Character Failure

[SilverClawShift]

A really simple question for the D&D playing masses.

Do your characters always win? In the end, do your heroes always save the day?

I'm not talking about individual fights, I mean the campaign or adventures goals in their totality. Generally, our DM likes to see us succeed, but isn't afraid of letting us fail either. I'd say as an estimate, that we win about 90-95% of what we set out to do. It's often enough that we do feel like champions, but we fail just enough to keep the reality in our mind (and to crush us when we do).

Our most recent campaign ended on a down note, with a TPK and the success of the BBEG, woe and destruction ect, ect, ect. Except now we're going for round two. Our DM wants to set the next campaign in a world based on our last campaigns failures, a few hundered years later.
I like that, personally. It lets us know we're not invincible, but it also is giving us an open-ended feel that there's more to the story. I know not everyone plays the game the same though, so I'm curious as to others thoughts.

[JaxGaret]

Do your characters always win? In the end, do your heroes always save the day?

Depends on the DM, and the campaign.

I'd say it's about 50/50.

[Crowheart]

I'm pretty guilty of always wanting my players to succeed. Hell, I'm pretty guilty of not wanting my player's characters to die.

I have to occasionally remind myself that sometimes I just gotta let it happen.

My reasoning for this is mostly the fact that I tend to design a lot of my quests around the PC's backgrounds and affiliates.

In the end: It makes my players feel more important, but sometimes it can seriously inflate their egos and make them feel invincible.

I think I'm pretty close to SilverClawShift on this note. Very awesome campaign development by the way.

[Stiz]

I have no problem fudgeing a few dice rolls for the sake of the game if I was the one that under or over estimated the power of the PC's. However...... if they do something stupid, then I play 'em how they land.
I love worlds that are effected on real levels by the success and failings of the PC's.

[Xefas]

Our most recent campaign ended on a down note, with a TPK and the success of the BBEG, woe and destruction ect, ect, ect. Except now we're going for round two. Our DM wants to set the next campaign in a world based on our last campaigns failures, a few hundered years later.

Is this the zombie kythons game? I began to really miss those updates after it ended.

Anyway, strictly speaking, I don't think any of my campaigns has ever actually reached the final climax. Inevitably, real life ends up breaking the group up for 6 months or so, and then no one is interested in trying to continue the previous game, so we start a new one.

I always create such lofty final encounters, too .

A Geometer Lich who has spent the last 200 years as the grand architect of the greatest city in the world, meticulously building the entire metropolis into one single spell-circle for an epic spell that will use the life forces of the entire populace of millions as a material component to remake reality.

A Deity.

Etc.

[loopy]

Is this the zombie kythons game? I began to really miss those updates after it ended.

My god, when that campaign ended I actually started suffering withdrawals. Luckily I found the Dustlands, which kept me going briefly.

[Breaw]

We generally win, but some of our wins come at a pretty hefty cost.

Not long ago we pissed off one of the greater evils of the campaign. The retard-younger-sister of the greater evils, but badass none the less. The guy was next to unkillable, you could chop him up into a million pieces and he would come back at you.

I won't go into how we ended up actually killing him, but as a result one of our party members absorbed his bloodline. Now the cleric who used to have a LG god bloodline now had a CE bloodline. The character was strongly urged to play it carefully, as we all know what happens when you use evil powers.

Well, in the end this cleric used the evil powers as much as physically possible, and fell. She is now the replacement greater evil, not as strong as the original, but still pretty scary.

In the end this was a fate worse than death really, an unplayable character. We may yet try to save her, but for the time being I believe we are going to have a new adventurer join the party.

[Eclipse]

I generally try not to kill off PCs unless the PC is gunning for a heroic death.

That said, I love to try and make them fail in other ways, such as being captured for information they may have, or not catching/killing the villain this time around, or having another villain come in to prevent the heroes from achieving a victory over the current villain. They still succeed more often then fail, which is how I like it. But the failures do serve to remind them that they can lose.

And if they do something stupid enough, or get themselves embroiled with people way above their power level, I will play those encounters through to the bitter end. While I try not to kill PCs, I can't set a precedent that will allow them to always survive anything at all. They need to know that there is risk involved in what they do. In the case they don't know the risk, I let them know it's exceedingly risky ahead of time if their characters should know that. In this way, they know they're getting into something where I think they have a high chance of death. They usually take that chance anyway, and usually survive it in ways I don't foresee, but they earn survival in those cases.

[Kizara]

A really simple question for the D&D playing masses.

Do your characters always win? In the end, do your heroes always save the day?

I'm not talking about individual fights, I mean the campaign or adventures goals in their totality. Generally, our DM likes to see us succeed, but isn't afraid of letting us fail either. I'd say as an estimate, that we win about 90-95% of what we set out to do. It's often enough that we do feel like champions, but we fail just enough to keep the reality in our mind (and to crush us when we do).

Our most recent campaign ended on a down note, with a TPK and the success of the BBEG, woe and destruction ect, ect, ect. Except now we're going for round two. Our DM wants to set the next campaign in a world based on our last campaigns failures, a few hundered years later.
I like that, personally. It lets us know we're not invincible, but it also is giving us an open-ended feel that there's more to the story. I know not everyone plays the game the same though, so I'm curious as to others thoughts.

This sounds like what I shoot for as a DM and how I would like to play.

That being said, as a player, I ALWAYS want to win. But I'm a pretty competitive person and I powergame alot, so that's to be expected.

[Ascension]

In my (rather limited) experience, campaigns A.) never last long enough to reach an actual conclusion and B.) are designed in such a way that the actual villain and his actual schemes are incredibly obscure at first, and so C.) they usually end long before you even figure out what the real threat to the universe is, much less actually defeat it.

All we had learned by the abrupt end of my last campaign was that whoever was behind all the multiversal intrigue branded his/her/its servants with a peculiar eye symbol. And judging from its actions it was most likely neutral, rather than actually evil (which means our true neutral tuladhara druid (personally assigned to monitor our party by the Rilmani) probably would have Face-Heel Turned if we ever reached the point of actually fighting it).

At the moment in my current campaign we're investigating the "great plan" of a an enigmatic figure named "L" (no, it's not based on Death Note). At the rate we're moving, I figure the semester will be over and I'll be headed back home from college before we even figure out who all is working for L, let alone who he is or what his plan is (so far we know for sure that the hobgoblins, derro, and some white-furred yeti-people are on his side, and we're fairly certain that the elves and the (apparently Always Chaotic Stupid) humans aren't. Although I'm convinced that the elf general who's ordering our party around is actually L himself having fun with us.).

[Tempest Fennac]

That sounds like an interesting campagn set up, SilverClawShift (atg higher levels, it makes perfect sense for the PC's action to have an im[pact on the world. If there any way of saving the Cleric, Breaw? (I'm guessing an attonment spell wouldn't be enough here).


(PS: Did you get that PM, I sent you several weeks ago, SilverClawShift?)

[Talic]

It's D&D. As long as everyone has fun, you win.

My favorite part of open ended stories, is that whether you succeed or fail, life goes on. Removing one part does not unravel the stage.

I really like the idea. I've used something similar once. Let us know how it works out.

[leperkhaun]

We ussually win. When we lose its ussually because we used some stupid stragey or did not play smart.

Also it depends on the level. At low levels our DM trys to work things in our favor...however at higher levels (when you have more options)...the dice lay where they lay and punches dont get pulled.

I did have a GM for some Call of cuthulu.....that was fun, but he was probably in the top 3 DMs iv ever gamed with. good thing about call of cuthulu....you never win...but its really fun losing.

[nerulean]

Being a university group, I get to see the conclusion of a lot of short (twelve weekly sessions) campaigns. We usually play two or three campaigns at once, and the campaigns running simultaneously often end the same way: we go through phases where the PCs win, kill the bad guy and get the girl, so to speak, and others where the campaign ends in a battle of epic proportions designed to wipe our characters off the face of the planet.

And then sometimes we win unexpectedly. Did you know an epic warlock can oneshot a lesser deity?

[Kurald Galain]

Do your characters always win? In the end, do your heroes always save the day?

No. I've had some of my best campaigns end in TPK. Although usually the heroes win, and they always have a good chance to win.

[Triaxx]

Usually, but I occasionally turn the win around into a defeat. Such as when they defeated the druid which seemed to be the root of evil, only to have his death turn the oceans of the world (Most of it), to acid, destroying all the ships. Of course, the early part of the campaign had consisted of destroying all the airships on the planet. Which left the party stranded. Woops.

As a player, I like to win, but I'm not terribly disappointed if I lose. I don't like to have my character die though.

[ghost_warlock]

The last long-term campaign I played in ended with the utter annihilation of the campaign world, which was intentionally perpetrated by one of the PCs. Not sure if I can count that as a win or a loss...

In a previous, StarGate-based campaign, the PCs accidentally caused nuclear winter on Earth and sunk Japan trying to destroy the main factory for Terminator-style robots. I think that was technically a loss.

When we played StarWars, the party was tricked (by another party member) into handing over the leader of the resistance to the Emperor. Oops.

Our ALIENS vs. Predator campaign kind of petered out after the death of the medic convinced one of the high-powered combatant characters that the mission was futile and he may as well just kill the rest of his party (he hated them anyway so it didn't take much to convince him).

[Talya]

I'm pretty guilty of always wanting my players to succeed. Hell, I'm pretty guilty of not wanting my player's characters to die.

I have to occasionally remind myself that sometimes I just gotta let it happen.

My reasoning for this is mostly the fact that I tend to design a lot of my quests around the PC's backgrounds and affiliates.

In the end: It makes my players feel more important, but sometimes it can seriously inflate their egos and make them feel invincible.

This.

I'm telling a story. Even if they succumb to a TPK, I need an out. I need a believable storyline reason to bring them (or at least some of them) back. The movie that ends 45 minutes in with the hero dying and nobody seeing the resolution would suck. Roleplaying --particularly DMing-- is an excersize in storytelling, only the players are part of the story. As such, the story shouldn't be anticlimactic, or without satisfying resolution. Poor player choices, or just bad luck with the dice, can make that resolution harder, more costly, or take much longer, but in the end the story needs to be resolved.

In my pirate game, I've killed off 3 of the characters rather permanently so far. A fourth character is believed to be dead, but I'm bringing him back as an NPC (likely as a cohort to the player that played him when he 'died.')

[hewhosaysfish]

I've only ever played in two campaigns that ran all the way to completion: neither were DnD.

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The Aberrant campaign ended triumphantly, with the party clobbering an alien invasion fleet. Not as grim and dark as White Wolf is normally supposed to be, I think, but I didn't care: it was fun to save the world through enormous bad-assery.

Spoiler

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The A|State campaign ended on a more... low-key... note, with half the party getting gunned down by macro-corp soldiers while the other half slunk away down the street muttering "I told you so". For those of you who don't know A|State (probably a lot of you), this is a pretty fitting sort of ending for that game. What I do particularly like, though, is that the GM did offer to throw us a life-line if we wanted the campaign to run on: this emphasized that although the characters had failed, we the players had not.

I think the last example is most telling: there are two ways that a campaign can end with the failure of the characters.
1) The players do something damn silly. Rocks fall, everyone dies.
2) The failure closes the campaign rather than aborting it. It is a fitting conclusion to the sequence of events that have led to this point, where fittingness is defined by the mood and theme of the game. The way the A|State campaign ended was perfectly fitting, but would have been terrible in the high-fantasy environment of DnD. Going down in a blaze of glory, taking a great many enemies with you, could work in both (although harder to pull off in A|State). There are some genres (well, 4-colours supers is the only one that springs to mind but there may be others) were it is never really fitting for the good guys to lose.

Long story short: The players should feel like they are writing the last chapter of a tragedy, not like they were halfway through a heroic epic when the GM confiscated their pen.
Do that and failure can be fun.

[Crimson Avenger]

I have found that my players are very resiliant. The currect campaign we are in (Incursion modified to 3.5), there was indeed a TPK at about 9th level. Well, actually one guy got away. But the TPK was an issue of rushing in where angels fear to tread, they attacked a complex WAAAAAAAY out of their league.

We could have started a new campaign, but we re-started the campaign with different PC's in a different part of the world. We have been playing in my campaign world continuosly for over seven years now, with two different GM's, just working half a world apart.

The nice thing is that the current PC's can see the effects that past PC's have made upon the planet.

I don't pull punches in my campaigns. I don't use a DM screen. I roll the dice right in the middle of the table where everyone can see the rolls. And that's the way we like it.

[hewhosaysfish]

... turn the oceans of the world (Most of it), to acid, destroying all the ships...

I think travel is kinda pointless anyway, if a vast part of the world's ecosystem has been destroyed. No where you could sail to would be worth visiting, what with the air turning to poison and acid raining from the sky and all that.

[EvilElitest]

A really simple question for the D&D playing masses.

Do your characters always win? In the end, do your heroes always save the day?

I'm not talking about individual fights, I mean the campaign or adventures goals in their totality. Generally, our DM likes to see us succeed, but isn't afraid of letting us fail either. I'd say as an estimate, that we win about 90-95% of what we set out to do. It's often enough that we do feel like champions, but we fail just enough to keep the reality in our mind (and to crush us when we do).

Our most recent campaign ended on a down note, with a TPK and the success of the BBEG, woe and destruction ect, ect, ect. Except now we're going for round two. Our DM wants to set the next campaign in a world based on our last campaigns failures, a few hundered years later.
I like that, personally. It lets us know we're not invincible, but it also is giving us an open-ended feel that there's more to the story. I know not everyone plays the game the same though, so I'm curious as to others thoughts.

Depends. When i am the player, oh gods no, we suffer. We have made it to level 5 yesterday, so now we are begining to feel like we have a chance

When i'm the DM i'm generally nice to hte PCs, and i don't activity try to prevent them from winning, but i agree with your DM, if the PCs want to win they have to earn it. I'm PCs have been defeated many many times in my games, mostly through bad planning, but sometimes simply because the BB is smarter than they are (I.E., they make tatical blunders).


The one exception are the games where i have two Pcs groups fight each other. Then one side wins (actually, most of the time both of them lose but hey)
from
EE

[valadil]

I play in two different groups. One allows for failure and the other doesn't. The possibility of failure makes combats a lot more dramatic in my opinion. Usually if we TPK, whatever TPKed us ends up as the BBEG in the next campaign.

In games that I run, I aim to beat down the players several times and then let them win in the end. I'm of the opinion that escaping from an enemy who is too powerful, then chasing him down only to see him escape, and then finally getting to kill him is way more meaningful than killing one guy, then killing his boss, then killing his daddy.

[Baxbart]

Well, in the past, I used to play a lot of GURPS.

Most games ended with at least one dead party member, several more crippled, and everyone wounded in some way. Granted, my players never really got the hang of their own mortality in GURPS, and always wanted to be stupidly heroic (and, hence, got killed). Even after years, they never REALLY learned their lesson, though they did start working out how not to get killed all the time.

My most successful campaign was a Star Wars game (pre-saga edition) that ran for... about two years. Its been on effective hiatus because I promised only to play when all the players could be involved (and with a party of 7, it became rather hard to organise during term times when most of them are off in different parts of the country for university). Anyway, my point is that I never pulled punches. I don't use a screen, and I always let the dice fall as they will.

I won't tell the whole story, because its a rather epic task - but my players have told me time and time again how much they love that game. Each of the players have put an awesome amount of work into developing their characters; from mannerisms to descriptions and background - and its sometimes quite staggering to see, when I consider that these are the same guys that used to get themselves arbitrarily butchered in my GURPS games.

A long story short(ish), I left the last session (which was a few months ago now) on a major cliffhanger. The campaign takes place in the 18 years or so between episodes 3 and 4, and I have specifically done a massive amount of research to bring the whole thing alive for the characters, and to tell their story as one of great importance in the establishment and growth of the rebel alliance as we know it at the start of episode 4.

I dread to think what is going to happen next though. The party is split, one character is disabled (a droid bounty hunter), two are severely overwhelmed as they try to hold off swarms of stormtroopers from their ship long enough for the rest of the party to return from a failed rescue mission. The rescue party have been divided and severely injured (I think only one character is still about 30% hp) and about to run into another firefight on their way back to the hangar - and the lone jedi of the party (One of the lucky few who has yet to be assassinated) has voluntarily gone back alone to face the BBEG solo to try and win back his former lover (who, it has been just revealed, is actually the BBEG's sister, and a jedi who turned to the dark side under the Emperor's rule). I think he's on 0 vitality, less than half of his wound points, and he can't move one of his arms.

The players will be heartbroken if they fail, but I am frankly stunned they made it this far! (They maneuvered their ship into the belly of a star destroyer during a planetary bombardment, and tried to fight their way to the bridge)

[Dannoth]

DMing Stlye -

I create a world
I create a scenario
I allow my players into the world and see where they go forcing my world to react to them.

I do not significantly alter my world to fit them, they must live inside of it (no this isn't limiting ... the world is huge and well developed, not to mention revolving around them). This being said ... if you charge the Torrasque you will die. I will not save a party from doing something so incredibily stupid that it brings about their demise.

[Talya]

At the same time, you can warn the players before they do something colossally stupid. At least once. If the entire group is that stupid, well, you're not going to have that much fun anyway.

See, as a DM, you've probably come up with a huge, epic (as in style, not level) campaign idea and story, bad guy, overarching plot, npcs, and plot hooks to draw in your players and make their characters important.

All your hard work and creativity goes to waste if you kill them all off before the end.

[elliott20]

Me? my GMing style has changed significantly over the years. I used to just let the dice fall as they may. If that means killing the occasional character or resulting in the heroes failing to save the world, so be it.

The problem is that sometimes, that just doesn't make for a good story especially when the characters are pretty low levelled and are doing things like clearing out sewer rats or cleaning out small goblin caves.

Now I try to think more towards the narrative. That is, if there is going to be failure (as sometimes, that's going to happen, no matter what), it's not going to be as absolute as basically invalidating all the work that was done before. So, if possible, I try not to blow up the entire campaign if the players fail. Rather, I try to use that failure as a means to springboard the next set of adventures. that is, I leave a way out so that the game can still continue, and the characters can bounce back from their failures.

The same goes for character death. I try to make sure that if a PC is to die, they do so heroically and with some dignity. (and controversially enough, on their terms) After all, this story is about them. If I kill them off in some random encounter when a mook got lucky, that makes for a pretty crappy story. On the other hand, dying at the hands of the villains or in some other large scale conflict is actually kind of cool. It also means the character is less likely to feel like a redshirt death and is more willing to let that character go. Also, this gives the player a chance to work an actual, meaningful "he killed my father" style storyline into his next character. to me, that's a bit more interesting than "oops, I rolled 2 crits in a roll, guess you're starting over."

and in the event that DOES happen, I try to elevate that into something more substantial. Guess what, mook #2 who killed that PC suddenly has a name, a history, and he's going to start leveling and appear as a recurring character.

now, as for PC stupidity, again, to me it's about the interest factor. If we always uphold the attitude that we should punish players for making less than tactically sound decisions, we discourage them from taking risks and performing daring stunts. In some games, that's fine. In games about groups with high level of military tactical feels, that's appropriate. On the other hand, if the game is about swashbucklers, pirates, action adventure fantasies, then dammit I want to see people swing from ropes, jumping off ledges, letting themselves get surrounded while boistrously taunting them into a fight, and doing all sorts of dangerous stunts to make it look like good cinema! And if they fail? Well, that's okay! Even really famous characters fail a lot too. (i.e. indiana jones fail at actually alarming regularity in his tasks) So in that regard, if the PC stupidity is done for the sake making for an interesting story or fun characterization, I won't penalize the player for it.

On the other hand, if PC stupidity is done solely for something that isn't interesting, isn't fun, doesn't develop the character, and is just plain disruptive, yeah, I'll have no problem punishing the player a little for it.

[Azerian Kelimon]

Personally, as a guy who tends to play any important battle hardcore (My newest campaign will start with a Batman psion, a sneaky Ultrablast, and is pretty high power), PC's tend to die on my watch. However, I'm very open to new and flexible, crazy ideas, so if a PC wants to climb the head of the Tarrasque, and use the momentum from the critter trying to throw him to go high up in the air and come down gutting it, he can do it. Additionally, I grant them bad roll immunity against mooks or in cases of gross bad luck against big guys, because NOBODY wants to die because of a botched crappy roll.

[elliott20]

AK, I guess the real question is, how do you turn a potentially bad fumble roll into a new story possibility? In D&D, due to the very clear guidelines drawn for combat, such a fumble can often by RAW be deadly.

How do you reconcile this beyond just letting a roll slide?

[hewhosaysfish]

AK, I guess the real question is, how do you turn a potentially bad fumble roll into a new story possibility? In D&D, due to the very clear guidelines drawn for combat, such a fumble can often by RAW be deadly.

How do you reconcile this beyond just letting a roll slide?

Actually, by RAW there is no such thing as a fumble. A natural 1 on an attack roll is just a automatic miss. Falling on your own sword 1 time in 20 is just a popularcommon house rule.