What do you do when your players refuse to succeed?

[Lord Zardoz]

I'm at the end of my rope, here. I've been running a campaign for a while, and it had been going pretty well, until four sessions ago, when all luck seems to have abandoned the characters (and the players).

(and much hilarity ensues)

I say try to roll with it, and find a way to extract some entertainment from the perpetual failures. Let the bad guy win this time and move onto what happens next.

I would also recommend implementing some form of action point system, so that you can mitigate the frustration from near misses. Rolling a d20 10 times and coming up with 1, 2, and 3 in some combination can be funny. Hitting 13, 13, 14, and 12 when you need a 15 to succeed is what drives people insane.

Also, rather than fudge dice rolls, you could engage in some suboptimal tactics. Provoke some AoO's while moving. Attempt a Sunder, Bullrush, Trip, or Disarm without the feats. The way your players are rolling, it would be entertaining to disarm a player, pick up his weapon, than kill him with it. Attempt to attack at 2 or more range increments away. Try two weapon fighting with two medium sized weapons and no two weapon fighting feats.

Lastly, if your using humanoid opponents, you can go for capture and humiliate rather than kill. If your players are getting rocked by Fireball, bust out Stinking Cloud, Web, Grease, and Whelm (from PHB2).

END COMMUNICATION

 

[werk]

Questions:
...
2) What CR is the opponents and what level is the party?
3) Do the characters have level appropriate treasure?

Almost exactly what I need to know to offer solutions.

 

[Warren Okuma]

Almost exactly what I need to know to offer solutions.

You always have to know what the house rules are. Seriously. I've heard of campaigns where nobody has any magic, to changing the hit dice, to E6. It is essential that you know the houserules.

 

[Pozeltum]

I would just keep on trucking as you were. Random things can heavily favor one side to the other. I remember once in Vegas a few years back, I was just looking at the electronic board that each roulette table had that showed the past 10-12 numbers. I came across one and it had some insane number of blacks that were in one big ol' group, like eight or nine in a row. Try flipping a coin nine times and getting tails all nine times, but it happened there.

Wait, I forgot about the magnets the casino's use. Nevermind...

 

[mmu1]

You always have to know what the house rules are. Seriously. I've heard of campaigns where nobody has any magic, to changing the hit dice, to E6. It is essential that you know the houserules.

No house rules. They are 40 point 7th level characters with appropriate wealth for their level. None of the enemies were over CR7. (and no, I'm not in the habit of throwin 4 CR7 enemies at a 7th level party and then complaining that they didn't do well.)

 

[MonkeyDragon]

An adventure of low-threat enemies. The plot? Finding the source of and eradicating the curse that they have clearly been cursed with.

There's always the option of crazy rituals to psych out the dice. We put our dice in time-out when they are bad to us. Putting them in the fridge, either as punishment or for conditioning, is always fun. I train my dice. Put them all with the 20s up so they know how to land.

Anyone remember the thread about the crazy dice rituals and the guy that "cheeses" his dice at the beginning of each campaign?

 

[DestroyYouAlot]

Don't fudge a thing. Enjoy the glow that comes with a battle-hardened player group who expects everything to go wrong, always. They'll figure out tactics that don't require rolls all over the place - mean, sneaky tactics. Once the numbers start going the other way (and they will), they'll excel and kick ass all over the place.



Edit: Oh, and smash one of the offending dice with a hammer, in front of its peers. Fear produces better rolls.

 

[werk]

You always have to know what the house rules are. Seriously. I've heard of campaigns where nobody has any magic, to changing the hit dice, to E6. It is essential that you know the houserules.

You're right, I just assumed if there were any huge houserules in play we would have heard about them.

The OP doesn't sound like he's doing it wrong.

I like action points, but many are resistant to anything they feel bears the taint of Eberron.
I also hardly ever fudge rolls, it just doesn't feel right to me.

It really sounds like you were going about things the right way, setting them up with a nice little encounter to help then get their confidence back. Maybe the OP's strategies are too effective or the PCs are build weird, it's hard to say from what we have so far.

I'd scale it down a bit more, put them up against some kobolds or goblins with class levels. Or something weak, but hard to defeat.

Definitely check their dice to make sure there's no errors going on there.

Good luck!

 

[mmu1]

Well, we had another session yesterday, and while they found the encounters somewhat hard, it never progressed into the near-wipe territory we've been in for the last several sessions.

I ran one of the two combats they had pretty much unchanged from how I originally planned it, but toned down the other a bit to get rid of anything that was likely to lead to extreme results, and relied more on the terrain than on the enemies to make things challenging.

They even managed to level up, so I think we might have rounded the corner.

(for those inclined to superstition, we did play the session at a different location than usual )

 

[Drowbane]

Let the dice fall where they may. If that means "kill 'em all"... so be it.

One of my buddies had this elven archer-type who couldn't hit the barn side of a broad if his life depended on it... he just had terrible luck with the dice with that particular character.