Fail Finale
Accepting that failure can happen is part of the thrill in this hobby. The Divine Arrow is knocked, the Avatar of Desolation hovers at the apex of its celestial ascendancy, and the world holds its breath as the icosahedron clatters…. But that little plastic bastard don’t always come up 20. Sometimes it comes up 1. And when that happens, and especially when it the final fight of the campaign, you’ve got to ask yourself whether special considerations apply.
I’ve said it twice before now, but nobody wants an asterisk next to their character’s name. Deciding that the bad guys win is a great big “feels bad,” but then again, so is pulling out that scroll of retcon.
Just imagine it. You’ve spent three IRL years campaigning with your pals. You’ve made it to the end of a complete Adventure Path (possibly for the very first time!), and there before you lies the Mad Mage / Demon Queen / Aforementioned Avatar of Desolation. None of that matters though, because you can’t roll dice today. The cleric has been dominated, the wizard failed on his dispel magic, and your paladin just whiffed on her full attack. The BBEG lets loose another AoE, and there goes your last HP. No one is left to heal you.
“Sorry guys. I guess you lost. Does somebody else wanna DM next time?”
So for today’s discussion, walk me through your thought process in this scenario. It’ll be our own little Kobayashi Maru. If your party TPK’d in the final fight, would you reset and try again? Would you accept defeat? Or would you expect your GM to fudge the dice just enough to keep the BAD ENDING from ruining a good campaign? Let’s hear all about you philosophy of failure down in the comments!
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If it really is the final fight, then I’d let the dice lie as they roll. The journey and the destination are both important, and I want my players to feel like they earned their ultimate victory, and they can’t earn it if there’s no way to fail.
It’s in the middle of the campaign that I’m much more likely to fudge things. A party of characters that work together well, not just strategically but socially, and that their players identify with, is worth a lot, and that’s not something I’m willing to throw away on a random encounter.
As to actual failure endings that I’ve run… well, the only one that comes to mind was a Legend of the Five Rings game set during the Unicorn’s return to Rokugan. Most of the PCs were on the Unicorn’s side, but the Scorpion PC was opposing them (on orders from his clan, of course). And he made a good attempt at discrediting the Unicorn. And he failed. And that was okay, because he made some really good plans, but they ultimately failed, both because of the other PCs and because he was fighting an uphill battle against history. It was still a good time.
That’s an interesting dynamic where one PC’s failure is another’s success. Was it still a satisfying conclusion for that Scorpion? Was there some kind of payoff or Pyrrhic victory?
If the party wiped the final fight, then no, I would not turn back time. But then again, I would probably never have the final fight either be that important, or possible to lose.
Consider good old Final Fantasy 7. Sure, it has multiple ‘final’ fights, but the actual last fight of the game, you just press X to win. If the end of the world (or other significant event) hinges on the final fight, I am going to make sure the party can’t lose – the real hard fights would have all come and gone, and the big bad in his castle will be a sitting duck ready for summery extermination.
The alternative (which is my usual strategy) is to have the final fight (or fights) either serve as a tipping point between several acceptable futures, or as a villains last “I may be defeated, but I am taking you to hell with me” gambit. In the former, sure, the party will no doubt have their preferred goal, but if they lose, their characters may be dead, and their main goal missed, but the alternative will be palatable, and will still someway reflect the parties achievements up to that point – a lesser victory, but a victory all the same. In the latter, whether they live or die merely impacts their characters ability to live happily ever after in the world they’ve already saved, not whether or not they actually save it. Either way, a defeat will them only give them a bittersweet ending, not abject faliure.
Sounds to me like you’re distinguishing the fate of the characters from the fate of the world. The latter is controlled by the players’ choices, while the former (read: small-stakes personal tragedy) is controlled by the dice. Seems like a solid way to split the difference.
Considering I had a similar situation happen in a pathfinder adventure path (the group ran for a year and a half (probably more i dont know), we were on a final fight against a dude and we all died) I think I know my personal answer.
Yeah I will just accept the bad ending, we tried our hardest but it just wasn’t enough. We made a mistake or simply just ill luck led to our deaths. Maybe a new group will find out about it and do it but apart from that yeah I’ll just accept defeat. Its what the group and I in pathfinder did when we all died in hells rebels in the song of silver book at the very end of it. We all cursed and moaned about it for a bit before letting the GM make a new campaign for us. (return to the temple of elemental evil or the first i don’t remember)
Sometimes, evil wins my dude sometimes evil wins and the good guys lose. Maybe someone else will come along and solve it but that won’t be the players. Their story is done.
Now as for running a game in it after the bad end, I am not one for it I have my preferences. I like playing a good guy and running a good guy campaign. I have had enough 40k and grim-dark campaigns for a while. I would rather just try another campaign, world or alternate dimension where the shit didn’t happen.
But all this requires a group who is okay with it. So uh make your intentions clear when your in one as a GM or as a player :P.
Was the feeling unanimous? Did any of your fellow party members seem to feel that a retcon was a better call, or did everyone agree that would cheapn the story?
Also: How did your GM describe the loss? Was there some way to soften the blow in the epilogue?
As far as I know, yes.
Don’t remember it, but it was more of a “okay you all die, badguys win [insert description of bad shit and world going to shit]. Lets move onto the next campaign.
The bad guy never REALLY wins, you’re just setting up the scenario for the next group of adventurers. “Stop the evil vizier from seizing the throne” might turn into “overthrow the evil kingdom”, or “stop the rampaging warlord” turns into “avenge all the people the warlord killed”, etc etc etc.
Yeah if you’re emotionally invested in your character then dying can suck, but the story isn’t really OVER, there’s just the point at which one chapter ends and the another begins.
So you’d do some kind of sequel campaign? Seems fair.
The idea of being overly-invested in a character is interesting to me. I guess sometimes the aesthetic of immersion goes a little too far, and it’s a better idea to treat your relationship to the game as a contributing author rather than an inhabitant.
I’m a roleplayer and an actor; I enjoy creating characters and playing out how they would react in situations, and if they die, I feel a little sad that their story is over (or at least on-hold until someone can scrounge up the diamonds for a resurrection).
It doesn’t really appeal to me to introduce the party to Varg, long-lost twin-brother of Targ (died to a goblin-arrow in the eye) who had joined the party after his cousin Jarg got caught in a cave-in.
I suppose a lot depends on how the party feels. Is let everyone cool off and see what they want – possibly they’re ok with just admitting defeat and moving on to a new campaign. If they’re still out for blood, there is plenty of ways to bring the party back to life. Maybe the BBEG decided to ressurect the party and keep them around as petrified/feebleminded/balefully polymorphed trophies, only so that La Resistance can swoop in and rescue them decades later.
This of course leaves an issue – how to prevent the players from feeling like, as you put it, they have an asterix next to their name. The solution I propose is simple – make it hurt. Have them pay for their ressurection by showing them just how much that lost battle costed them. Base of operations – ruined. Favorite city? Filled with bandits, misery and diseases. Beloved NPCs? Butchered or broken being repair. Except for that one character that used to be really upbeat, but now hates the party for their failure. Hopefully they won’t fail a second time…
I love it!
But there’s the rub. I feel like this solution is solid, but it carry connotations of “you get one free bonus life.” In other words, it’ll only work once.
Well we failed to stop Orcus from abolishing the other gods and taking kver the world in our previous campaign.
…so in our followup campaign, 300 years after that, in a post apocalyptic world where the rain is blood and undeads are everywhere, we are scraping by as mere survivors, but we just found some leads on how to get the gods back or something. Oh and we’ve come to a refuge city where our previous party is revered as heroes and everyone is named after them… And try to dress up and imitate them too… (No, it wasn’t a sentimental session, you’re crying, not me).
Sequel campaign after BAD END? Not familiar. Never heard of it…
https://www.neverborncomic.com/?comic=chorus-of-the-neverborn-460
Colin Stricklin and Kyle Strickland? I feel like there’s a pattern in Laurel’s choice of writers.
My current Pathfinder game I’m dm-ing takes place in a metropolis that was gated to a demiplane create/ruled by a demon lord. Behind the scenes, an offscreen adventuring party failed to stop the evil cultists ritual before it was completed, all this was happening while the party was celebrating their successful level 1 adventure and figuring out what to do with level-ups.
Huh. Neat point of comparison. Are they going to stumble onto the legacy of the failed high-level party at some point?
Most likely. I’m kinda flying by the seat of my pants as I do this.
The demon lord did send a telepathic message out to the entire city after the gate happened gloating about the whole thing.
Demon lord’s gonna demon lord.
I tend to build my own homebrew universes, because I am a slightly crazy person. I have one that is based on a mix of Emperor of the Fading Suns and Thief: The Dark Project (the trilogy really, not so much the reboot). I already have 2-3 time periods I can set events in, have been working a bit on a prequel and sequel era. I have used this universe for 12+ years at this point and the PCs have real impact.
In another era though their actions can subtly impact things (books they were writing are well known, or just stumbled across, or bigger actions they wind up marrying a noble and ending a feud. Or I can set-up what will become what was a conflict in another adventure.
In this case I would advance the clock by 5-10 years and they can continue to explore the universe they have enjoyed for X months or years with new characters. Plenty of world building already done, but they get to have their own impact on it and see the ripples of their previous characters adventures.
Another option would be to “Neville Longbottom” or “Bean” it, or Shadows of the Empire. Reset the campaign timeline to a prior point, but have them start with new characters. Now you can reference what their previous mains were doing, they might even run across them in “down time” (see them in a memorable tavern brawl or something) but they run parallel. Eventually they get to the BBEG again and it turns out THEY are the ones prophesized, not that other party of chumps!
Best used when the BBEG’s plans don’t involve ending the whole world. But even in an epic like say, Star Wars…even if Yavin 4 was blown up…maybe a different group would eventually rise and make it. Like General Syndulla’s crew. Imagine if the climatic confrontation on the Death Star was between Ahsoka and Darth, or Ezra, etc. Tweak the story as to how they overcome it, but it doesn’t HAVE to be the Skywalker saga.
The enduring campaign world is something that I’ve never played with. Sure I’m aware that Tekumel is theoretically a thing, and that one party’s major triumph becomes another’s historical footnote, but that is definitely a years-long project that I’ve yet to undertake. As you say, I’m guessing that “end the world” scenarios aren’t on the table in such a setup, just because it represents too much wasted work.
The way I do it is to build in the themes of conflict. (Noble houses with X general personalities/dispositions exist and are squabbling. Magic is heavily restricted and controlled by X church, how do the Noble Houses interact with that.) Then from there I build out “What is the major disruption that is growing/unveiling in the world?” (i.e. Proof of X faction that currently is in power causing the problems in the first place, etc.)
Depending on the power level of the PCs will help shape what initial adventures they will have, but it lets them build a PC concept that fits into the world a bit. From there I work out a bit why they are all together (some of this I can do on the fly, while trying to avoid the “You all meet in a tavern” session 0) and give that to the players to flesh out a bit. Now they are invested, and have some ideas and hooks they can throw back to me. (Oh! I was raised by Barbarians in the north…there are a couple tribes there described here…so that’s neat, I don’t know which ones I’m descended from! or they can go heavily in depth and work with me “I want to be a retainer, minor noble, etc from House X, how will that fit in how do we work that out?)
It then gives some low-end adventures “You’ve been tasked to retrieve X thing, or investigate X thing” and how the players do that helps me shape where they are going from there. I often have some rough idea what the BBEG might be doing when they face the ULTIMATE BBEG at Level 20 (no stats, just conceptually…it’s a SUPER LICH of the wizard of the long forgotten neighbor country that was overrun, he’s seeking to gain dominion again! and can sprinkle in little hooks. Then if it turns out the party wants to work for the BBEG…well conveinently the ruler of the kingdom they are in, or counsel or whatever just became the new BBEG…and conceptually is getting drawn out.
Wound up with a supporting “Bad” faction that one of the players really hated them. But even the “bad” faction had “really not evil” aspects to it. But his actions and attitudes toward that faction helped shape the adventure. Years later after I had moved and was visiting I did a one-off, and he…playing a completely different character, got to find some information…while working for that very faction…that was going to seriously disrupt things…or would it be suppressed? (Knowledge is power)
All of this actually saves me time in the long run because there are so many possibilities for it being linked. I have also found some of my players really love it because it has familiarity to it…and if they have been with me for years it feels like comfortable old leather they are putting on, but there is still plenty of “new” or “different” and it isn’t quite as train-tracked as a lot of pre-built adventures, and the world itself is just tweaked off normal 3.5 DnD that it’s familiar…but even those who have been playing for 30+ years can’t truly metagame fully. (Though the peace-loving dinosaur-riding shamanistic minotaurs are definitely not Tauren. That would be copyright infringement…)
I don’t really care about the final outcome as long as the journey getting there was a fun one. If the DM and the players all had a good time, then what happens at the end is what happens at the end, whether the dice are rolled in front of everyone or behind the DM screen.
Either outcome can be narratively interesting and if you are running another campaign in the same setting (with maybe a time jump or a parallel event) then the “bad ending” could be an interesting outcome for the next party that is played in the setting. Campaign two, the sequel after the forces of evil “won”, could have a whole new feel to it.
Now if the second campaign ALSO ends badly… well that could suck, but there is a long journey to get there too.
The one bad experience is if a single player is having consistently bad rolls through the entire campaign (as one person in a game I am a part of has been having) then that player might feel like no matter the outcome, their part was less significant than anyone else’s part.
I suppose it all depends on how one handles things reaching the end.
How many sessions do your campaigns tend to last? I don’t mind losing my dude in a 10-session arc. But if it’s been over a year and 18+ sessions I’m invested, and suddenly the ending is an important thing to me.
I’ve rarely had a campaign last long enough for this to be an issue, but fingers crossed the campaigns that I’m in right now will go the distance and we’ll get a satisfactory ending.
Pro-tip: Massage that GM ego! If you write in-character journal entries, suggest world-building ideas, or otherwise show that you’re invested, it helps to keep a GM trucking along all the way through to the end.
Good luck, and happy gaming. 😀
For me, the final fight against the end boss is a chance for the PCs to show off. It is not specifically that they win; it is that they demonstrate how they have grown and what they have picked up over the course of the campaign. Unless they have turned into losers (which never happens in campaigns I run), victory is an inevitable consequence of that. The end boss would have curbstomped the PCs at the start of their journey, but now – it is not always a curbstomp the other way, but the PCs have worked hard to gain the advantage, and this is their time to demonstrate it.
I remember one campaign where 8 PCs were all pulling off limit breaks, beating down the end boss, and it still wasn’t enough…until finally it was the 9th PC’s turn. His action: “merely” breaking the action economy, giving the other 8 PCs another turn, right before the boss would have gone. This was dramatic enough that he was given much credit for winning the fight. (And technically that wasn’t even the final combat: there were some sessions of “post-game” epilogue, including another boss from that PC’s personal plotline.)
The Exalted player in me recoiled in horror:
https://exalted-thesunalsorises.obsidianportal.com/wikis/limit-break
What system were you running?
As usual for such things, the party’s fall was a result of their own actions. While not a final boss, they had released a priest of the Elder Gods from its seal by looting a magical sword stuck into the priest’s corpse. After a few more weeks of adventuring, tactfully ignoring the havoc the priest was causing to a nearby kingdom. Only after they learned that said kingdom would be offering a large monetary reward for aid against the priest’s aberration army did they arrive. By that point, what was left of the kingdom was holed up in the castle, at the last parts of a siege – unable to help.
So the party went alone to confront the mighty priest, fighting through his minions – losing one of their frontline warriors and almost losing their healer in the process. Upon seeing the party wielding the sword that sealed it away coming toward him, the priest teleported back to his lair. Rather than follow, the party fled into the woods, abandoning the quest. And so the kingdom fell, and the Elder Gods once more had a foothold in the world.
In the closing narration, I had them lose their jobs from the adventurer’s guild (which didn’t know the extent to which they were responsible). They joined with a bounty hunter to go do that, as the world slowly fell deeper into ruin. Not a traditional TPK, but in this case it was a campaign-ending messup.
Was it a satisfying conclusion though? Did the players feel like they screwed up, or did they feel like tragic heroes doing the best they could in a tough circumstance?
Final Fight?
as in… the fight in the session before the Never Ending Hiatus?
You poor, poor thing….
I don’t know how to tell you this, but campaigns? They can end. Ya know. Like stories. With satisfying epilogues and everything.
Yeah. This sort of feels like storygaming to me. Hollow victory for plot armor ex machina. Feels like we’re forcing a story to be so grand that the players couldnt have failed in the first place. Campaign storyline was too big to fail.
Is that a bad thing?
The absolute final battle sounds like the perfect opportunity to whip out a Paper Mario ending to me. If the party is downed, they’re filled with visions of all the places they’ve been on their lengthy adventure, all the friends they’ve made along the way, all the people depending on them and cheering them on as they fight to save the world. The party gets a second wind and rises again, fully or partially healed, the boss’s ult or defenses are disabled, and you pretend that this was the plan all along.
Anime style? Pulling power from their bottomless wellspring of willpower and fighting spirit?
https://s3.zerochan.net/240/04/12/593104.jpg
We would roll with it. The bad guy wins, okay. Now how that affects the campaign? How we can use that? For example, there is a PC game called Tyranny. The central premise is that evil already won. The protagonist is a Fatebinder working for Kyros The Overlord. And the game has no ending in which Kyros doesn’t wins one way or another. So it is a good example of what to do. The bad guy wins? Roll with it. The next heroes must live in a different world now. They can be freedom fighters who try to overthrow the new regime. Or evil already won and they are no more than glorified and idealistic terrorists. Maybe the world was destroyed, so now the heroes are adventures in broken world, unearthing relics from the old civilization and trying to survive among the shards and debris while trying to stop a second and more destructive scheme. Or evil won because good was weak. In that case evil is the right path, right? Why no work for our new evil overlord? The pay is good, girls love bad guys and you can kill as many people as you want… only to discover too late that goodness is your call. And also, where the problem will be with evil winning? That is very Yankee idea, no offense intended. But evil winning isn’t the end of things. Evil winning is not a bad ending, is just and ending and one people can make great things out of it. It can also mean victory if the path of evil is the one the “heroes” walk 🙂
Just ask Cleric. He said yes and is alive while the rest of the party said no and is dead. Remember, evil is always hiring and when the bad guy may offer the heroes a job if they ask him. Even in the middle of a battle 😀
Have you run into this? The sequel campaign I mean.
I’ve never had the opportunity to do “the next crop of heroes,” but that does indeed sound like a satisfying way to play it.
We have done The Campaign, The Campaign II, The Campaign III , The Campaign IV and three spin-off 😛
Many times we have continue forward with the history of the setting. Either with the next harvest, or with the next problem that need some heroes to resolve. In fact once we played a group of heroes that liberated a kingdom from the tyranny of a usurper. The next campaign was about another group of heroes that needed to defend their country from the previous group. Once they have liberated their kingdom they have put their endeavour in reconquering the lands their kingdom have lost under the reign of the usurper, only to find another bunch of people rising against them because hey don’t want to be conquered. The Harvey Dent quote: “You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain” were the arc words of that campaigns 😀
Also since i love continuity porn, there is a lot of continuity from a campaign to the next. If i can put references of course 🙂
Is it the same group of players every time, or do you invite in new blood? I could imagine a lot of inside jokes going over my head if I was a new player in that setup.
We are, and we have been, the same guys and girl from a time ago. Being as we are it would difficult for anybody to integrate on the group. Only us we can support how much obnoxious we are 🙂
We can keep the continuity low but still, for someone new, it could be like starting a series by the ninth season. We have a lot of rules and do and don’t that form a huge infrastructure in which we sustain our group 🙂
Curating a group is a proper skill. Actually, I should do a comic on this at some point. Let me talk to Gunslinger and see if he has any ideas.
Glad to be a font of inspiration 😀
I have to say that in a battle between a skeletal mage and this particular party of adventurers … it’s a bit of a toss-up whether evil won or lost. ^^;
I am reminded, however, of a time when I was in a Hyskosa’s Hexad AP, and we suffered a TPK attacking a ghoul lord in his tomb. That was a real bummer. The other players were surprised that I took it so hard, but I put a lot of love into that character and I had lots of fun with him. ^^;
Heh. One of the fun things I did was just before the TPK; we were being attacked by a rat swarm in the cemetery surrounding the ghoul lord’s tomb, and my character managed to thin out about a third of the swarm … with a cantrip. One casting of ghost sound, and the rats thought there was a cat swarm incoming. ^_^
What do you mean? Fighter is obviously Neutral Good. It says so on his character sheet, so it must be true!
If they die, they die. I try to avoid fudging when I can. The villain is still there, and needs to be stopped. A new party is 2-3 levels behind them and also wants the villain dead, because they cheesed off a lot of people. Who knows how many dead parties came before yours?
Do you restock the dungeon for the new party, or write some other adventure for ’em?
If it’s the big game climax… then yes, have them die. And fight their way out of the afterlife. And re-emerge in the world of the living who knows how long later Legend of Zelda/Samurai Jack style. What’s this new world where the villain won like? What new trails and tribulations must they face in their quest to get revenge?
If they were too high level for this sort of Season 2 and 3 of their adventure to really work, then just say dying changed them. Maybe coming back to life did too. Or maybe they find that their return to the world of the living is just as the guiding ancestor spirits of their actual or spiritual descendants.
Or if you don’t have the time scale for any of that… well just have them make new maybe higher level characters and just do a montage about how their defeat effected the world and the extra work and preparation the new character who had to take up their mantle went through. And then make it an even bigger crazier fight (thus why I suggested even higher level characters).
Basically you want to avoid doing anything too close to the exact same fight over again or making it feel like their deaths not only killed their beloved PCs but also unlocked easy mode because apparently that is the only way you think they can win (or at least that’s how they might perceive things).
And maybe in their victory this second set of heroes finds a way to revive the old ones if the players were really attached to the old characters and in the epilogue the old characters do something vitally important for the future of the setting. So that they’re not just “the guys who lost”.
Though to be fair, “You lost to the villain and they’ve returned you to life as their minions, evil campaign time!” sounds like an evil campaign with way more teeth in it than one I’ve ever seen precisely because the players have an actual investment in the world and characters already. (Though be prepared if the players actually find this a fun twist and plan to stay evil.)
Orpheus dungeon sounds like a blast.
As for the heroes-turned-villains thing… I’m beginning to wonder if that’s the proper way to do an abyssal campaign over in Exalted. Have ’em run as Solars for the first arc, get to know their characters, then fall into the clutches of evil.
Interestingly enough the common gaming wisdom in my local tabletop scene goes the other direction. Instead seeing the final battle of the campaign as a situation where the balance of fudge or let the dice fall where they may is pushed towards fudging to ensure victory for the players, I have often heard it expressed that the final battle is the exact time where it is OK for the party to fall utterly. The logic is that it just provides a more tragic ending to the story, but still a proper ending, while a total loss to some miniboss’s lieutenant half-way through could still make it difficult to continue but wouldn’t provide a complete arc for the campaign.
Have you witnessed such a failure? What was the player reaction like?
If the bad guys win that final fight, then it was no longer the final fight. It was the backstory for some new party (or maybe the original party, revived by some patron as the only ones powerful enough to even hope to prevail), fighting for their lives in the dangerous world where a big bad guy has already won!
Now this is interesting to me. It sounds like a campaign can’t be a tragedy. Everything has to come out OK eventually. And when it finally does, then the campaign is allowed to end.
I’m generally of the opinion that if a TPK happens, then it happens. Sometimes things just go badly for the heroes. Of course, such events are perfect for sequel adventures, whether it be the old characters’ friends/family going to find out why they never came back, or a different group setting up to take out the evil dragon that is now lording it up over a kingdom.
Our campaign is just coming off of a similar arc after a (mostly nonlethal) TPK. The party faced down an encounter that might have been a bit on the strong side, rolled kinda badly, and weren’t focusing on the things that were doing the most damage (mostly because the ranger wanted to tame them). Fortunately the party mostly survived because these were the sort of enemies that like capturing people for saves/live sacrifices, but even if they had all actually died, that wouldn’t have been the end of things in that world. I probably would have had them make new characters, particularly ones that might have had some sort of connection to current events in the campaign. Maybe somebody related to the mine they’d cleared out, or someone from the town they’d saved — that sort of thing.
I’m surprised that I haven’t heard more of the old “take ’em captive” option. That mess is practically standard for TPK situations, and tends to work well in oops-we-died, non-climactic-ending situations.
Honestly I’d just revert to the start of the battle, videogame style.
(Or do something like that Excel Saga scene with the Great Will Of The Macrocosm)
Do you think the “asterisk” would bother you?
I have never encountered this situation, and I wouldn’t expect to, since the main group I DM for are full of cowards who would totally retreat if they were losing the big fight, even if some PCs were lost.
That said, I’m more on the “help the party out” side than the “welp, the world is destroyed, I guess” side for a couple of reasons. One is that I am a story-focused player, not a game-focused player, so a satisfying ending to the tale is more important to me than saying “well, we beat this really hard encounter on the first try.” Another is that, regarding the “asterisk” concern, players can only ever win if the GM lets them. The GM has literally infinite resources and the power to break rules at will. Players will only ever defeat a villain because the GM made that villain beatable, and that’s fine. That’s how this is supposed to go. If the lich beats you and the GM bails you out, it might not feel like you “earned” a victory, but if you beat the lich the first time, that only happened because the GM made the lich beatable. So a GM bailout, especially if the players have to work for their Round 2 victory, is not really any different than winning the first time, and is arguably more dramatic. There are plenty of stories where heroes lose badly and come back from it. My last reason might be a little odd, but it is a matter of… fairness, I guess? Basically, it doesn’t seem right to me that a villain’s side can lose perhaps dozens of fights, have whole lairs seized and tens of thousands of gp lost, and then have a really good 5 minutes, kill 4 people and win. That honestly breaks my suspension of disbelief more than God putting their thumb on the scale. (Also, the “the next campaign is 10 years after the last PCs screwed up” concept doesn’t really appeal to me for some reason, though that might be because my groups tend to have very different scenarios in each new campaign, rather than the continuous world model.)
I’ve seen in these comments a couple of times a good idea, which is to make sure there is no single “if you fail this hard fight, you lose” scenario. The villain’s plan should be substantially damaged by the time of the “final” fight, so even a TPK does not grant them total victory. Encouraging players to be willing to retreat and regroup against overwhelming odds is also a good habit, and allows for more dramatic scenarios and player-NPC rivalries.
(I just realized that Bionicle’s 2006 Voya Nui arc did this exact thing – the old heroes from 2001-2003 (2004 and 2005 were flashbacks to a thousand years earlier) get TPK’d by the new villains and are almost killed but instead held prisoner, and a party of civilian NPCs from the 2001-2003 period get promoted to PCs to finish the mission and save the old PCs.)
I’m not certain I agree with this argument. On the extreme end of the scale, I remember being a first level fighter hitting dire rats with a two-handed weapon.
“13 damage!”
“It squeaks in pain. Then it turns to attack you!”
I knew from experience that dire rats only have 5 hp. I also knew that I was dealing with a new GM. And when I asked if there was anything special about these dire rats (“They seem unnaturally hardy!”), the critter spontaneously died from my attention.
Sure a GM can invent some impossible-to-beat monstrosity. They can also improvise plot armor for their dudes. But I think that there a difference between “quantum ogres” and a fair fight, where the stats exist on paper before the combat starts and the GM plays those stats.
There’s nothing wring with being a narrative gamer. I tend to fall in that direction myself. But if you’re playing a complex mechanical system rather than Fate or PbtA or some similar rules-light affair, I think it pays to pay attention to the other modes of play as well. I often conceptualize the game mechanics as a collaborator in the fiction, and I find that ignoring the system feels ominously like ignoring the contributions of a fellow storyteller.
To clarify, I wasn’t talking about the GM cheating to get their creature through a fight. I was talking about the pre-encounter set-up when the stats are put on the paper in the first place. It is well within a GM’s power to place in an encounter foes of such a high CR (or so many foes of moderate CR) that, RAW, the party is effectively guaranteed to lose. Should the GM do that? No, because such scenarios are (almost) never fun. Part of the basic social contract of the game is that the GM puts forward challenges that the party can reasonably tackle. That doesn’t mean that success is guaranteed for them, or that hands should be held, or that you can’t have situations where the PCs are meant to flee or talk their way out instead of fighting. But it does mean that there is already a GM thumb on the scale in the player’s favor, as there should be, since the goal is for them to have fun. To me, at least (and I can understand other people feeling the opposite way) that makes the occasional presence of a second GM thumb less offensive. Especially if the players still have to work for that Round 2 victory.
So if I’m following, GM cheating (let’s call it fudging) is inherent in the role of the GM. Therefore, it’s not a problem when the GM fudges in other ways. In this construction, choosing encounter difficulty is roughly equivalent to saying, “You guys miraculously survived. You get a do-over.” Both represent the ‘infinite resources and power’ of the GM to effect the course of narrative. Is that about right?
If so… I dunno. In my mind, there’s fudging and then there’s fudging. You can do it elegantly and well, such that it feels natural and the hand of the GM remains relatively hidden. But by the same token, imagine taking that mindset into the Tomb of Horrors. If the party manages to wriggle their way out of every death trap due to ‘miraculous luck,’ they didn’t really play Tomb. If I was a player in that setup, I’d still feel like the asterisk was very much in effect.
Tomb of Horrors swings very far in the other direction when it comes to intent and GM handling, and I don’t think extreme examples clear some of the other good points clcman brought up.
It’s all preferences anyway, sure, but why would the villain win if they’ve been losing for the entirety of the campaign (which is how this is structured in many, if not all)? How much can they actually do if they win at that point? And what’s stopping a GM from arranging the forces of the world in advance to make the “asterisk” feel less like fiat and more like natural progression? Different tables can handle this differently, but for the common mode of people who want a satisfying win, there’s definitely ways to make that happen elegantly even if the dice try otherwise.
We almost had this exact scenario go down (including mouse over text) a few weeks ago.
We were going up against the Big Bad of our campaign for the first time- a demon lord trying to become a god that we call the Fungal Queen- and we actually started out pretty strong. A couple nicely timed crits and smart plays put her down by a lot of hp (keep in mind we’re only about 3/4 of the way through the campaign, so this would have been quite the speed run). Then she summoned her worm-y minion and we proceeded to get our asses handed to us. We very nearly had a resounding TPK (full failure, campaign ending, world destroyed, the works), but we convinced our DM to let us do one round of death saves. The cleric rolled a nat 20 (popping back up with 1 hp) and was able to get everyone up with the bare minimum of hit points. Wizard cast Haste on the Goliath who carried everyone out except my poor Halfling Rogue. My PC got to do the whole “go on without me” and was converted into one of the Fungal Queen’s undead minions (complete with fungal growths coming out of everywhere).
Not sure what we would have done if the TPK had actually happened. The DM seemed really bummed out before we convinced him to let us try for a miraculous death save.
Can’t wait to get assassinated by my beloved old pc, haha! Our Goliath Ranger said it best at the ‘funeral’- “I wish she was more dead than she is.”
Nice! Full points for the epitaph!
I would bitch about our bad luck, but ultimately accept the L and move on to our next game.
I’m pretty autocratic when it comes to this; the GM’s first and final duty is to ensure the players are entertained. If the players have loyally continued to game on for however long the campaign has gone on – which is hard, and always has been; we rarely talk about how gaming is a huge time sink, even when limited to monthly sessions – then they need to feel it meant something.
That can mean dying nobly, if that fits the thema of the game. But most players don’t want that. I consider myself pretty good at getting a read on my groups, and as the stage is set, I usually circle the rails back to where they need to be. It’s not unusual for a final session with me to have no combat checks or danger at all; the last battle with the BBEG (if present) having been the last rules n’ dice battle, and the last /session/ being about the fallout, or how the players want to finally dispose/reform/seal their foe away, or whatever else they may plan to do.
Despite that sounding pretty strict and authoritarian, I’m also pretty laissez-faire; I want them to be the star of the show, and give each character a swan song. I often have players who make it that far come up to me wanting their story to end a certain way. Perhaps they feel it’s only right X dies off, too.
I think I’ve done a pretty good job of ending stories, and making them feel like openings for other adventures – whether with the same cast, or entirely different folks, or ones that will never happen – but linger in the memory of the players, promising that somewhere else, their party continues on, fighting the good fight, forevermore.
I TPKed a party once. It was something about a middle of campaign. I took a week to come up with why a second party would want to be involved with the campaign and what other battle they can try to win to compensate previous loss (that stayed in the lore and history).