How often does your party fail?

[Olaf the Stout]

Not all that often. However in my current game, the PC's will (hopefully) do something that they think is good that will actually free a demon and make things a whole lot worse. That's when the real fun will begin!

Olaf the Stout

 

[Rvdvelden]

The problem is that players (like me) often are poorly informed about the consequences of our actions.

For instance, in one campaign we were told to deliver a piece of parchment that was held inside a box. It also needed to be translated during our travels. We got attacked a couple of times and lost the parchment and the box, but one of us still had the translation. So instead of recovering the parchment and box, we dediced to deliver the translation to our contact. Turns out that the box was the actual artifact and the papers were almost irrelevant. So we were told that our mission was a failure, while we thought we were quite successful.

Next mission was of course to retrieve the box, which we did, so we finally did manage to achieve victory after all, but I find it rare that the players' view on a victory coincides with the DM's view of a victory, as he has much more information on the campaign than the players have.

 

[phindar]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. In years past, players of mine have complained that my games are too hard because they often fail, either by dying or by becoming frustrated because they can't figure out how to succeed. I think one problem is some of my players think in terms of winning or losing, and my games aren't necessarily pass/fail. I don't design problems to be solved, but scenarios to be explored. Instead of figuring out what the pcs need to do to succeed, I'm often as curious as anyone to see how the games turn out.

I ran a game based on Night of the Living Dead (plus Day, Dawn, Revenge and so on), and some of my players took umbrage because it was an unwinnable scenario. And it was, mechanically. In a low-level, low fantasy world, zombies are going to win the war by attrition-- that was the premise of that game. I freely admitted up front that it was Survival Horror, not Heroic Fantasy, and that the CR/EL net was gone. It was a Kobayshi Maru, no question. It was, like a lot of my games, an experiment. I guess instead of winning it was the type of game you play to not lose, and some people grok that and some don't.

I think parties should fail (by some definition); if not half the time, then probably around 30%. As a player, I find hard won victories to be the most fun and part of that means there has to be a real chance of failure. If you don't ever fail (if you effectively can't), then success feels meaningless.

I mean, there's mechanical failure (losing combats, retreating, dying, getting pwned), and then there's story failure: not solving the mystery, backing the wrong horse, getting tricked, and so on. Mechanical failure is pretty easy to judge, you know at the end of initiative if the fight was win, lose or draw. Story failure is more of a prickle pear, because to me the only "failure" in a story is if its not interesting. A lot of times, not doing the story the correct way is a lot more interesting than simply succeeding-- and to me, the only measure of success or failure in a game is whether or not the people at the table are having fun.

But that's the rub, because what's fun for some people may not be fun for others. As a player, I don't mind losing. Failure tends to make an eventual success much more satisfying. So in game where the party is getting owned, as a player I might be having a blast and another player who doesn't like getting owned could be not having fun or and getting mad about it. Likewise, in a game with a very low chance of failure, another player might be having a blast owning the bad guys and I'm going out of my gourd with boredom, and I start getting frustrated.

I was a player in a game, and my character was the party leader. (This was one of those rare games when we set the party roles up beforehand, and I got the short straw.) In the first session, the group got tricked by another adventuring party to go into a tough fight which we just barely won, and afterwards when we were significantly weakened, the other party showed up to claim the spoils. It was very Belloq from the opening of Raiders, if you'll recall. The group was ready to fight the other party, despite the fact we were wounded, low on everything and they were fresh, roughly as powerful as us and had the tactical advantage. That's not to say we wouldn't have won, because pc's do crazy things and sometimes that works. It wasn't a hopeless battle, but it wasn't the kind you'd go into if you had a choice.

At that point, I was fine handing over the spoils to the other party although I could tell the group wasn't really into it. We ended up negotiating a split of the treasure (using Diplo and Bluff mainly to convince the other party we weren't as weakened as we appeared), and we got 1/3 of the haul. Because I was in the party leader role it ended up being my call whether we'd attack them or not, and I really enjoyed the way the session came out. We lost, another party got the better of us, and we ended up with a pittance. Iit really set up the conflict with the other party, they'd beaten us and now we were looking to beat them. I came out of that game energized because we'd failed. But some of the other players were just disappointed, and we ended up switching that game out for another one.

 

[avigor]

Thus far, once. And pretty badly. The most embaressing part? It's all my fault.

My char, a cleric, managed to get branded a heretic by a temple of seven gods that worked together for balance (three good, three evil, and one neutral). Each symbol in the form of a letter 'H' on his cheek. Ouch. This happened because he switched gods twice, first due to a "convert or die" situation he was put into while a slave in an arena, second because the danger was over so the charade ended. So yeah, he basically earned it. He also never got back his clerical powers before we quit that campaign because we goofed too bad.

Then, he got a mission from that "balanced" church, which told him via a dream that they might help him out if he helped them, to find some guy because he was "out of balance". Kill him. So, I managed to get the group to agree to at least go and find out what exactly this guy is all about. Depending on our info gathering, we were going to either proceed and attempt to kill him or leave him in peace, possibly resulting in divine wrath; we had a paladin in the party, a pregnant half-orc who didn't even know who her deity was, and he was the loudest voice for leaving the guy alone, as would be expected from any paladin.

Anyhoot, we ended up finding a farmhouse where demonic activity of some sort had occured, then bumped in to (and almost attacked) the captain of the city guard while still trying to reach the city. That encounter earned us a letter causing us to have a private audience with the local baron, who wasn't our guy. Our guy was the baron's competition. We stupidly asked him for info about the target while in his throne room, while surrounded by visitors, which included a theif who we witnessed having a hand cut off for theivery, meaning that it wasn't just nobility but peasantry as well. Dead silence. After a fumbling explaination, we ended up in a guarded room. Shortly thereafter, an attempt on our lives was made. Only an arcane lock from the party wizard kept us alive through the night; my char got paralyzed by stupidly eating food that was brought to us to try and trick us into paralyzing ourselves into helplessness.

After that, we basically got kicked out of the palace, personally met the target, heard that the duke was the actual bad guy, and decided to leave to save us the whole stupid intrigue thing. That was when the DM decided that campaign was over and handed off the screens to the next guy in line; we rotate DM's in this group, and since me and my dad are new, we aren't DMing, at least not yet.