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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oofta" data-source="post: 8650076" data-attributes="member: 6801845">If the PCs do stupid things repeatedly, it can lead to a TPK or everybody being imprisoned.  Them's the breaks.  The few times it happened, the group just laughed about it and we moved on because they realized that one way or another the group was just FUBAR.  I should note this has only happened 2-3 times in all my years of DMing (in one case there was a sole survivor who ran away fast enough to escape).  So far less than once a decade.It's not like it happens often, but if death and failure are on the table then so are TPKs or imprisonment.  If they aren't on the table then the PCs always win, at least in the long run.See above.  If the group can never truly fail that means that they always win.  It's a two sided coin, you can't have both.  Sometimes if you try to open the safe and can't, you can't and you don't get whatever shiny thing was inside.  The only consequence is you didn't get the shiny.  Other times you may take a risk and try to lug the safe to somewhere that you can bust it open or any other number of options.  It depends on what I thought was a logical scenario.  If I think an NPC would have a safe, they have a safe.  If they have the means, it will be a safe with a good lock.  What the PCs do about that safe is up to them.  If they believe it could have secret documents proving the NPCs guilt and they can't open the safe then they have to find some other proof if they can.  It's a plot point that comes up in fiction all the time.  In other cases they may have asked the wrong people questions (probably after failing a few things along the way) the safe may be empty.  Maybe the NPC gets away with whatever dastardly deed they have planned, this time.  So how are you not saying that the PCs always win if they can never fail?  This is what confuses me.  Either the DM sets up scenarios with backup ways of succeeding to the point that they guarantee the PCs will eventually succeed or they do not.  I wouldn't purposely set up a scenario with a single point of failure, but multiple points of failure?  The PCs do something stupid even though I've literally warned them it was unlikely to work?  The players can always do what they want in my game, even if that leads to complete total utter failure. Suppose the PCs are trying to stop McEvil from blowing up the parliament building.  After failed investigations, bad planning, deceptions checks that fail and so on McEvil succeeds on their nefarious plans and blows up the parliament building with their beloved patron inside.  Does it suck?  Yes.  But now they have a nemesis and will stop at nothing to hunt them down and bring McEvil to justice.I don't create artificial barriers to success, but I don't create artificial alternatives to achieve success either.You seem to think that failure means the end of a campaign.  This is just foreign to me.  Even if the PCs fail to stop Bob the Evil Wizard from becoming a powerful lich, it just means that there's a new powerful lich in the world.  Maybe it will have some other impact on the campaign, maybe it won't.  Maybe Bob will become a nemesis for the next campaign.  But in most cases the PCs are still alive.  There are still threats, nasty no-goodnicks that need to be brought to justice.  Failure rarely is an end.Then again, I almost never do apocalyptic campaigns.  Save the city or region?  Prevent something bad from happening to a lot of people?  Sure.  World ending destruction?  No.  Yeah, the PCs failed and an evil emperor now sits on the throne.  It's not the end of the world.  Or the campaign.</blockquote>

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