this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Serves them right for trying to railroad you into being "evil"
Amen. As a DM it is completely fine to generate challenging "food for thought" situations for their players, but when you start to play against your party and actively sabotage their characters, decisions or playstyle, it's time to step down as a DM.
For a while I've been getting the impression that some DMs are the same as power players, they just feel validated by having the Golden Rule to wield.
To justify this sort of thing with "it's what my villain would do" is about as bad as when a player does it.
The issue with this kind of thing is almost never the actual challenge or moral dilemma, wherever and however it may spring up - it's usually about trying to narratively 'pants' a character with a poorly contrived But Thou Must or Sophie's Choice, and the most generous interpretation of that action is that the GM feels that the suffering of a PC will help tell a good story. I find more often that these scenarios pop up in Humiliation Conga campaigns, where the GM just gets a kick out of creating worlds and encounters that primarily serve to inflict pain and misery on the PCs, and sometimes even the players themselves. And that's not to say that those kinds of stories and settings can't work or be enjoyable (Paranoia and the character-focused 40K games like Rogue Trader come to mind) but it has to be the kind of story that everyone at the table wants to tell.
And the problem with an actual moral dilemma is that nobody knows the right answer. It can work great for establishing your character and seeing how they react to a situation with no clear answer, but you can't just have God say "no, you're wrong" and have it be satisfying. At least, not unless you're prepared to have the paladin say "no, you're wrong*, and eventually become a god of their own. I imagine that would be very satisfying. Still probably something you should talk about beforehand though.