I am DMing a new campaign for some of my friends (about 1/2 of which are new players) and one player recently suffered an unlucky death (Rolled 2 death saving throws, miss + crit. miss).
The issue is that the party is currently only level 2, so nobody has access to Revivify or any other spells that could bring him back to life. To make matters worse they are currently 6 days of travel from the closest known town. I spoke to the player and he was pretty excited to see where his character would go and the party is making me feel like a bit of a 'bad guy' for playing by the rules. I definitely don't want to just let them off the hook, since the character legitimately died, but I do want to give them a chance to bring the character back at some sort of large price.
My current plan is to give the party a choice: Either carry the dead body(Dwarf) the whole 6 days back to the village in an attempt to find a way to bring the PC back to life. I will place a Cleric in the town that can cast Raise Dead at the cost of 500gp. Obviously the party would have to find and persuade the Cleric to help them, but it gives dead PC a chance.
Alternatively the party can decide to continue on their mission and leave the PC behind to die, so it will be up to them.
Does this sound reasonable to you guys? Is it reasonable to expect a party of level 2 characters to even attempt/know it's possible to resurrect a dead Dwarf? If not, how do you deal with an 'unpopular' PC death?
Sure, it's reasonable for the characters to know its possible. If you want to play straight down the line with them, they should probably also know that Raise Dead has a 10-day window and it's a 6-day ride back to town, and 500 gp is a lot to scrounge together for a level 2 party, so they'd better get hustling.
If you're one of those DMs who requires people to write up a 2-page backstory and read the Wheel of Time series as homework for your campaign, then I think people have a more legitimate gripe about dying at second level. If they're new, they may not realize yet that no individual character is some unique. genius masterpiece and they may take it hard. But by and large, I agree with Big Lizard. It'll do them some good in the long run.
Have to agree with the others. And I’ll add one more thing: I LOVE creating new characters. If I had to roll up a new one because a beloved character died, that’s an opportunity. An opportunity to see what the game is like as a new race/class combo. To see what odd personality quirk this one will have. Or to create a character who had history with the dead character so that they live on through his backstory. I try to avoid character death as much as any PC without a death wish would. Because you do miss out on the joy of leveling up, finding out what spells they might learn, or what their Evasion feature saves them from. But death is an opportunity in this game if you look at it like that. Without Molly’s death on Critical Role, we wouldn’t have Caduceus. And that’s a trade I’d make again and again.
I agree with a lot of what the others have said. I'm running into a similar concern where my players are about to enter their third session, are walking into a dungeon that will bring them form level 1 to level 2 and the boss there has a legitimate chance of killing at least one of the characters-and that is if no one gets unlucky leading up to the boss.
If the player died legitimately through legitimate means-meaning that it wasn't a situation where you made the encounter too difficult for their level or put them in a tough situation-then I agree that that stuff will happen. It is tough for the player, especially when they take the time to create real backstory and emotional investment. That's the hardest things for players to learn-that no one has plot armor and storylines can go unrealized if they roll shitty.
Now, to offer maybe another option, why don't you give the option to the player? For example, in between sessions you could have a demonic lord or his dieties or something offer him a deal that will bring him back to life right there. That way there will still be some cost involved (a favor he owes a demon lord, a mysterious scar or mark on his body, or he comes back as a revenant etc). This would allow that character to continue in the game but also make it clear that dying isn't something that you want to do. If the character suddenly can no longer get healed by radiant spells that might change if he wants to come back or not. Ditto if he knows a devil might just control him when he least expects it.
Good luck! It's tough to find the balance between a rewarding story line and and making sure players feel that true sense of danger the others were talking about.
Hm... how about some out of the box thinking. The player wants to keep playing the character, but you want death to have meaning. The party is low level right now, but will be gaining X.P. as they go.
What if some powerful being, similar to a Warlock patron, were, as this character crosses over from life to death, offer him the option of coming back... as a Revenant? You'd have to do some tweaking but you would essentially follow the Revenant rules, which are that he has these cold burning eyes, pale ghastly skin, and is effectively undead. He could play his class and gain levels in his class, etc. But.. by the revenant rules there is a deadline (a year in MM, but I would say as DM, in this case, whatever deadline you want). Instead of him having to "get revenge on who wronged him," he has to get perform a task for the patron-god-whatever who "revenanted" him. This task should be something that the party probably doesn't want to have happen, but the patron will let him know if you don't make progress toward this task, I take you back to my domain.
Now there is a ticking clock. And, there is a way to cure revenants -- the Wish spell. The party will need to be high level to cure it. But it is possible, and now they have a goal -- we need to get this done before Dwarfy summons the evil patron from the far beyond, and before his year (or whatever) is up. And they can always possibly find a Wish another way (e.g., genie in a bottle, ring of wishing, powerful mage for whom they just did a favor).
But I would not just spring this on the player. I would offer the option, and see what he/she thinks. He might be game, or might hate the idea. If hate, then go with one of the other options.
EDIT: And I want to point out, obviously at level 2, the Dwarfenant would NOT have all the uber-powers like Regen and Glare that the Revenant in MM has. UA has some rules, I think, on PC revenants but if not... you would let these abilities open up as he levels, NOT from the start.
A lot of good advice above. I think I would have used this to "teach" you all (both players and you), that death can happen in this game.
In my campaign, I'd might have considered to have him "return" if it was a strong in-world reason for it. If an archdemon or dark god or something are paying close attention to the group, I could might have used this as an opportunity for some of BioWizards creative thinking, but I don't think I would have written that into the campaign, just to spare his life.
What you could consider (if you decides to keep him dead). Is a funeral (or something like that). Have the other players raise a tomb over him, have them say farewell to their comrade. Use this to "round up" the players story. Give him the farewell he deserves. To make the character feel better - try to remember the character yourself, and have people ask about him. Have people miss him. Like if they come back to an inn they've stayed together, have the innkeeper ask about him and be sad when he learns about his death. Be generous with inspiration when the other players do things in his memory - things like that can actually make that death to one of the most memorable things with the campaign.
Thanks so much for all of the thoughtful replies! I totally agree with BigLizard and I do think the game will be a lot more engaging for everyone (Especially the new players) now that they know death is a real possibility.
@BioWizard. Another great suggestion. I will talk to the player, and if he remains very attached to his Dwarf I may use this (though I'm leaning against it for now)
@emrfish6. Unfortunately they didn't get to him in time (likely they expected him to survive more than 2 death rolls) but they also didn't exactly prioritize saving him (There was also one other unconscious character, whom they did stabilize).
Fear and anxiety aren't conducive to good play. Anyone who has sat through any TV from the years of 1960 to 1990 will have seen the moral that fear brings out the worst in us. Players who are "afraid" for their lives will make unheroic decisions. Why? Because heroism involves risk-taking. If you want a good simulation, then, by all means, make your player's characters into paranoid jerks who shoot first and ask questions never. If you make it too risky to do the right thing, then people won't stick their necks out. It's not smart to be heroic. It's not smart to fight a dragon. But you know what it is? Good story-telling.
Yes, you need stakes in good story-telling, but those stakes need to actually matter. If your character is dead at level 2, you aren't invested in that character. If you are invested in that character, then you've just been punished for caring enough to put all that work into it, because it has just been wasted. Deincentivising your players to care about their characters is bad GMing. If a player gets killed at level 2? That's a plot hook opportunity, not a chance to teach the player about the uncaring nature of the universe. Have a cleric resurrect them-- the players can't afford the price right now, but they do have something maybe as valuable: they're wandering killing machines. Get the cleric to send them on a quest as a payment for the service.
What were they doing when he got killed? Did they have to abandon a dungeon crawl to bring him back to town? Well, now conditions just got worse for failing. The situation just got more complicated. They all get to keep playing their characters, but there are consequences.
If you die at low levels, it's probably because the dice are not sapient beings and determine the face they show based on physics and not any rational ordering. This is why you commonly see the advice to be careful with level 1s in particular: it's when the characters are most vulnerable to bad rolls.
I know the most fun I had in D&D was when I stopped worrying about whether or not my character died and started playing her like a hero. Wanting to do the right thing but afraid that your stats aren't high enough isn't really that fun. I don't think any of us signed up to play D&D to feel impotent to stop evil. Reward your players for taking risks. It makes for better stories when your players swing from the chandelier, rather than killing them for failing the roll while trying to do something cool. It makes for a better story when in order to resurrect their dead friend, they have to delve into a lost tomb to recover a holy relic, then to write a character out of the story because their HP hit zero.
If a player has put a lot of work into a (now) dead character, I've found it really helps to "keep his memory alive". Hold a funeral or memorial service. If the character helped save the town, have the citizens erect a statue in his honour. Name a pub after him.
If the player invented a family/guild/patron, have the party visit them (if possible) to deliver the bad news. Involve those background characters in the story - maybe the daughter wants to be a hero and avenge her fathers death. Maybe the son, filled with anger, becomes a villain...
I mean, you can't take the high road and say calling your style of, in your own words, instilling fear into your players is a blight on my character after saying my post doesn't even qualify as advice and can only allegedly be called so.
Bad GMing is poor narrative engineering. I mean you have control over 99% of the inputs into the story, if you can't use that to engineer a satisfying output then you are doing something wrong. That you think that fear (specifically stemming from mortal peril) is necessary for tension shows that maybe those three decades weren't suitable applied. You should be able to establish tension (more formally we might-- as I already did-- refer to stakes. A term commonly used to describe character-driven dramatic tension.) As my chandelier analogy, that you seemingly willfully misinterpreted, went, the tension shouldn't come from whether or not the dice kill you every time you take an action that would conventionally be described as risky. The risk shouldn't be coming from leaping to grab a chandelier. If you have a 5% chance (i.e. rolling a 1 on a d20) of dying anytime you do anything, you wouldn't leave the house-- realistically. The risk should come from the thing you need to leap to grab the chandelier to escape from or quickly get to.
You are also aware that the GM is always faking the risk. None of this game is real. It's all fake. The GM faking the risk is no more realistic than the players faking their characters. They aren't actually elves and dwarves. That's just an agreed-upon illusion designed for entertainment. Which is to say the entire game is really irrelevant and meaningless: it's just for fun, mate. It means nothing in the grand scheme of things. It's just a collaborative fantasy. You could play the game equally well without dice or statistics at all. So, if you need the dice to add danger? I mean, you're doing a bad job. You should be able to tell a compelling story with your friends without rolling a single polyhedron.
Is D&D a bad game because it uses dice? Of course not. But if the dice are the ones running the game, what good are you as a GM? You should be the rational mind in control of the game with enough sense to realise when the dice "suggest" an outcome which is bad for the health of the game.
Is D&D a bad game because it uses dice? Of course not. But if the dice are the ones running the game, what good are you as a GM? You should be the rational mind in control of the game with enough sense to realise when the dice "suggest" an outcome which is bad for the health of the game.
This is a very important point that I think a lot of people miss, perhaps because of the prevalence of video game culture. For many players, most of their RPG experience and nearly all of their non-D&D experience comes from video games, in which the dice (in the form of the "random number generator") are in fact running the game. The developers build random number tables of encounters and treasure for a particular area, and when you walk into it, the computer "rolls" on those tables and spawns in whatever comes up. The computer doesn't say, "Hey this party is tired and had a lot of battles today let me go easy on them." The computer doesn't say, "Hey this Paladin hasn't gotten any treasure particular to his class in several sessions, let me put some Paladin-specific treasure in the next room." The computer doesn't say, "I know my players prefer puzzles to combat so let me put more puzzles in this dungeon."
The computer slavishly, unwaveringly, relentlessly, uncompromisingly, thoughtlessly, follows its programming and does whatever the RNG says to do. Period. Save file. Close program. If a DM is just following the RNG in the same unwavering, relentless, uncompromising manner, then, as you say... why have a DM?
I mean the DMG actually gives you random tables for making up dungeons, generating encounters, and generating treasure. You could literally play D&D solo with these things, or around the table with friends just randomly generating plots and dungeons and wilderness areas. Heck, it might actually even be FUN to do this on occasion (which is why board games like Dungeon! exist...). But it would probably get stale really quickly and you would not be able to have a good story... nor one tailored to your party (not without cheating, anyway).
The DM is there to customize the experience, so that it's not just a mindless, thoughtless repetition of a random number table, but is instead a personalized game tailored to the tastes, composition, and style of the players at the table. As a great lesson in how the same exact game can be wildly different due solely to the DM doing this customization, watch an episode of Critical Role, season 2 (any one will do), and then watch an episode of Colville's Chain of Acheron series. Leaving aside the production quality differences, the games are wildly different -- it's almost like they're not even the same game. Why? Because Mercer's game group likes one style of play, and Colville's likes another, and the DMs are tailoring the experience to what their players (and to a certain extent their audience) wants to see.
That's the whole point of DMing. You customize the experience to your players. This is not possible in just about any other form of gaming, and it's what makes D&D so amazing (and other tabletop RPGs). And by the same token, if the DM just lets the dice run everything, then you lose what makes D&D great.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Hi all,
I am DMing a new campaign for some of my friends (about 1/2 of which are new players) and one player recently suffered an unlucky death (Rolled 2 death saving throws, miss + crit. miss).
The issue is that the party is currently only level 2, so nobody has access to Revivify or any other spells that could bring him back to life. To make matters worse they are currently 6 days of travel from the closest known town. I spoke to the player and he was pretty excited to see where his character would go and the party is making me feel like a bit of a 'bad guy' for playing by the rules. I definitely don't want to just let them off the hook, since the character legitimately died, but I do want to give them a chance to bring the character back at some sort of large price.
My current plan is to give the party a choice: Either carry the dead body(Dwarf) the whole 6 days back to the village in an attempt to find a way to bring the PC back to life. I will place a Cleric in the town that can cast Raise Dead at the cost of 500gp. Obviously the party would have to find and persuade the Cleric to help them, but it gives dead PC a chance.
Alternatively the party can decide to continue on their mission and leave the PC behind to die, so it will be up to them.
Does this sound reasonable to you guys? Is it reasonable to expect a party of level 2 characters to even attempt/know it's possible to resurrect a dead Dwarf? If not, how do you deal with an 'unpopular' PC death?
Sure, it's reasonable for the characters to know its possible. If you want to play straight down the line with them, they should probably also know that Raise Dead has a 10-day window and it's a 6-day ride back to town, and 500 gp is a lot to scrounge together for a level 2 party, so they'd better get hustling.
If you're one of those DMs who requires people to write up a 2-page backstory and read the Wheel of Time series as homework for your campaign, then I think people have a more legitimate gripe about dying at second level. If they're new, they may not realize yet that no individual character is some unique. genius masterpiece and they may take it hard. But by and large, I agree with Big Lizard. It'll do them some good in the long run.
Have to agree with the others. And I’ll add one more thing: I LOVE creating new characters. If I had to roll up a new one because a beloved character died, that’s an opportunity. An opportunity to see what the game is like as a new race/class combo. To see what odd personality quirk this one will have. Or to create a character who had history with the dead character so that they live on through his backstory. I try to avoid character death as much as any PC without a death wish would. Because you do miss out on the joy of leveling up, finding out what spells they might learn, or what their Evasion feature saves them from. But death is an opportunity in this game if you look at it like that. Without Molly’s death on Critical Role, we wouldn’t have Caduceus. And that’s a trade I’d make again and again.
I agree with a lot of what the others have said. I'm running into a similar concern where my players are about to enter their third session, are walking into a dungeon that will bring them form level 1 to level 2 and the boss there has a legitimate chance of killing at least one of the characters-and that is if no one gets unlucky leading up to the boss.
If the player died legitimately through legitimate means-meaning that it wasn't a situation where you made the encounter too difficult for their level or put them in a tough situation-then I agree that that stuff will happen. It is tough for the player, especially when they take the time to create real backstory and emotional investment. That's the hardest things for players to learn-that no one has plot armor and storylines can go unrealized if they roll shitty.
Now, to offer maybe another option, why don't you give the option to the player? For example, in between sessions you could have a demonic lord or his dieties or something offer him a deal that will bring him back to life right there. That way there will still be some cost involved (a favor he owes a demon lord, a mysterious scar or mark on his body, or he comes back as a revenant etc). This would allow that character to continue in the game but also make it clear that dying isn't something that you want to do. If the character suddenly can no longer get healed by radiant spells that might change if he wants to come back or not. Ditto if he knows a devil might just control him when he least expects it.
Good luck! It's tough to find the balance between a rewarding story line and and making sure players feel that true sense of danger the others were talking about.
Hm... how about some out of the box thinking. The player wants to keep playing the character, but you want death to have meaning. The party is low level right now, but will be gaining X.P. as they go.
What if some powerful being, similar to a Warlock patron, were, as this character crosses over from life to death, offer him the option of coming back... as a Revenant? You'd have to do some tweaking but you would essentially follow the Revenant rules, which are that he has these cold burning eyes, pale ghastly skin, and is effectively undead. He could play his class and gain levels in his class, etc. But.. by the revenant rules there is a deadline (a year in MM, but I would say as DM, in this case, whatever deadline you want). Instead of him having to "get revenge on who wronged him," he has to get perform a task for the patron-god-whatever who "revenanted" him. This task should be something that the party probably doesn't want to have happen, but the patron will let him know if you don't make progress toward this task, I take you back to my domain.
Now there is a ticking clock. And, there is a way to cure revenants -- the Wish spell. The party will need to be high level to cure it. But it is possible, and now they have a goal -- we need to get this done before Dwarfy summons the evil patron from the far beyond, and before his year (or whatever) is up. And they can always possibly find a Wish another way (e.g., genie in a bottle, ring of wishing, powerful mage for whom they just did a favor).
But I would not just spring this on the player. I would offer the option, and see what he/she thinks. He might be game, or might hate the idea. If hate, then go with one of the other options.
EDIT: And I want to point out, obviously at level 2, the Dwarfenant would NOT have all the uber-powers like Regen and Glare that the Revenant in MM has. UA has some rules, I think, on PC revenants but if not... you would let these abilities open up as he levels, NOT from the start.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
A lot of good advice above. I think I would have used this to "teach" you all (both players and you), that death can happen in this game.
In my campaign, I'd might have considered to have him "return" if it was a strong in-world reason for it. If an archdemon or dark god or something are paying close attention to the group, I could might have used this as an opportunity for some of BioWizards creative thinking, but I don't think I would have written that into the campaign, just to spare his life.
What you could consider (if you decides to keep him dead). Is a funeral (or something like that). Have the other players raise a tomb over him, have them say farewell to their comrade. Use this to "round up" the players story. Give him the farewell he deserves. To make the character feel better - try to remember the character yourself, and have people ask about him. Have people miss him. Like if they come back to an inn they've stayed together, have the innkeeper ask about him and be sad when he learns about his death. Be generous with inspiration when the other players do things in his memory - things like that can actually make that death to one of the most memorable things with the campaign.
Ludo ergo sum!
Did any of the other characters attempt to heal/stabilize the downed PC? If not, it may be worth talking to them about such things.
Thanks so much for all of the thoughtful replies! I totally agree with BigLizard and I do think the game will be a lot more engaging for everyone (Especially the new players) now that they know death is a real possibility.
@BioWizard. Another great suggestion. I will talk to the player, and if he remains very attached to his Dwarf I may use this (though I'm leaning against it for now)
@emrfish6. Unfortunately they didn't get to him in time (likely they expected him to survive more than 2 death rolls) but they also didn't exactly prioritize saving him (There was also one other unconscious character, whom they did stabilize).
Thanks again!
Fear and anxiety aren't conducive to good play. Anyone who has sat through any TV from the years of 1960 to 1990 will have seen the moral that fear brings out the worst in us. Players who are "afraid" for their lives will make unheroic decisions. Why? Because heroism involves risk-taking. If you want a good simulation, then, by all means, make your player's characters into paranoid jerks who shoot first and ask questions never. If you make it too risky to do the right thing, then people won't stick their necks out. It's not smart to be heroic. It's not smart to fight a dragon. But you know what it is? Good story-telling.
Yes, you need stakes in good story-telling, but those stakes need to actually matter. If your character is dead at level 2, you aren't invested in that character. If you are invested in that character, then you've just been punished for caring enough to put all that work into it, because it has just been wasted. Deincentivising your players to care about their characters is bad GMing. If a player gets killed at level 2? That's a plot hook opportunity, not a chance to teach the player about the uncaring nature of the universe. Have a cleric resurrect them-- the players can't afford the price right now, but they do have something maybe as valuable: they're wandering killing machines. Get the cleric to send them on a quest as a payment for the service.
What were they doing when he got killed? Did they have to abandon a dungeon crawl to bring him back to town? Well, now conditions just got worse for failing. The situation just got more complicated. They all get to keep playing their characters, but there are consequences.
If you die at low levels, it's probably because the dice are not sapient beings and determine the face they show based on physics and not any rational ordering. This is why you commonly see the advice to be careful with level 1s in particular: it's when the characters are most vulnerable to bad rolls.
I know the most fun I had in D&D was when I stopped worrying about whether or not my character died and started playing her like a hero. Wanting to do the right thing but afraid that your stats aren't high enough isn't really that fun. I don't think any of us signed up to play D&D to feel impotent to stop evil. Reward your players for taking risks. It makes for better stories when your players swing from the chandelier, rather than killing them for failing the roll while trying to do something cool. It makes for a better story when in order to resurrect their dead friend, they have to delve into a lost tomb to recover a holy relic, then to write a character out of the story because their HP hit zero.
If a player has put a lot of work into a (now) dead character, I've found it really helps to "keep his memory alive". Hold a funeral or memorial service. If the character helped save the town, have the citizens erect a statue in his honour. Name a pub after him.
If the player invented a family/guild/patron, have the party visit them (if possible) to deliver the bad news. Involve those background characters in the story - maybe the daughter wants to be a hero and avenge her fathers death. Maybe the son, filled with anger, becomes a villain...
I mean, you can't take the high road and say calling your style of, in your own words, instilling fear into your players is a blight on my character after saying my post doesn't even qualify as advice and can only allegedly be called so.
Bad GMing is poor narrative engineering. I mean you have control over 99% of the inputs into the story, if you can't use that to engineer a satisfying output then you are doing something wrong. That you think that fear (specifically stemming from mortal peril) is necessary for tension shows that maybe those three decades weren't suitable applied. You should be able to establish tension (more formally we might-- as I already did-- refer to stakes. A term commonly used to describe character-driven dramatic tension.) As my chandelier analogy, that you seemingly willfully misinterpreted, went, the tension shouldn't come from whether or not the dice kill you every time you take an action that would conventionally be described as risky. The risk shouldn't be coming from leaping to grab a chandelier. If you have a 5% chance (i.e. rolling a 1 on a d20) of dying anytime you do anything, you wouldn't leave the house-- realistically. The risk should come from the thing you need to leap to grab the chandelier to escape from or quickly get to.
You are also aware that the GM is always faking the risk. None of this game is real. It's all fake. The GM faking the risk is no more realistic than the players faking their characters. They aren't actually elves and dwarves. That's just an agreed-upon illusion designed for entertainment. Which is to say the entire game is really irrelevant and meaningless: it's just for fun, mate. It means nothing in the grand scheme of things. It's just a collaborative fantasy. You could play the game equally well without dice or statistics at all. So, if you need the dice to add danger? I mean, you're doing a bad job. You should be able to tell a compelling story with your friends without rolling a single polyhedron.
Is D&D a bad game because it uses dice? Of course not. But if the dice are the ones running the game, what good are you as a GM? You should be the rational mind in control of the game with enough sense to realise when the dice "suggest" an outcome which is bad for the health of the game.
This is a very important point that I think a lot of people miss, perhaps because of the prevalence of video game culture. For many players, most of their RPG experience and nearly all of their non-D&D experience comes from video games, in which the dice (in the form of the "random number generator") are in fact running the game. The developers build random number tables of encounters and treasure for a particular area, and when you walk into it, the computer "rolls" on those tables and spawns in whatever comes up. The computer doesn't say, "Hey this party is tired and had a lot of battles today let me go easy on them." The computer doesn't say, "Hey this Paladin hasn't gotten any treasure particular to his class in several sessions, let me put some Paladin-specific treasure in the next room." The computer doesn't say, "I know my players prefer puzzles to combat so let me put more puzzles in this dungeon."
The computer slavishly, unwaveringly, relentlessly, uncompromisingly, thoughtlessly, follows its programming and does whatever the RNG says to do. Period. Save file. Close program. If a DM is just following the RNG in the same unwavering, relentless, uncompromising manner, then, as you say... why have a DM?
I mean the DMG actually gives you random tables for making up dungeons, generating encounters, and generating treasure. You could literally play D&D solo with these things, or around the table with friends just randomly generating plots and dungeons and wilderness areas. Heck, it might actually even be FUN to do this on occasion (which is why board games like Dungeon! exist...). But it would probably get stale really quickly and you would not be able to have a good story... nor one tailored to your party (not without cheating, anyway).
The DM is there to customize the experience, so that it's not just a mindless, thoughtless repetition of a random number table, but is instead a personalized game tailored to the tastes, composition, and style of the players at the table. As a great lesson in how the same exact game can be wildly different due solely to the DM doing this customization, watch an episode of Critical Role, season 2 (any one will do), and then watch an episode of Colville's Chain of Acheron series. Leaving aside the production quality differences, the games are wildly different -- it's almost like they're not even the same game. Why? Because Mercer's game group likes one style of play, and Colville's likes another, and the DMs are tailoring the experience to what their players (and to a certain extent their audience) wants to see.
That's the whole point of DMing. You customize the experience to your players. This is not possible in just about any other form of gaming, and it's what makes D&D so amazing (and other tabletop RPGs). And by the same token, if the DM just lets the dice run everything, then you lose what makes D&D great.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I'm sure there are plenty of games available to prove to everyone that you're a real man. Don't worry. Our paths never have to actually cross.