Do you "save" the PCs?

[Ariosto]

I'm assuming that even "let the dice fall where they may" GMs will have some mechanism in place such that the players are able to approximate the level of challenge a particular encounter represents and gauge whether they want to face it. How do you provide that information to the players in such a way that they will generally agree that a TPK is an appropriate consequence for their actions?

speaking primarily of 1E AD&D:

If everybody gets zapped at once, if it's even possible, then the famous last words tend to be pretty obvious:

"Boy, sleep is a great spell! Imagine if there were bad-guy magic-users!"
"Carrion crawler! A tentacle for each of us!"
"A dozen ghouls? I can turn them all in just a couple of rounds!"
"No answer from Bob? Let's all follow him into the dead black void that's radiating evil!"

Otherwise, it's more like someone thinking, hmm, we started with eight and we're down to four. Double the share of treasure! So, what if it's just me and one other guy? If he were a thief or m-u, then he'd already be gone like yesterday. That's good because, if things go totally south, then I won't have to outrun the monster. I'll just have to run faster than him!

Unless there's a second monster -- D'oh!

Anyway, you've got your Dungeon Levels. First floor, Ladies' Wear; second floor, Sporting Goods; tenth floor, Elder Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Approximately, anyhow. You could meet a lone minotaur on the 2nd level, but you're several times more likely to find a group of them on the 6th or 7th level.

You've also got your Hit Points. If you can surround an Ogre with half a dozen third- or fourth-level fighting types at full strength, then casualties on your side are extremely unlikely. If you're all down to 10 points or less, then someone very well might get floored in one blow. Someone at 9 could get instantly killed with the less generous KO range. Even short of death, the consequences of getting down to zero or negative points are not pretty.

Killing things is not the object, just sometimes an efficient means to the end of taking their stuff. If giving 'em a chance to whack you is the hard way, then maybe it's time to look for another way.

Maybe this particular loot just isn't worth the getting to you. Fighting Wandering Monsters at all, much less "to the last man", is for chumps because chump change is all they've got.

So, you scout. Demi-humans and thieves are very good for that, demi-human thieves very, very good.

How do you know what you're looking at? Well, most of my gang have been players long enough to know our way around the standard bestiary pretty well by memory -- and from tangling with at least the usual suspects more than once!

We will bring to the attention of less advanced students the note on the back of the Monster Manual, which indicates that "it is an invaluable aid to players"! Take heed, though, of the Foreword's warning that

as valuable as this volume is with its wealth of information, some DM's may wisely wish to forbid their players from referring to the MANUAL in the midst of an encounter, since it will be considerably more challenging to confront a monster without an instant rundown of its strengths and weaknesses -- and besides, a D & D player's true mettle (and knowledge) will be put to the test. And as even the most casual D & D player knows, that's what this fascinating game is all about . . .

Even without prior D&D expertise, one may bring to the table a fair bit of lore. Most of the MM's inmates are recognizable from movies, mythology, sword-and-sorcery tales, comic books, or even real life.

There's also common sense. Big differences in size, build and armament tend to indicate about what one would expect. It might be more difficult to gauge how much tougher a bugbear is than a gnoll, or a hobgoblin than an orc, but that the bugbear is in another league from the orc should be pretty clear.

Sometimes a reconnaissance in force might be called for. However, one should always have a Plan B. Make that, "One should always have a Plan C." Plan B, of course, is flaming oil to deter pursuit!

The Wilderness is not so tidy. Only very strong parties should venture there, and this is no secret. "Kobolds" are one thing; 40 to 400 kobolds (including elite types) are another kettle of trouble!

Normal random-encounter distance, though, is 60-240 yards. (Outside the USA, substitute meters for yards.) It is remotely possible, with extreme results on surprise and distance dice, to have an immediate, close-range confrontation.

Confrontation interaction can consist of any number of interactions, singly or in combination -- parley and reaction, spell casting, missile fire, melee combat, etc..

It is not, as in some other games, a matter of the DM decreeing that an encounter is "a combat" or "a skill challenge".

Moreover, it is nearly always possible in the wilderness (and usually in the dungeons) to undertake evasion of encountered creatures, which may or may not pursue. See DMG pp. 67-69.

The bottom line is that if one takes the trouble to investigate before rushing in, then one can make better informed choices. The environment is not inchoate, not a swirling vapor that takes a completely different form each time one looks in the same place!

One can choose not to stick out one's neck where one knows too little. Complete information, though, is not to be had even in Chess! What will the other side do? Finding out what shall happen is wherein lies the game!

Unlike Chess, AD&D has an element of chance quite apart from the vagaries of life and their influences on the players. Alea iacta est is a very literal part of the game. It is very rarely a game of certainties. Strategy consists not in eliminating risk, but in managing it.

That may stand to reason, as an adventure is "an undertaking involving danger and unknown risks, an enterprise of a hazardous nature". It comes from the Middle English aventure, meaning "chance, risk".

 

[Fifth Element]

The bottom line is that if one takes the trouble to investigate before rushing in, then one can make better informed choices. The environment is not inchoate, not a swirling vapor that takes a completely different form each time one looks in the same place!

Yeah, we used to play this way back in the day. There was the running joke about my brother, who we would say would poke the thing with a 10-foot pole, and if that was safe, would take out a nine-foot pole, and if that was safe, would take out an eight-foot pole...

In my youth when hours were cheap, that's how we played. My current groups have jobs and kids and little free time, and like to jump into the game and have some adventure. We don't enjoy poking and prodding around for signs of danger.

 

[Reynard]

speaking primarily of 1E AD&D:

snippity

For the record, as much as we have seemed to have talked past each other in this thread, the game you describe here is the game as I play it. So it is kind of weird that we don't seem to agree.

 

[Haltherrion]

I had guessed that you were also using the "you" in a more generic fashion and not specifically targeting and singling out Ariosto. But, like I said, I could be wrong...

You are correct; it was generic. Another way to put it is, "if you screwed up, shouldn't you fix?"

To me it seems that in nearly any game, the referee is making many decisions that affect play ability and that with so many decisions, mistakes will happen. In such cases, I might be more lenient then if the party just had some bad luck or made some bad choices in an otherwise reasonable, albeit challenging encounter.

 

[Haltherrion]

There are always options. Some options may not be available depending on choices made earlier. Once combat begins the options available depend on the nature of the opposition. If the party is set upon by a pack of ghouls then the range of options is narrower than if thier foes were bandits.

I agree and went into some of the same things you suggested in a reply earlier in this thread.

More recently, I'm just trying to point out that some TPK situations might be partly the referee's fault and in some case, I would think the referee has some responsibility to fix it.

 

[Ariosto]

Death is of course a possibility from the PC's point of view. But this doesn't tell us that it has to be a possibility from the players'/metagame point of view.

Nothing "has to be", or even "ought to be" in every game under the sun. That is, however, how the original Dungeons & Dragons game was designed to be. It was designed that way because people wanted it to be that way.

People still want it to be that way!

It does not "have to be" that players have real choices to make, in terms of what happens (not just how) at any level in the secondary world. That can be merely "of course a possibility" to Hamlet, whereas Hamlet's player knows the script by heart.

It does not "have to be" that we roll dice to see whether Character X dies from a giant spider's poison, or even that we play out "combat rounds" when men and monsters engage in violence.

However, the actual thing is what it is.

One thing it is has to do with is a concept of "role-playing" that is less about putting on a show and more about approaching the situation as if one has in fact assumed the role of Fighter or Magician. The aim is not just to pretend to be surprised or in the know, fearful or confident, disappointed or elated -- but actually to experience those states.

Even prior to that, more fundamentally, it has to do with what it meant, in the culture that created D&D, to play a game.

The two of those intersect, indeed are by design pretty clearly coupled. Characters advance by successfully meeting challenges, "just as actual playing experience really increases playing skill. Imagination, intelligence, problem solving ability, and memory are all continually exercised by participants in the game."

The last complete paragraph on page 7 of the 1E PHB may suggest how different the expected scope of the Advanced D&D game (in keeping with its Original predecessor) was from the mode assumed in some more recent designs.

The next paragraph (taking us to page 8) brings up the perennial problem:

Each individual campaign has its own distinct properties and "flavor". A good Dungeon Master will most certainly make each game a surpassing challenge for his or her players. Treasure and experience gained must be taken at great risk or by means of utmost cleverness only. If the game is not challenging, if advancement is too speedy, then it becomes staid and boring. Conversely, a game can be too deadly and become just as boring, for who enjoys endlessly developing new characters to march off into oblivion in a single night of dungeon adventuring?!

The second paragraph following, beginning, "Skilled players always make a point of knowing what they are doing, i.e., they have an objective," is packed with excellent advice -- as is the section on "Successful Adventures" at pages 107 and 109.

The PHB makes it plain that

THE REFEREE IS THE FINAL ARBITER OF ALL AFFAIRS OF HIS OR HER CAMPAIGN. Participants in a campaign have no recourse to the publisher, but they do have ultimate recourse -- since the most effective protest is withdrawal from the offending campaign.

As the DMG warns prospective campaign referees

To become the final arbiter, rather than the interpreter of the rules, can be a difficult and demanding task, and it cannot be undertaken lightly, for your players expect to play this game, not one made up on the spot.

Many people actually prefer not to play that game, but would rather play one or another of the different games that have come down the pike since. A few prefer to reshape it into something more to their tastes.

"Save the PCs" is quite a different philosophy than that expressed in "Saving Throws" (DMG p. 80) and "Rolling the Dice and Control of the Game" (p.110), and indeed throughout the game with its emphasis on chance.

Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time.

Right there is the plain advice, which is all the book can give a Master of the game.

Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done.

Note the conditions here:

It is very demoralizing to the players to lose a cared-for player character when they have played well. When they have done something stupid or have not taken precautions, then let the dice fall where they may!

In my circle, that is clearly the case when

The dice rolls are bad. The tactics have failed. The situation is grim. Yet, they won't run away.

The design is "game balanced" to work in certain ways, and it is no news that it can easily be found "broken" if bent too far in some directions! Magic-users, for instance, are supposed to buy the farm more often. That is what is meant, in reference to their being fearsome at high levels, by, "Survival to that point can be a problem, however, as low-level magic-users are quite weak."

For many people, a game designed from the ground up with different assumptions may be more convenient. Others may find that the very nature of a dependence on DM Fiat means that the supposed "rules" at hand in the form of algorithms in books make hardly any difference at all. It is the quality of the DM, and the correspondence of her or his style with player preference, that is all that really matters to them.

If it is due to a DM's interference that a character does not die now, then it is as a consequence that the character in the end dies precisely when the the DM chooses not to save him or her.

There MUST be some final death or immortality will take over and again the game will become boring because the player characters will have 9+ lives each!

Well, obviously that assumes a certain view of what makes a game boring. Not everyone is likely to share it, but the game was not designed to please everyone. Neither was any other!

 

[Tinker Gnome]

I will say this, in games with high lethality, I would probably not roleplay my character very much. That sort of game can be fun, but it would feel more like playing a boardgame to me.

 

[Janx]

I will say this, in games with high lethality, I would probably not roleplay my character very much. That sort of game can be fun, but it would feel more like playing a boardgame to me.

It would seem to me, that if you devoted a lot of energy into defining and portraying your character, you would get attached to it.

Doing that in a high turn-over game seems like one would be wasting that effort repeatedly.


Plus, I suspect, that unless PC#1 was a bad design, I'd attempt to make him again for PC#2, just so I could get some mileage out of the initial concept. Especially if I didn't get to play #1 very long.

 

[Vegan Kid]

I tend to fudge the rolls in certain situations. The number of times random encounters or what should be small,simple encounters have dragged on from either poor rolling or bad playing are beyond me. In these situations where it's not really attached to the story, having a player lose their character only adds insult to injury, so I try and guide them through it without any fatalities.
If it's an important encounter or one that they have known was coming and could prepare for, all bets are off. I find even if they do die in these situations they see it as a noble end. Getting slain by the level 3 Goblin raider from a few unlucky rolls is not...

 

[Humanaut]

If the PC's make bad choices, make bad rolls, refuse to see the writing on the wall or whatever... they die.