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.
Trust me, add "reasonable effort" in front.
Format your paladin as a Limited Liability Paladin
B corp certified too
have the rogue sprinkle some stolen gold on em.
no one will know any different, certainly not the gods
Ah, the ol' sprinkle some crack on the crime scene trick
“I’ve seen this once before when I was a rookie officer. This tiefling broke in and hung pictures of himself and his family all over the walls. Let’s sprinkle some stolen gold on him and get outta here.”
Is that a common problem? I’ve only ever played with a small group of friends, so my perspective is limited, but that seems like wild behavior to me.
Had a similar experience once at a convention. The DM was somehow obsessed with "winning" the scenario, as if it was a player party VS. the DM situation. He even was suprised when most of us flat out left the table after we managed to defeat the first major threat of the campaign and it then somehow suddenly turned into an undead version of itself, stood up again and managed to escape for no discernible reason other than the DM being unwilling to "lose" the fight.
On the flip side, we had a blast continuing the scenario in the partking lot on our own terms, without a DM.
Long story short; not a common problem, but IF it happens, it is frustrating and annoying and can ruin the fun of the entire party.
