Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haltherrion" data-source="post: 2796135" data-attributes="member: 18253">Both can be fun but both require care. The no-win requires greatest care.For a morale dilemma to be a real one and an interesting one, then it needs to occur in a properly fleshed out world where such things matter and it needs to be a real dilmema of consequences to the players. Casually tossing one into a hack-n-slash world is a waste of time. Another pitfall is one that singles out a particular PC/player which can seem most unfair to folks. But done well, these can really make a campaign.I can't recall playing a real no-win situation and the only one I ref'd ages ago was a disaster. I think in principle, a well done no-one situation could really set up a nice following story arc but that typically players see this as the referee taking advantage of them. Speculating here (since as I've said I've neither played one nor executed one well), think you need to firmly establish the possibility of the no-win and then give the players some sort of "carry over" beyond the failure to give them something to look forward to (their heirs continue on, the PCs continue on in a world completely reshaped by their loss), etc.To cite a couple of fiction examples:T3: there was no way to stop the machines from destroying civilization but there clearly was value in how the PCs survived the transition and then defeating the machines afterwards.Firefly: this was mostly in flashbacks but the main characters faced a no-win in the rebellion then went on to cool stuff in the aftermath. You could do something comparable in your campaign and use the no-win situation to start the campaign. (Come to think of it, I've used and experienced no-wins as campaign starters. Just haven't successfully ended a campaign with one.)</blockquote>

Verification