How often does your party fail?

[KrazyHades]

This one's for GMs or players alike. How often is something so difficult or (much more likely) you do something so disastrous that you fail to complete your mission (NOT a TPK). This isn't "oh, we have to run away from the dragon," or anything. I mean, the princess you are trying to rescue is executed because you couldn't reach her in the three days before the sacrificial ritual, or an evil sorcerer manages to obtain a powerful artifact despite the party's best efforts, or the two nations go to war because your diplomatic ineptness messed up the treaty negotiations.

How often to your PCs flat out fail to accomplish their goal, be it short or long term?

 

[Vorput]

Tragically too often... mostly due to us just being idiots as opposed to incompetence... like the time we handed the sword artifact to our patron, the queen- to have her protect it.

Boy were our faces red when it turned out she was evil and plotting to overthrow the kingdom!

 

[blargney the second]

an evil sorcerer manages to obtain a powerful artifact despite the party's best efforts

That was *exactly* what we achieved(?) with Grasp of the Emerald Claw. Gah.

 

[KrazyHades]

I generally make the missions pretty achievable with a bit of innovation on the players' parts, but I've been thinking about ramping it up. Really bringing on the character deaths, the failures, making them WORK to win. That's why I'm asking about other groups' practices. More stories, anybody?

 

[Treebore]

About 50/50, but I have often found that to be a good thing. It really gets them motivated to clean up messes they allowed to happen. Not always, but often enough.

 

[blargney the second]

That sounds about right to me, Treebore.

 

[kaomera]

My current group, as a general rule not very often for the sort of stuff in the examples. When they have a specific mission in front of them they can usually come through, or at least they're gung-ho about it that failure will mean a TPK.

However when they have nothing else to do my current group tends to default to "lets make some money!" And they are absolutely horrible at that. I'd say they end up spending more money on an adventure than they recover, oh... about 100% of the time!

 

[Kelleris]

All the freakin' time, at least when I'm DMing (which is about 90% of the time). Most of my campaigns start with some straightforward goal to accomplish - protect this sage, escort this widget to this place, investigate this portal - followed by a failure of epic proportions, and then the rest of the campaign is devoted to trying to get things back under control. My track record as a PC is only slightly better.

It's like a death spiral of ineptitude, really.

 

[Lanefan]

Not often, surprisingly enough; but when we fail we fail *big*! (says he, whose namesake character once attacked a Hobgoblin turncoat at a secret meeting instead of talking to it and getting all the Very Important Information it had; thus instead of the forces of good easily defeating the compromised Hob's the end result was a world war...)

The ways in which said goals get accomplished, however, tend to have very little to do with what the adventure or story expects might happen.

Lanefan

 

[Shadeydm]

It can be a difficult balance to make adventures/missions/goals easy to recognize and follow through on while trying to ensure that they are not railroady (is that a word lol).

I just have a terrible time trying to predict how a group of players will react to any given situation making the whole process a crap shoot.