Have any of you ruined a session for your players because you were impartial??
I feel that's a bit of a strangely-worded question that implies that the players are
subjected to my impartiality, rather than participating in a style of play that we've all agreed upon and want to participate in.
There was a session in an ACKS campaign a few years back where an encounter with carrion crawlers resulted in a TPK. Absolutely everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and the PCs were slaughtered. It was shocking and unexpected, and very deflating. I, personally, spent the next couple of weeks trying to come to terms with what had happened and feeling a kind of emotional numbness about the whole thing. I had at least one player who felt hard done by and was also struggling to come to terms with it. One player chose to stop playing -- although that particular player has never participating in a full campaign and they have always withdrawn at some point, usually because they want more fighting and less talking or exploring.
I would not say the experience fun for anyone at the time, so it was kind of a ruined session. I could have abandoned the style of play we'd all agreed upon and instead made arbitrary decisions that allowed the PCs to survive, so it could be said that I bear responsibility for not doing so. But I do not think it is fair to say
I ruined the session. Instead, the dice
and the style of play we agreed to participate in resulted in an outcome that was not a lot of fun for several of us, me included,
at the time.
The thing is, in the long term, that event has made my games better. My players are more aware than ever that it's not just talk and that I do, in fact, play fairly and impartially. If there is a fluky confluence of events such as what occurred in that fight, then I'm not going to save them. And, if I'm not going to step in when when the world and the dice behave unfairly, I'm certainly not going to protect them when negative consequences are the results of their own decisions. In turn, this means they can believe that when things work out, they deserve the credit for it. They have succeeded because they made smart plans and outperformed their enemies, and maybe enjoyed a little luck. But I certainly haven't handed them anything. And that feeling is a very large part of why the enjoy my games and keep coming back.
At the time, several players believed the fight was massively arbitrary and not much different from "rocks fall, everybody dies". They did not believe that there was any way the fight could conceivably have gone differently than it did. I disagreed, and was adamant is was just a wildly unlikely confluence of really bad rolls by the players and really good rolls by the enemy. A few sessions later, they ended up in a very similar fight with another group of carrion crawlers. This time it was an easy win for the PCs. The TPK really was a freakishly unlikely outcome.
Now, after all this, according to the rules we'd agreed upon, most of the players with deceased PCs (there were two or three PCs/players who were absent from the TPK and still had their old characters) were going to have to go back to level one, as they had no henchmen and had not banked any XP for their next character. However, as a group, we agreed that starting such a large number of PCs back at level one and needing to grind back up, even if just for a few sessions, was not going to be fun for anyone. Therefore, as a group, we decided to relax that rule and the replacements were upgraded to a higher level.
