NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 1208615" data-attributes="member: 5328">G'dayI have evidently been getting quite unnecessarily steamed up, and I have written intemperate things. I guess an apology is due to ForceUser: Sorry.Allow me to suggest in the nicest way possible that you might need to practice the delicate art of clarifying these things to the players through in-game cues, and doing so before they make crucial decisions. There isn't much game-play, and not a lot of fun, in making decisions without essential knowledge. It is a real shame that he didn't do this at the beginning, enabling the party to contain the menace. By wasting vital time on a useless subdual attack he left the party making much harder saves, and this very probably led to their TPC. And you all are going to be a long time living that down, because the players know in their hearts of hearts that what really happened was that the little monsters killed them all while they were dominated, but that you let them off by a clunky plot device.Unfortunately this is what happens. Either the players get incredibly lucky, and stomp the encounter that is supposed to drive them off in another direction. Or they get incredibly unlucky and get stomped flat just when they have to triumph to save the world: leading to a humiliating deus ex machina that makes the players feel that their characters were irrelevant all along, or else to an equally unsatisfying TWD (Total World Destruction).I could admonish you to always have a backup plan, room for a major defeat that is not a TWD. In this example you might have been best to have the surviving monsters flee in panic. That way the players would have felt a real defeat (to make their future victories all the sweeter), but would not have been humiliated by a TPC and DexM. But, to be quite frank, I'm not that good, and I can really expect your to be that good either.So, here's the distilled wisdom of 23 years of fairly intense GMing: A TWD is better than a DexM. The TWD destroys one campaign, but it gives the players the sense that the stakes are real in the next one. The DexM subliminally tells players that their decisions don't make any difference and that their characters' exertions are pointless--and the taint doesn't die with the campaign: it carries over until it is burned out with fire and the sword, amid the deaths of PCs and the lamentations of their players. It took me years to rebuild players' engagement with my campaigns after I clumsily created the impression that events were programmed and success certain.One other thing: when things go wrong (especially through your miscalculation), try to turn the volume down, not up. Draw a veil of silence across the mess, don't pursue the PCs with unpleasant consequences, and do press rich rewards on them.Now you know that you just can't plan what players will do. "Don't worry about what is going to happen. Don't wait for it to happen. Stay alert, and see what does happen.[Roy Baty voice]"That's the spirit!"[/Roy Baty voice]You can't call yourself a horseman until you've been thrown on land and in water, into nettles, and over a barbed wire fence. And ridden a horse with your arm in a sling.Regards,Agback</blockquote>

Verification