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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6159380" data-attributes="member: 6681948">I don't think anyone has suggested that "failure = TPK".  I think the only failure that = TPK tends to be players who run characters who will walk through a meat grinder because the game, to them, is just combat, and the prospect they could lose is unfathomable.  This trap sounds quite similar to the Undead situation in that both allow the PC,s to retreat with limited or no consequences.  They have the option of stepping back to lick their wounds and reconsider their options. I always liked the old Villains &Vigilantes modules' approach of specifying what happens if the players lose this combat.  Having a sense of what happens if the PC's fail, as well as if they succeed, means the GM is not at a loss when it happens, and it becomes clear that it's not only OK to fail (ie that's not "TPK - scrap campaign and make new characters"), but that failure can lead to a game session at least as fun as success will.  It also can jar "those players" out of the worldview that the PC's can never fail so there is some acceptance that, sometimes, they are just overmatched, and that this, too, will advance, rather than end, the game.As noted above, this is hardly some revolutionary indie game concept never considered before.  It's Drama 101.Considering other approaches is the same. In fact, it's quite possible to plot out an adventure with "if the heroes fail here" planning, so that you don't need to do a lot of thinking on your feet to adjudicate those results.  Sure - the village gets burned down; the Gate gets opened; the prisoners get released; the Bad Guy gets the magic artifact he was seeking; whatever.  And the game goes on.  We must rebuild the village/stop the army that's been released; close the gate/defeat whatever came through; recapture/slay the former prisoners; stop the Bad Guy before he can use that artifact for his nefarious ends/whatever.In a good game, the players generally won't know whether they were "meant" to succeed or fail. Some years back, I had a player survey the field of combat, look at the group and say "Guys, I think this is one of those battles we just weren't meant to win". Actually, it was an encounter I had expected to be challenging but that they would win, but things had gone poorly for them for a variety of reasons.  They didn't need to know that. The Bad Guys had goals not involving the PC's, so having won, they went about their business.  The PC's, meanwhile, spent a lot of time and effort planning out the "inevitable rematch". The only thing that made that rematch "inevitable" was that I had to write it in after seeing how much they were looking forward to it. And that later rematch was a great session.In a GREAT game, the GM should seldom, if ever, have a preconceived notion of what the players are "meant" to succeed at, at least when looking at significant challenges.First and foremost, getting out of the mentality that every battle is "one side wins and the other dies" is the first step.  Methodically slitting the throats of the fallen isn't the expectation I have for heroes, nor does it tend to be the source material's approach.  If it was, Luke Skywalker would have been Wampa Chow, James Bond would have been executed in his first outing and Batman's head would be on the Joker's den wall long ago.  Once we recognize "lose" and "die" are not synonymous, a world of possibilities open up.The heroes can't stop the village being burned down because the spells and HP they needed to defeat the enemy behind that arcane ward were used up fighting the elementals, or just because they took so long to figure it out that the enemy could marshal his forces so they moved en masse, and could not be picked off by a rag tag group of adventurers while they were still planning the raid. Or, perhaps, there was no rush to get into that area, nothing was going on there anyway. If that door has been sealed for 500 years, three more days should not make that much difference, should they?I'd call these "trivial difficulty". Anyone who can read Dwarven knows the runes aren't Dwarven, and anyone with any arcane knowledge (a rank, a spellbook or the ability to read a scroll) can see they are Arcane.</blockquote>

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