Is it an unspoken rule in ttrpgs that bad things can only happen to players if they are either foreshadowed or permitted by a dice roll outcome?
One of my favorite "teasing the players" stories I like to tell is about my first group (back in highschool) taking an entire session to open a door that was unlocked and untrapped. They spent hours circling the house the door was attached to, rolled multiple checks looking for traps, considered going through the windows, poked the door with various lengths of poles, the entire time with me sitting there breaking character to say "You can just open the door, I promise."
I usually don't tell the second half of the story because it's less funny.
The second half of the story is me stopping the session to go "Okay, look, it feels like I messed up somewhere. I swear the door is safe, why don't you believe me?" And one of the players giving me a frustrated look and saying "Of course you'll say that, you're trying to win."
At this point, I basically went "Explain."
Their first DM had been one of the player's dad. The dad was a gamer from 1st edition DnD. The dad had told the kids it was a competitive game and that the DM was supposed to try and kill the players and the players had to be smart to survive. But, of course, in DnD the DM is omnipotent. The DM/dad always won - for years.
We were in high school. One of these player's dad had, for years been getting his kid and his kid's friends together, having them make characters, and then killing the kids characters while telling them they had a chance. When I'd offered to DM the players had been thrilled. I'd thought it was because they wanted to play more. Apparently it was because they'd thought they'd be able to win against me since I was their age.
I hadn't played DnD before at this point. I had instead done a bunch of collaborative roleplaying on forums without rulesets, and had gotten tired of people throwing up everything proof shields (also bad things had happened that I'm not going to get into because I don't want to need a CW on this post) so I wanted to play DnD to experience the storytelling without the bullshit (or the trauma). I explained that to the players, and asked them if we could play again next week, and promised them that if I killed them and they felt it was unfair I'd give them each $5 but only if they didn't assume everything was a death trap or an attempt to murder them.
From their perspective I'd just promised to kill their characters quickly and pay them for it, so they were fine with that.
Was the next session brilliant and perfect? No, I was a novice DM who didn't know the rules and had a very poor plan. Combat was messy, the plot was somehow both rail-roady and at the same time barely there, and I was too in love with my own DMPC.
But did they have more fun than some asshole using the role of the DM to lord imaginary power over a bunch of teenagers? I mean, of course, the bar was underground I just had to walk across the surface.
It's lead to me, whenever the players are being odd about something, asking their reasoning. And I've found, over the last 20 years (fuck I'm old) of running various TTRPG games that more often than you'd expect, its because those players were traumatized by a bad DM. Sometimes the stories were funny. Sometimes they were legitimately upsetting. But it's given my own personal rule 0 for being DM:
If the players are acting in a way that doesn't make sense to you, ask them why.
