To Catch a Killer, Part 4: Supposed to Lose
Having tracked the true culprit to her evil lair of evil, Team Bounty Hunter now find themselves locked in a bullshit boss fight! This is what happens when you let the Handbook watch too much classic Trek. It may sound like a neat idea in theory, but as any GM who’s ever tried to implement a supposed-to-lose encounter can tell you, translating the Kobayashi Maru to the tabletop takes work.
I’ve seen it done four times in my career, all with varying degrees of success. Here’s the rundown for each encounter.
- Dragon Kings — Our band of Exalted heroes were tramping about the ruins of a dragon king temple. We soon found a door marked “nursery,” and in our infinite wisdom decided to try and pry it open. This was not a good idea. For those of you unfamiliar with dragon kings, these scaly humanoids don’t develop sentience until they fully mature. Before that they’re little more than bloodthirsty prehistoric predators. So when our ST described “several hundred shrieking monsters climbing the nursery walls like xenomorphs,” it was clearly not the time to stand and fight. A chase scene ensued. And as he later confessed, that was exactly what our ST had planned. I’ve often wondered since: What would have happened if we tried to enter combat? The encounter worked out fine, but only because the “you’re supposed to run” vibes were broadcast so hard.
- Expert Piloting — This was a skill challenge rather than a combat encounter, but the principle of supposed-to-lose was very much present. Longtime readers may recall our Savage Worlds Firefly crew getting marooned on a Reaver-infested space station. It turned out to be one of my all-time favorite sci-fi horror sessions, but getting there was a little rough. On paper it was a solid setup: sudden explosion, flying debris on a collision trajectory, and a critically damaged hero ship. We would have no choice but to dock with the partially-exploded station, search for replacement parts, and try to escape with our lives. Unfortunately, our pilot aced all of her rolls. “Exploding dice to dodge that chunk of bulkhead! Many degrees of success to reverse course! What do you mean we’re damaged anyway?” The rolls had been exceptional, but the phrase our hapless GM used to save his adventure was, “That’s just barely enough!” We could smell a rat, and quickly deduced that the outcome would have been the same no matter the roll. It was an important lesson for me as a GM: If your premise requires X to happen, don’t ask for a roll. Just narrate X happening.
- Fae Ex Machina — I introduced you guys to Anomander a few comics ago, but my fae trickster is relevant here as well. That’s because he turned out to be one of my biggest gaming regrets. It was the end of a long Exalted campaign, and it was finally time for the boss fight. The party used the craziest vehicle I’ve ever encountered to blitz the Juggernaut, provoke The Mask of Winters, and attempt to rescue their allied NPC from the clutches of evil. Turns out that Deathlords are crazy powerful though, and the fight was not going well. Happily, my GM senses had warned me that a TPK was imminent, and so I’d prepared for the contingency. All campaign long I’d hinted that one of the PCs was a living gateway to the Wyld. When the Mask of Winters landed what would have been a killing stroke on him, I described the PC’s head ripping open FLCL style and a nonsense army of fair folk coming through. “You forced our hand!” chirped the triumphant Anomander. “Can’t have you dying before we invade reality now, can we?” It was every bit as deus ex machina as it sounds, and completely undermined my players’ agency. I proceeded to narrate the fae-vs-deathlord fight going on in the background while the party rescued their friend. The momentum had gone out of things, and an otherwise successful campaign ended on a sour note. In retrospect, it should have been an honest TPK, or at least a “you’ve been captured” scenario.
- Strahd — You may have run into this one yourselves. The Curse of Strahd adventure over in 5e features a number of supposed-to-lose encounters, as the eponymous vampire loves nothing better than toying with PCs. He appears seemingly at random, taunts you like the smug jerk he is, and then (at least in our case) rips off your fighter’s arm before flouncing into the night. It works well because of villain psychology. Here, losing doesn’t mean the end of the adventure. It just means mustache twirling, a bit of villainous character development, and PCs with an even stronger motivation to level up into proper Van Helsings. This was a successful one from my perspective, but I suspect that a certain one-armed fighter has other feelings on the matter.
All things considered, I intend to be very, very careful next time I’m tempted to Kobayashi Maru my players. It can be dramatic and engaging when well-implemented, but as the examples show, the pitfalls are numerous.
Therefore, I now turn to the rest of you for our daily discussion! Have you ever found yourselves in a supposed-to-lose scenario? Did it play well, or did you walk away feeling like you’d lost your agency to a GM’s pre-written plot? Tell us all about your own brushes with unbeatable bosses down in the comments!
EVENT: The Handbook is heading out for Southern Fried Gaming Expo!
We’ve got our table set up at the Marriott Renaissance Waverly in Atlanta, GA. Both the writer & illustrator of this here Handbook of Heroes will be there Friday, Aug 20 – Sunday, Aug 22. We’re always down to talk shop in person, and we’d love to meet any and all of you guys out there in meat space.
So come on down! Win some free merch! We’ll sign your favorite d20!
ARE YOU THE KIND OF DRAGON THAT HOARDS ART? Then you’ll want to check out the “Epic Hero” reward level on our Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Like the proper fire-breathing tyrant you are, you’ll get to demand a monthly offerings suited to your tastes! Submit a request, and you’ll have a personalized original art card to add to your hoard. Trust us. This is the sort of one-of-a-kind treasure suitable to a wyrm of your magnificence.
Well.
…
Gestalt is rocking that outfit, isn’t she? Lauren really did a wonderful job on this page; the dynamic energy is wonderful.
I can’t help but imagine Gestalt being a murder-granny, given her outfit and hairdo.
Or a evil, more badass version of Granny from Looney Tunes.
Maybe Gestalt was just grandfa-… grandmothered in from back before the GM knew better than to allow it.
Granny or gray wolf? YOU BE THE JUDGE!
We don’t get to do a big dynamic fight scene between our characters too often. I think she was excited. 🙂
If Miss Gestalt is able to spread her conditions this could wind up being a “welcome to team evil” rather than a TPK for the bounty hunters.
I’m honestly not sure which option would go over worse with most gaming groups. There’s a cool aspect to getting turned into a monster or a hero turning evil but it could really sting if you’re invested in your character, which most players are.
What would a Catfolk with lycanthropy be like? Would it just be a Werecat, or a Cat with (were)wolf traits, or a mix of canine and feline (most likely, a fox)?
I think Druid and Eldritch Archer might help even the odds a little, though. Or offer reincarnations. Or bring along some proper silvered stakes and holy symbols.
Yes, what a shame if our beloved Bounty Hunters had to turn to the Villains for a payday. >_>
Not exactly the same but… So no shit there we were, session one, I’m rolling up with my drow twilight cleric and the DM let me add my racial and subclass darkvision scores together to make up for my sunlight sensitivity. We’ve just been hired by the captain of the palace guard to investigate a possible assassination attempt on the princess, and we’re walking into the castle when, lo and behold, we’re asked to roll perception checks.
I’ve got +6 to perception (we’re level 3) and roll high, so me and the artificer are the only ones who notice something that “looks kind of like a bird” but is hard to make out. I respond with “I have 420 feet of darkvision, can I see it better?”
Well, it appears to be a humanoid figure, sneaking away from the princess’s window in the dead of night, the guards none the wiser! I take off running, and my party follows me, and we chase the figure into the night halfway across the city, at which point the artificer uses their lightning gauntlets to blast them right into unconsciousness and making death saves….. right after the sorcerer used message to contact them and realized it was the princess we just got hired to protect, out for some midnight rebellious-teenager mischief. Whoops!
Good start.
What kind of princess sneaks out of a window and evades the guards without any class levels / bonus hp? Amateur hour! 😛
Don’t think I ran into a ‘supposed to lose’ scenario so much as frequent ‘do not fight the obvious bad guy / monster / evil entity or you TPK / lose an ally you desperately need’.
There were a few instances of ‘do something idiotic to progress the plot’ though. In one Starfinder AP, you have to, against all logic or reason, go into an eldritch entity’s prison and inadvertently break said prison, for a doohickey you don’t even know exists or will need for the later parts of the adventure.
And of course, the last 1e Pathfinder AP, Tyrants Grasp, has a similar problem that gained it infamy…
Having run five books of Starfinder AP, I’m beginning to think science fantasy is better at setting and flavor than plot. :/
Well, it’s Friday, lets hear those spoilery behind-the-scenes script(s). 😀
TITLE: To Catch a Killer, Part 3: Stay of Execution
TEXT: Keep a sharp watch at hangings, beheadings, and executions. They come with a 100% chance of drama.
PIC: An execution. Arcane Archer stands bound and gagged, his neck in the noose. Team Bounty Hunter look on from the crowd. Beside them, Miss Gestalt throws back her hood in frustration.
DIALOGUE:
Inquisitor: Amateur mistake shedding at the crime scene. A trained ranger can spot canine hair a mile away.
Magus: And to think he almost got away with it.
Gestalt: It was me you morons!
SCROLLOVER: Of course, this was all moments before a giant ape with braided hair rode in on an allosaurus and started wrecking up the place.
BLOG: The hanging of Rochelle Diebar.
TITLE: To Catch a Killer, Part 4: Supposed to Lose
TEXT: It is not victory, but defeat, that is the true test of a hero.
PIC: The Villains’ lair. Gestalt chokes the shit out of Ranger with one hand while holding Inquisitor’s axe by the blade with the other. Blood drips from Gestalt’s hand, but she grins ferociously as she bears Quiz to the ground. (If you can make it fit the composition, we can just make out REDACTED.)
DIALOGUE:
Inquisitor: How the crap is this a balanced encounter?
Gestalt: That’s the fun part. It’s not!
SCROLLOVER: Don’t worry. I’m sure that Magus is just invisible and biding her time, waiting to strike with a well-placed shocking grasp. Either that or she’s been distracted by REDACTED.
BLOG: “Supposed to lose” encounters.
When I DMed a Strahd encounter, it was definitely a ‘supposed to lose’, but I changed it up by also making it a ‘Strahd is also supposed to lose’.
Anyone who knows Strahd’s backstory knows that the key to his curse is the reincarnations of Tatyana, his lost obsession. Rather than concluding the adventure in one of the normal ways, I planned for neither the party or Strahd to win, but for both to lose by killing Tatyana. My first act was to raise the stakes by having the reincarnation fall for one of the characters (in particular, a character with a dark past, and a redemption arc). In the final encounter, I deliberately engineered the encounter in such a way that Tatyana would be killed (as it happened, knocked off the parapet into the gorge in an echo of her ‘original’ death), in such a manner that Strahd and the character were both partially to blame. With both sides ‘defeated’, I then had the mists swirl in to snatch the party away, denying both them and Strahd a chance for revenge over her death.
The party (in particular, the player of the love interest) loved it (it was a very ‘Ravenloft’ ending), and this was a campaign we ran at university, so I planned all this as the conclusion of the campaign for the year, and the next year we picked the campaign up with the party transported halfway across Ravenloft, being hounded by Strahd’s minions.
I wonder if we’ll ever see the origin story of Gestalt – how she got her scars and templates. Or BBEG, and his eternal hatred of Fighter(‘s party). Or the rest of the evil party.
Villains tend to have better backstories / origins, given they’re DM creations for story purposes rather than PC avatars. They also tend to have cool/tragic ‘before the evil’ stories or scenes to show.
My guess would be that Gestalt was the end result of one of those wacky vampire/werewolf romances, where the vampire and werewolf decided they liked each other better than the boring dumb human they were competing for.
In my experience, barring horror moments like “zombie-apocalypse” style things where it’s obvious and almost OOC agreed upon it has gone poorly.
One of the worst moments involved demons teleporting in and capturing the party, and when the dice/decision making would allow at least two PCs to escape the DM decided to backtrack and discount the rolls he called for in the first place. When challenged on this the following was said:
DM: “What, do you want the illusion of choice?”
Player: “No, [DM], we want actual choice.”
Campaign ended with that.
Supposed to lose is hard to pull off I agree.
You have to run here (and it’s really a chase scene that you are supposed to win) is a bit easier but still difficult in that you need to communicate that this is what’s going on which require the players to be able to accurately estimate how powerful/threatening the enemy is.
They are relatively rare as a result in my experience, though with a few more “the enemy is too powerful and you know it, don’t start a fight, at least not right now”.
I do remember one though, which didn’t work since we didn’t lose and the GM didn’t know how to handle it. We were playing Warhammer fantasy roleplay and were looking for a way into a city under quarantine. The party’s gimmick was that we were all dwarfs on a trade expedition to the empire from Barak-Varr, or rather what was left of it after most of ti got killed in an Ambush. I was playing a Slayer (who seeks death in battle against the most dangerous foe possible to cleanse themselves of shame for those unfamiliar with Warhammer) that blamed himself for the incident and the death of the expeditions old leader (hence why he became a slayer).
We had arranged a meeting at an inn with someone that might be able to help but they didn’t show at first, so after waiting a bit my character went outside to look and see if anyone was coming and/or take a leek.
This is when the supposed to lose scenario happened as a gun got pressed to the back of my head (the helmet I mimed putting on as I said I went outside mysteriously being retconned away, no I’m not bitter) and some unknown type started making threats and talking insult. I’m pretty sure I was supposed to buckle under and give in and quake in my boots, but instead I did the proper thing for a honorable, brave and grudge-bearing to the point of being suicidal dwarf warrior. Which is to say I shouted a battle cry tried to dodge to the side and spin around to attack with my axe and got shot with an automatic crit (which luckily didn’t kill me) for my trouble.
Off the rails now my assailant tried to insult/threaten me down, switching to reasoning when that didn’t work as we fought a few rounds while the rest of the party rushed out there, which didn’t work out for him (see honorable, brave and grudge-bearing to the point of being suicidal), especially since he made the tactical error of stopping trying to talk right before the actually reasonable members of the party arrived.
The assailent turned out to be our contact, but special badass npc of the pre-published scenario through he might be WFRP wasn’t really a system were you won 4 on one fights against serious warriors (or 3 and a half since I was gravely injured already)
It mostly comes up in video games, but there’s been a couple of tabletop campaigns it’s come up in to, but I absolutely detest mandatory forced-loss scenarios.
Fights that are clearly something you should run away from are fine. Nobody should reasonably expect the level one party to win against a T-rex, as an example.
But, when the game drop an encounter on you that you’re just not supposed to win, all because you were in a general vicinity trying to advance the plot. Oh it just grinds my gears.
I’m alright with it when it comes to cutscenes, because by definition anything happening in them is out of the players’ control anyway.
As a DM, I have been in the position of a player wanting to over step into a situation they would have died to, and as a player I have been in some really overwhelming odds type situations, but in both cases, the intent was never meant to force a loss, or make the party run…
As DM, I had told the group, the intent of the story would be to go into monster grinder dungeon X (use your imagination, there are a lot of them) and then the game started and the intent was to first get them up to a level where going into MGDX would not immediately kill them.
One player was just too dang eager however and tried to walk straight into said dungeon on the first minute of player introductions (which, he did not even attempt to introduce himself to the rest of the group, he just marched double time straight toward his inevitable doom).
Obviously, I couldn’t let him go there, so I described the bouncer at the door and created a simple test. The bouncer was an ogre who read books and delivered a single test to any adventurer that wanted to brave the dungeon. A swing of his giant fist and BAM! I made them roll a dex check, a check they had no hope of overcoming, they took a full brunt ogre punch to their level one face, got knocked the fug out, and woke up a few hours later in a room at the inn that was specifically for foolhardy adventurers to recover from a failed test of the ogre bouncer.
The player and the character they were playing got the idea… it wasn’t subtle, and it wasn’t meant to be… ‘You are not going to survive in the dungeon yet.”
As a player in a few situations that felt overwhelming, there was always a chance, one way or the other, but I never felt like it was a you MUST run situation. In fact, a few times, we not only did not run, but turned the tides and caused the villains to run. After the fact, having killed a couple of them, our DM said they were supposed to have lived to be recurring, but he plays every encounter as a ‘let the dice fall where they may’, and it really feels like we truly have the agency as the phrase goes.
As for a “you must run” encounter, much like the ogre, we encountered an ancient blue dragon that we were absolutely no match for, and in order to show us just how out matched we were, it breathed it’s dragon breath at us, killed one of our party (first death of the game) and KOd two more… in the first shot. We couldn’t have avoided it, because the dragon was invisible at the time!
The dragon then took flight and in the next round, turned invisible again… We got the idea pretty quickly that we needed to leave this situation, and we did. It did not feel ham fisted or forceful in a bad way, because the dragon in question was set up as the ultimate evil before hand and as this was our first encounter with it, we were actively unprepared.
Our next encounters would be different, and eventually we killed that dragon, but the fact was, we had a great time, despite the overwhelming odds.
I think it all depends on how the encounters play out, how “early” a DM tries to make the players think about their actions (we were level 7 or 8 and had been playing for a few months by then, so we knew generally how each other would react to a situation), and how well the players do react when the time comes to think a bit more tactically than just rush the boss and hope for the best…
a tough balancing act indeed, but done right, can feel epic even when you do RUN AWAY!!!
My eye sometimes darts over a page before I actually start reading it, so I saw “Dragon Kings” and “Kobayashi” and part of my brain was confused about what that maid anime had to do with anything.
I can’t think of any big “supposed to lose” moments from campaigns I was in. I can, however, think of two smaller ones that didn’t work out.
One comes from a Traveler one-shot I was running. The players were in starship combat and wanted to ram the other ship. I pointed out that that was basically impossible at this scale and wouldn’t end well for anyone; they didn’t care. The pilot rolled a 12 out of 2d6, and I narrated the effects of two ships colliding at interplanetary speeds.
The other, less TPK one comes from when my main group played Storm King’s Thunder. Two players were playing an ettin, so they decided to con their way into the frost giant fortress. Their intent was to bypass a couple hours of trying to figure out the best way to infiltrate the fortress with a lie so bald-faced that it couldn’t work.
Then the DM called for a Deception check.
“Natural twenty.”
“—with disadvantage?”
“…natural twenty.”
So, the rest of the party spent the next couple of hours trying to figure out the best way to infiltrate the fortress.
I think the key is good management of players’ expectations. Take a game like Ten Candles, in which the entire point is that the PCs all die at the end; the only question is how. As long as everyone knows that it’s unwinnable and the point is to tell a story, it can be an incredible experience.
Similarly, I’ve been teasing for a long time that our ongoing Pathfinder epic will feature a fake ending and a fake final boss. That is, everything has been building up to this one moment, this one battle, that will turn out to not actually be the end of the campaign. Sure, it’s a spoiler, but it’s managing their expectations so they’re not devastated when it happens without actually spoiling the details of how it’s going to go down.
It’s tempting to play all your cards close to your chest for the biggest surprise value, but that’s a very risky strategy that could result in hurt feelings. Letting your plans slip every now and again, just enough to give your players some idea of the expected tone, results in a more stable and reliable level of fun.
This isn’t quite a “supposed to lose” scenario, but my efforts to keep my DM-PC character (otherwise, they’d have no cleric) from overwhelming the adventure sometimes go sideways. Usually I’ll throw in a elephant for the priest of Hercules to wrestle or an extra mob for him to fight, but the players often don’t do what you’d expect:
-) Sometimes this is a result of “I’ll have what he’s having, and the players decide they like the big-guy’s designated dance partner better than their own, leaving the rest of the battlefield to fall to the enemy.
-) Once, this resulting in the pre-rolled portion of the fight wrapping up 4 rounds early (but with no real effect on the rest of the adventure). I just skipped a bunch of narration and hand-waved the unattended goblins as having “fled or been squished by falling debris in the melee.”
-) One time, though, the players demonstrated that I’d accidentally installed a lethal trap in what was designed to be a challenging but (mostly) non-lethal dungeon. It never occurred to me that they would split the party, so I didn’t foresee a flaw in my dungeon design until Rogue fiddled with a control panel and closed a door with the rest of the party on one side in a water-filled chamber with a riverswell spirit (with the key and no key-hole) and sealed Rogue with the key-hole (but no key) on the other. I was more than happy to encourage even more outside-the-box thinking from my players: they’re the ones that broke my dungeon–THEY could be the ones to fix it. (Spoilers: Everyone lived. Barely. They thought I’d planned it.)
I’ve been thinking about this challenge recently, as I’ve been designing an unofficial RPG based on a media property, and the D&D style of “the PCs fight lots of things and win almost every time” doesn’t work very well for the tone/style of the property. What I’ve ended up with instead is basically “superhero rules” – combat is actually really hard (with even low-level enemies remaining dangerous in moderate levels) but dying is also really difficult. (0 HP gets you a Wound, and you need 5 Wounds to actually die – though it’s nearly impossible to resurrect a PC.) The intended result is that many PCs will get wrecked the first time they fight a new foe, but recover and come back better-prepared in future rounds, which very much fits how the original property’s stories worked. Though some enemies may survive and return as well. My current GM instructions encourage them to describe falling trees, cave-ins and getting knocked off cliffs to justify defeated PCs and enemies escaping. My enemy challenge rating system reflects this balancing, with Tier 1 enemies being easy, a squad of Tier 2 enemies matching one PC, a single Tier 3 enemy being about equal to one PC, one or two Tier 4 enemies matching a whole team of PCs and one Tier 5 being in “campaign final boss” territory.
In Pathfinder, I once ran what was sort of a “supposed to lose” encounter. The party had 5 Level 6 PCs and two NPC aides versus a CR 11 encounter (though not all of the enemies were there in the first round). The point was a) the villains are tired of PC interference and have lured them into a trap and b) a different faction connected to one of those allied NPCs will show up to help at the end, thus introducing themselves and making the PCs feel favorably towards them (the leader was a member of a race the PCs had been fighting, so I thought this was needed to get them to trust her). Anyways, a LONG fight and several paralysises later, the players thought they were basically screwed, at which point the cavalry arrived. I actually think they could have won on their own with maybe one or two PC deaths, but there was no need to tell them that, and a suitable impression was made when the reinforcement leader came out of nowhere and dropped the enemy’s second-in-command. A PC did almost die on the boss’s last turn when she used her last AoE spell, and I was actually mentally prepared to fudge the damage to save him (on the grounds that I had forced them into this way-above-their-pay-grade situation, so it was my responsibility to make sure they made it out), but he made his saving throw and survived fair and square.
Overall, if the GM is planning for a party to lose a fight, it is probably best if the enemy in-universe engages in fiendish preparations (all the doors get magically locked, they spam disabling magic, they exploit PC weaknesses), so the players’ inevitable anger is directed at the vile villains and not the game master who tells them what to do. Or, at least, if the enemy are master grapplers or something so the party can be captured without having to beat them all the way down to 0 HP.
The closest I come is when planning big boss level encounters. Since these are major set piece encounters, I have my act together for any one of several outcomes-including the wipeout. But the core concept of an encounter you’re “not supposed to win” goes against my senses of story telling, so it’s not something I do. Every encounter I’ve ever run is, at LEAST, possible within reason.
That said, my Pathfinder 1e group has had a few wake up calls. First there was the colossal wendigo encounter, which was primarily me going ‘what if we had a Monster Hunter style fight in DnD?’ And more recently, those level 12ers took on my 16th level mythic chrono lich + minions. They won. No one died.
I do little post mortems with my group after major encounters-I like to see what worked and what didn’t, get opinions, etc. This time I just told them that the next time you guys run into him, he’s not going to loaf on any of his actions and you can expect him to burn Mythic Surges more often.
I maintain they can win, but they are afraid.
I had one of these a few months ago in my current campaign. I was a player at the time, but recently took over as DM.
It was the first session of the game, and our ship was attacked by a kraken-like leviathan. Our level 1 characters fought off a few of its minions, but it was pretty obvious from the word go that the ship was going down no matter what we did. I mean, it ripped the ship in half. What was I supposed to do, use my carpenter’s tools to rebuild it?
I have some major problems with how that campaign started, but the unwinnable fight isn’t one of them. It was telegraphed pretty well, and had the feeling of an intro cutscene even though we were technically free to act. It was clear that the DM wanted to get us into the real story in a particular way, and I was more than happy to humor him. Giant sea monsters are a pretty good way to telegraph an unwinnable fight. I might not use one as a DM myself, but if I did, it would probably look a lot like that.
Now, losing the unloseable fight, or fighting the unfightable social encounter, or talking down the set-piece combat encounter (my group’s favorite)… I have THOSE problems a lot.
“If your premise requires X to happen, don’t ask for a roll. Just narrate X happening.”
Yes – as a cut-scene that merely sets up the real encounter.
As someone who has been both a GM and player many times, I can not stress how true that is. Few things tend to enrage players more (and rightly so), than being handed a option with a difficult roll, bravely taking that option and rolling extremely well, and then the GM throwing out the roll and its implicitly-agreed upon results. It is GM incompetence. This is doubly true if the PCs spent resources to achieve what should have been that success.
My version of doing a ‘you are not supposed to win encounter’ correctly:
Set things up so that the odds seem to the GM to be pretty stacked against the PCs, but in a fair way. That is, the foes are very, very powerful – but they operate only with information they would actually have access to. There should be indications of how tough the foe(s) are broadcast to the players, and then let them choose. Generally, in a meaningful encounter, their will be good reasons for the PCs to choose the very-tough-fight, despite knowing how tough it will be. Be at peace as a GM that the PCs might never the less triumph – do not become attached to the expected outcome. Always prepare for the possibility of PC victory, however unlikely it might seem at the outset. Then, once the fight starts, GM it in an impartial manner. I have found that as a GM of the right type of players, they can surprise me and snatch victory from what looked to the GM like the jaws of defeat. Sometimes it is due to dice-luck, sometimes due to the players knowing better than I what their PCs are capable of when pushed to the limit, sometimes they just thought of ideas I never foresaw. However it happens, if they earn their victory, let it happen. It is moments like this that can make a game truly exceptional from a player perspective. Also, that generally shows a high level of player investment in the game, which is both necessary and wonderful. The take-away message here is that the game includes players for a reason – so that the game is a shared, collaborative story-telling experience. If a GM merely wants to railroad things, they should not include players to begin with, and simply go author a book by themselves.
Make the unbeatable boss fight an unbeatable beatable boss fight 🙂
That is, make the encounter fair if hard. Not OP, give people a chance to beat the boss. Then when they do, show the boss true power. Make him rise again and stand for a second round of OP total party beating. They got beated, the BBEG power got show, they beat him. Think of Alucard on Hellsing. He allows himself to be beaten before regenerating and shredding his opponent 🙂
I‘ve been in a few „not supposed to win“ encounters recently.
They where of the sort „OP monster fights for X rounds, then buggers off“
too bad if a player kicks the bucket before X rounds are over (in our case just the riding animal)
my sandbox definitely has a „you are not supposed to fight here“ encounter, with plenty warning signs; but I suppose it will go as in those comedies… where the car smashes through the wooden barriers, explodes the water tanks and then hangs precariously on the edge of the unfinished bridge.
The last ‘supposed to lose’ scenario I found in literally ripped our large multigroup pathfinder campaign in half.
The head GM of the game forced all the players into a combat encounter in the hub area of the game, and then when several of our players turned it against him really hard he had to make a bunch of stuff up so things would still follow his script. In the end, the GM team couldn’t handle the stress, and the rest of the GMs (myself included) split off from his game to go make our own.
As to the actual combat side of things, turns out ‘overwhelming numerical superiority’ means a lot less with a combination of a well placed Fog Cloud, Entangle, and the Fire Dancer bardic performance that lets allies see through smoke and fog.
I’ve encountered a few. You might possibly recall my character Miang I’ve mentioned a few times. I can think of two examples from that game.
The first was maybe first or second session where we were met with a seemingly endless wave of undead coming out way. That went fine as it was pretty clear the goal was just to successfully escape.
The second time in that game… well I’m not even sure if it was a “supposed to lose” scenario so much as “the GM didn’t understand our 6th level party can’t handle their homebrew Iron Golem thing”. We wound up beating it by accidentally realizing we could use low level spells (or was it just buckets of water? I can’t recall at this point) to wash away the writing on the inside of it to deactivate it. I’ll note again, this was an accident. There was no information given that this was how this worked and in fact we’d never faced this foe before and I’d spent half the session kiting it away from the rest of the party (using Expeditious Retreat and Spider Climb) until we wound up in a situation where it was between us and the place we needed to go. We’d only tried fighting it at all, even though it was clearly more powerful than us, because the alternative was to just run away from out objective with no direction of where to go if we did. And still that’s what we would have done if we didn’t luck out on partially hindering it with water on the first round of combat.
To this day I have no idea what the GM was thinking here as it didn’t seem like there was any sort of plan for how we were supposed to deal with this situation or what we would have done if we couldn’t defeat it. (Then again, they weren’t a very good GM so I’m somewhat doubtful there was a coherent plan beyond “this is a thing I want to include because it’s cool to me”.)
I’ve seen a few scripted “You lose this battle” scenes, but they’re generally not too interesting.
Instead, I will zero in on Inquisitor’s dialogue here: “How is this a balanced encounter?”
Some advice to DMs and players alike that took me ten years (and the Deltora Quest series) to learn: Balanced encounters are holding you back!
DMs: Throw stuff that’s too strong for your players at them.
Players: Tackle these challenges with creativity and cunning, rather than with dependence on the encounter being balanced for you to win it.
The result is harrowing, awesome, “Wow, I can’t believe we managed that!” adventures against memorably terrifying foes who will never be anticlimactic.
Remember that strategic retreat is always an option, and when in doubt, collapse a ceiling/tower/tree/etc. on your problem.
AAHAHAHA After 10,000 years, I’m FREE! Time to start commenting here again.
I’m working on the prep for doing a campaign of the FFG Star Wars RPG for some of my D&D group, and even though I don’t plan on using him in the foreseeable future, I’ve already decided that any fight against Darth Vader the players actually win will result in me saying something to the effect of “The sheer impact of your onslaught has left Vader staggered, but he is recovering quickly. If there was ever a good time to run, it’s now.” And hope they understand how impressive just slowing him down is.