capture rather than kill. Here, the capture gives the DM a chance to make the escape scenario into an alternative to a total-party kill.
2. Having someone the party trusted betray them
In fiction, a seemingly trusted ally who betrays the heroes makes a compelling third-act twist, the sort of complication that increases tension. But setting up a similar reversal in a D&D game hurts the game. In the typical setup, someone hires the party for a job that seems worthwhile, but in the end the group learns that they were duped by an evil patron. This can go two ways:
- If the players start by using Insight or a spell like detect thoughts to discover the patron’s sinister motives, then the adventure ends in a scene where the group decides whether to murder the guy.
- If the players assume the patron is trustworthy, then when they learn of their betrayal, they feel like dupes. Instead of enjoying the thrill of a twist, everyone just feels foolish.
Either way, the players learn to avoid future betrayals by refusing to trust anyone else they meet. This toxic dynamic makes the DM’s job harder because every potential ally seems untrustworthy and every adventure hook earns distrust.
Instead, tempt the heroes into accepting help from an ally who they know they can’t trust, but nonetheless offers something helpful.
3. Taking the characters’ gear
Players hate losing their characters’ gear. As a DM, have you ever tried to set up a perfectly reasonable situation like a social gathering or a diplomatic conference where in any plausible world the guests must surrender their weapons at the door? While the requirement makes perfect sense, in play, it leads to a fight or to frustrated characters turning away.
In D&D we call equipment treasure and reward success with it. Enough of a D&D character’s power and identity comes from their gear to make many players ready to sacrifice a character’s life before losing their equipment.
In D&D’s early days, some gamers coached DMs to deal with excess treasure by having thieves steal it as the characters slept. But despite spells like Leomund’s Secret Chest that seem designed to thwart thievery, no players enjoyed a D&D game that expected keeping a protective eye on gear. In fun games, the careful adventurers know how to keep their gear safe even if their players get careless.
In situations where the players should reasonably leave their gear behind, contrive ways for the party to smuggle it or otherwise keep it close at hand. Even if a party get taken captive according to the rules set by item 1, have their captors leave the equipment in a place the party can reach early in their escape.
4. Planning for a villain’s escape
Every DM loves a recurring villain. But to establish one, you need to introduce the villains and then somehow invalidate the players’ decision to murder them. D&D characters are so good at murder that escaping from a group of adventurers always proves nearly impossible without help from the dungeon master. And any such help will strike the players as a setup intended to deal an unfair loss to the party.
Instead, make your recurring villains into a group with multiple scoundrels. If one beats the odds and manages to escape an encounter with the party, promote him, but if he dies create another to take his place. When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Hydra in 1965, they turned the inevitable defeats suffered by comic book villains a threat. “Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.”
5. Having the players hunted
While filming for original Star Wars movie, Mark Hamill noticed their scene came right after the escape from the trash compactor. He said to Harrison Ford, “Shouldn’t my hair be all wet and matted?” Ford turned to him and said, “Hey, kid, it ain’t that kind of movie.”
In some roleplaying games, players expect to play cat and mouse with the heroes running scared, but D&D ain’t that kind of game. In D&D, running in fear feels like a loss. At best, an adventure where players must keep hiding and fleeing from an overwhelming threat feels like a frustrating string of losses. At worst, the characters make a hero’s stand and the adventure ends in a total-party kill. Either way, players feel like targets for the DM’s power trip.
The common thread
All these tropes share a common element: To create them at the table, the DM must contrive a way for the players to lose. To set up the twist, the characters must lose a fight or be tricked by an NPC.
Sometimes losses come naturally from play. For instance, players can lose because they made a bad choice or because they suffered a string of bad rolls. But when DMs use their power to arrange a loss, players will see the manipulation as unfair.
Players of some roleplaying games expect to lose. In Paranoia, the fun and humor comes from betrayal and a computer that does every character dirty. In Call of Cthulhu, the fun comes from a heroic struggle against insurmountable odds and an uncaring universe.
D&D ain’t that kind of game. D&D players relish overcoming obstacles and winning as a team. That doesn’t mean that DMs should set up players to win against paper tigers. Players want to feel like they overcame difficult obstacles using their own ingenuity and the power their characters’ bring. Notching a win that the DM arranged just feels empty.
So you can still include monsters that the party (probably) can’t beat just as your dungeon can include walls that the party (probably) can’t get past. The challenge becomes finding a different way past the obstacle, and that provides players the same pleasure as scoring a win in combat.
Related: The 4 Unwritten Rules No Dungeon Master Should Break
5 Situations That Tempt Every Dungeon Master to Railroad Their Players
You identify the real issue at the end. Play to find out what happens. Don’t force the outcome. I’ve had villains escape, and player characters flee combat, or be taken captive, or be betrayed many times in my games. And the players have had a lot of fun, but I didn’t force those outcomes.
I foreshadow betrayal, so the players know who to be suspicious of. Villains don’t break the rules of the game to escape. Often they have an escape plan or two, but those can and often do fail.
More often villains taunt the players from a safe distance through an emissary or a body double, or with spells like Magic Mouth, Project Image, Dream, or Sending. In a longer campaign the players might first meet a major villain when they are of too low a level to pose a credible threat.
And yes, occasionally an escaped minor villain gets promoted to archenemy.
I don’t force the players into unwinnable combats or knock them out with a save or attack or damage rolls, but sometimes players get into combats they can’t win of their own accord. Other times weak tactics, poor preparation, or just plain bad luck leads to a party loss. I never fudge the dice or tweak monster stats mid-combat.
A common theme here is that players hold the expectation that they will, with whatever level of difficulty, win. In other words, they expect the outcome to already be pre-set, in their favor.
You or I may regard this as an unfair and unreasonable expectation (and it is — there can be no Winning without the possibility of Losing, after all), but it doesn’t change the fact that the expectation exists.
Your ending encapsulate this somewhat:
“That doesn’t mean that DMs should set up players to win against paper tigers. Players want to feel like they overcame difficult obstacles using their own ingenuity and the power their characters’ bring. Notching a win that the DM arranged just feels empty.
So you can still include monsters that the party (probably) can’t beat just as your dungeon can include walls that the party (probably) can’t get past. The challenge becomes finding a different way past the obstacle, and that provides players the same pleasure as scoring a win in combat.”
Despite many players loving the quote by Jean-Luc Picard, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life”, most players are of the “beer ‘n’ pretzels” variety [1] – they want to throw some dice, laugh with their friends, kill some monsters, and collect the loot – they’re not usually quite so vested in deeply exploring the roleplay and story as much as they just want some brief escapism and entertainment.
So players seeking shallow escapism and DMs attempting to craft stories with common narrative elements are at odds with each other – incompatible goals, a mismatched expectations, leading to tragedy at the table.
And much depends on DM skill – to frame a narration-required loss not as a player defeat, or railroading, but as an interesting plot complication that the table should _look forward to_ – not everyone has that skill. It’s tough. Too many players have the stereotype in mind of the “railroading dm” that they will apply the label and bail early.
DMing’s a tough gig.
[1] Yes, yes, reader, I know that _you’re_ the exception, but it is common enough that I feel comfortable painting with a broad brush here.
Having a “narration required” loss is generally a bad idea. My players lose from time to time, and it works because their losses stem from some combination of bad dice luck and/or decisions that they made, not because the narrative required them to lose. There’s no predetermined narrative, the “story” arises from the process of playing the game.
Why do you feel so comfortable painting a broad brush that all dnd players are troglodytes who don’t actually want to play the game they’re playing? If your players are so frequently acting like the “beer and pretzels variety” go play bg3 or overwatch or whatever game you actually want to be playing. If someone is basically taking up a part-time job to put on a game like dnd for 4-8 people who, by wotc 5e design, do nothing to actually contribute, those people better actually engage with the narrative and roleplay, or else they are bad friends who do not respect the DM’s time and effort. If you want to just kill monsters and collect loot, there are a million billion boardgames that do the exact same thing that don’t require one person to be the sole keeper of fun. The DM is a player too, not just a game-engine loot-machine. The fun of being a DM is telling a story and creating an emotionally impactful narrative, and this article is basically telling you “hey, you’re a dumbass who can’t narrate, improv, or balance encounters correctly. Just give the players a treasure chest with a cardboard dragon in front of it and call it good, and make sure the npc gives them a handy on the way out”. It’s insulting. If you wanna play that kind of game, whatever, it’s a free country, but don’t spit on our games and call your bullshit “peak performance” like you’ve mastered ttrpgs. I don’t even seek these articles out, they just get put on my feed because the algorithm reads “interest in rpgs” as interest in this backwards ass, braindead slop, and that is why everyone’s games are failing, not because you had a slightly morally grey npc, but because every new person who gets into this game expects to get something for nothing and put zero effort into having their own fun. DMing is only such a tough gig at this point in time precisely because you and people who write these kinds of articles make it much harder for yourselves than you have to by catering to people who, again, want to have an experience that is completely at odds with the experience that dnd is designed to give. If someone is playing the game this way, they do not want to play dnd. Go play talisman, or munchkin, or dominion, or uno, or whatever the fuck. This is not the game for you. I do not go into a vegan restaurant and ask for sirloin steak, do not come into my house and blanket statement say that my players can’t handle a single second of negative emotion, and that I’m a bad dm for creative a narrative with impact. Articles like this are the reason why the current ratio for people “wanting to play dnd” and people willing to actually run a game of dnd, is approximately 200:1.
The perspective that the players “should” win is flawed. If you correct that expectation by telling the players upfront that the game is not set up for them to win, but to challenge them, and that they can “lose” or their characters be killed, they will engage with the game in a deeper way while having greater satisfaction that every victory they have is because they made it happen, not because it’s supposed to go their way.
If you have a group of players that have this mature mentality, then you can do all of the above things you cautioned against so long as there is proper threat signaling and that the outcome of an encounter is not predetermined, however likely.
Playing in this way creates heightened narrative tension because defeat becomes a real possibility, and every win is an elation.
Yes, you hit the nail on the head. Signalling can make all of these work; making sure the players are in on the story.
I have captured a PC and took their gear in one situation, but told her that she would escape soon and get (most) of her gear back. It was a tricky situation, having a female pc captured by Strahd. In the end, she got a chance to be a badass and escape, only without the Sun Sword!
My next campaign, my players will start out in captivity, only for the ritual they are to be sacrificed for goes wrong and they can escape!
With any of this, I tell my players what I am trying to do, just to comfort them. The way they escape or the way they solve any situation is undecided, I just make sure we are on the same page.
Yeah I think having an open discussion about the game person to person is a good way to get expectations in line. You have to know your players and yourself. DMs want to see some cool stuff happen on the opposing team, but mostly we DMs want the players to win of course. A good tough challenge here and there is always fun for the PCs though, at least at my table. If the party is too smart and avoids all the tough fights, they might like a What-If one-shot type scenario outside the normal game for a good challenge to change the pace but not be penalized.
I would like to mention that I wrote a post about how to introduce a villain and let them survive, fairly. You can read it at https://gnomestew.com/meeting-the-villain-and-letting-them-live/
I have also taken on a monster that the heroes can’t defeat outright on my own blog. You can see that one at https://dragonencounters.com/shadow-dragon-unleashing-terror-from-amidst-the-darkness/
(I would welcome fresh perspectives, especially on the second, telling me if they think I got it right or not. The approach is to give the players a goal that they can accomplish, but it’s tricky to get right.)
I am planning an article or two on betrayals as well. What DMDavid means (I assume) is don’t betray them without giving them a fair chance to be able to refuse falling for it. I plan to offer up ways to make it tempting, without forcing them to accept.
My thanks to DMDavid for all the wonderful blog posts over this years. This has long been one of my very favorite blogs, and I continue to follow it avidly. (Now if only he’d accept guest posts.)
Alexander Atoz
alexanderatoz77@gmail.com
The best tabletop RPG experiences emerge when players and DMs align on expectations—embracing both the thrill of victory and the narrative depth of meaningful setbacks, all while trusting that the story will unfold organically from their choices, not from predetermined outcomes or forced wins.
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Love your blog in general, not sure about this one. 1 & 2 I put together under “Don’t railroad players into making a mistake”.
(Unlike general perception, railroading isn’t always undesirable. Many players like having a strict direction to move in. Railroading mostly becomes a mistake when it’s pushing the players in a direction they don’t want, or into making a mistake.)
The difference between my version and yours is that if you can do it without railroading, you’re fine.
You already discussed how to capture players without railroading (and I could add ‘by having them let themselves get captured in order to infiltrate,’ Which you mentioned in a past article.)
Betrayal without railroading, even assuming the quest giver betrays them, can be done if they have a choice of quests and quest givers (easily doable in a sandbox, or even in a campaign via side quest).
I wrote a pair of articles on how to betray a party fairly. If you feel like giving me your opinion, I’d love to hear it.
https://dragonencounters.com/alliances-and-betrayals-encounters/
https://dragonencounters.com/drow-betrayal-darkvision-encounters/
And one which I wrote for Gnome Stew on keeping a villain alive, along with the value of doing so.
https://gnomestew.com/meeting-the-villain-and-letting-them-live/
Hunting the players in D&D might be doable if they’re pursuing a goal while staying ahead of the villain, and I’d add to the list having them rescued by an ally. (AKA Gandalf rescuing Frodo and Sam from Mount Doom.)
By the way, I can’t see the other comments on this post. I could see them on a different post, so I don’t know why this is different.