What do do about lots of deaths/no shows?

[Majoru Oakheart]

This is sort of related to the no shows thread.

I was thinking, I've been running a game for the last year or so. I'm running a long adventure(published mod) that isn't over yet. It occurs to me that by the end of the end of the mod all the players might end up being heroes, heralded all over for having saved the world, given land and titles.

However, I'm wondering what to do about the fact that each player has gone through about 7 characters each.

The mod is fairly deadly, I've attempted to lower the costs for raise dead and raises to encourage PCs just to bring back the same characters when they die. Plus, when players don't show up for a session, it makes things even worse.

Most of the mod is a large dungeon. I've run out of reasons to have new PCs just "happen" across the dungeon and wander down the exact right corridor to run into the other PCs without fighting any of the enemies solo. The PCs will go weeks without going back to town and I hate telling a player to wait until they do to join the group (it would take months of real time before they could bring in a new character)

So, because of this, we end up with a situation like this:

6 PCs set off in a quest and find evidence of bad guys being around.
They investigate and find the lair of the bad guys.
They voyage in, making attacks against them.
3 PCs die, 3 new PCs join.
The other 3 PCs die, bring in 3 new PCs.
The party is now an entirely new party who has nothing in common with the first one at all.
The PCs do something great, they get heralded as heroes and made into knights.
However 2 of the players aren't there that session.
All of the PCs die in a TPK, a bunch of the plot items they need to finish the quest are on their corpses.
All the players make up new character, you have to arrange convoluted methods to get them ALL on the same quest the original party was on AND get them the items they should have at this point in the mod.
Repeat this process about 6 times.

So, the current party basically should have none of the clues they acquired at the beginning of the adventure, none of the items without a bunch of "convenient" circumstances, and no real reason to be going on the same adventure.

Plus, all of the current characters have no history or background because they are just replacements for previous characters.

What I'm wondering if there is a way to have a continuous story when players keep rolling up new characters when they die instead of being raised? Also, how do you have a continuous story if players aren't there one session and they are suddenly there the next?

I mean, at the end of the mod, I have a feeling the "only" accomplishment anyone in the group will have done is defeated the "boss" of the bad guys as the other party will be wiped out the room before hand and roll up new characters.

 

[reveal]

I wouldn't want to DM or play in a situation like this. As you said, it's like the players are just there to beat the big bad guy in the end. They have no vested interest in their characters finishing the campaign.

If it were me, I would cut the campaign short and give them an ending or simply stop all together. Then I would regroup and come up with a less deadly campaign.

As for players not being there, I usually just have someone else in the party run the character as an NPC who's in the background until combat. The character still gets full XP. This very rarely has to happen, so I don't penalize anybody for it.

 

[IronWolf]

I just had a campaign end this past Thursday for the very same reason. The original members of the Amber Company had all perished. The final encounter with 6 party members against an Arachnid Mouther left there to guard a passage/supplies by the drow ended 5 of their lives with the 6th fleeing back up into a stronghold he had spent the past 15 years in, hiding from the orcs who took it over.

After that session we all realized there was little point to continue with the storyline. No one was left alive that really had any reason to complete the goal. Sure we could have made new characters and worked them in somehow, but the overall story arc seemed diminished.

So Citadel Felbarr likely fell to the orc invasion, since they could not be warned about the multi-prong attack. Perhaps we can pick the story up again in the future. In the meantime another one of the player's is stepping up to DM a campaign in his homebrew world. The change of pace will be nice and as a DM I hope to pick up a few things along the way.

 

[Delemental]

What I'm wondering if there is a way to have a continuous story when players keep rolling up new characters when they die instead of being raised? Also, how do you have a continuous story if players aren't there one session and they are suddenly there the next?

I mean, at the end of the mod, I have a feeling the "only" accomplishment anyone in the group will have done is defeated the "boss" of the bad guys as the other party will be wiped out the room before hand and roll up new characters.

It seems as though your players realize something that perhaps you yourself have missed - there is no point in making an effort to have a contiguous storyline or complex character backgrounds in an adventure that is essentially a killer dungeon.

The first thing you have to figure out is "Is everyone having fun?" It sounds like you want a little more, but maybe your players are content with the status quo. Maybe they like hacking their way through this adventure, and aren't that concerned about the illogic of having characters with no connection to the original plot. If this is the case, then you need to ask yourself if you can live with that, and not worry so much that it doesn't make sense.

If it turns out that everyone in the game would rather have things different, then you should talk with your players about what that is. The one suggestion I would make is that if you are wanting to have characters continue on and develop something of a connection to the story and each other, then you need to tone down the lethality of the adventure. Players build connections to characters over time, and it won't happen if they end up dead after 1-2 sessions. If this adventure is as deadly as you have suggested, then your players may be saying to themselves "why bother raising a character I've only had for a week or two, when they'll come back a level lower and be more likely to die faster the second time around?"

As far as the no-shows, just have them accompany the party as NPCs. Get a copy of everyone's character sheet for reference. You have several ways to handle this; you can treat them as fully active characters who get full XP and treasure (but risk dying in combat just like anyone else), but what I'd suggest is giving the characters of missing players half XP, but giving them a measure of protection (they don't really contribute much to combats, but monsters generally don't target them, most traps miss them, etc). That way, players who miss sessions have an incentive to be there (to get full XP) but have less of a chance of coming back to a dead character.

 

[PrinceZane]

Solving the no show...

I was DM of our group for a little bit and we had a bad problem of this. After a week or 2 of struggling I started a reform for making things better. Since then the only time someone has missed was illness or family emergency, except for 1 guy who has suffered both times.

First, I told everyone to meet a few minutes early because I wanted to go over some stuff for the "new campain". I drew up a nice manager-to-employee type of speech saying basically, "you don't show up for work, you get on probation" meaning you get one strike on your record (assuming its an 'unexcused absence'). If you get 3 strikes total, then your out. Basically, it's not worth the other people and myself as DM to have to keep changing the way things are and such because "someone" keeps missing. We also had a problem of some people getting distracted or watching tv - basically just going through the motions. "I do whatever the other fighter is doing" without looking away from his distraction. Being the "rear end" that I can be, we had a unanimous agreement that it wasn't fair to everyone else who was trying to have fun etc, and if it came down to it, just dropping the person out of the group. They can watch, but if they become the distraction then they'll no longer be allowed to show up. That pretty much caught their attention and attendance and participation went way up. Since then I've had everyone come up to me individually saying how much better things were and how much more fun it was.

It can be hard telling a good friend "You can't play with me/us" but you have to think is dealing with 1 issue worth everyone else being pulled down too. Find whatever words or tone fits you best, but being blunt should get the attention across. If it doesn't, I suggest dropping them or finding a new group if they're all against you. There's no point in you fighting/dealing with it if there's no sign of hope.

 

[PrinceZane]

Player death issues...

As far as solving the player deaths, we went through this as well...

Just like any other game, there are going to be certain "levels" you can't beat on the first try. If you could, there wouldn't be a challenge. Our old DM would usually baby the quest around and avoid killing the players and such. I changed this as well.

If there is a PK, then they must learn how to allocate resources to afford raise dead/resurrection. Hire a cleric merc for it, get in good with the temple, split the party treasure for an "extra person" (split it 5 ways instead of 4, etc) as a "party stash" to buy raise/res scrolls, identify wands, etc, that all of the party can benefit from. It makes the characters take a little while longer to get sexy, but taking 2 months longer to get sexy is better than getting dead and scratching it.

Anyway, what we would do is if there is a player death, they can do 2 options. If they want to res/raise the fallen, good. If not however, the char is dead and the party moves on with the quest, or doesn't. I don't let a guy just jump into the quest in the middle or anything. It cuts into the atmosphere of things, etc that throws the entire mood off. The party can either go back to town and drop the quest until later (after they have reason to restart it, usually the villian reattacks town or something). Or there's a TPK and everyone starts new chars, and we start all over again. Sometimes at the start of the new quest (maybe changing a few details so things are predicable). Anything that "fits", just depends on how you want to deal with it...

 

[Andre]

I was thinking, I've been running a game for the last year or so. I'm running a long adventure(published mod) that isn't over yet...snip...The mod is fairly deadly,

This wouldn't be RttToEE, would it? Sure sounds familiar...


The only solution I can see, if you really want to continue the module, is create your own into for the new party. As part of the first couple sessions, they should hear about the other adventurers, rumors that they've been captured, or wiped out, or just left town, etc. Maybe play up the idea that they had some nice items on them, or some information the new party needs. Give the new party a reason to investigate.

Next, figure out what happened to the old party. If they died to servants of the Temple, then their items would probably be in an npc's keeping. Have the npc decide to keep the quest items, maybe to get leverage within the Temple, maybe to usurp its boss, or just maybe because it's stupid.

If, OTOH, the party was wiped out by an encounter unrelated to the Temple, your job's much easier. The items stay with the creature(s) that wiped out the party. Maybe the creature wants to sell the stuff. Maybe it just throws the stuff in a pile and forgets about them. Whatever you decide, it's not likely the quest items will have been scattered too much.

Whatever you do, consider some optional rules to make death less likely. Hong's "9 Lives" suggestion in another thread is viable. So is using the hit point reserve from Unearthed Arcana. Action points could make a big difference. If the party tactics are the problem, actively work with the players outside of gameplay to teach them more effective tactics. And, if worse comes to worst, consider weakening the module.

Obviously, if you're not playing RttToEE, the above suggestions have to be modified. But it can work, if you and players will meet each other half way. It's more work for you, as GM, but that's always the case. Good luck!

 

[Goblyn]

This wouldn't be RttToEE, would it? Sure sounds familiar...

Sounds like my experience with RttToEE as well ... I ended up leaving the game for RL reasons, but the mod was not fun, so it wasn't hard to leave ... come to think of it, I haven't played DnD since. That was in May/04.

 

[TheGM]

Sounds like my experience with RttToEE as well ... I ended up leaving the game for RL reasons, but the mod was not fun, so it wasn't hard to leave ... come to think of it, I haven't played DnD since. That was in May/04.

That's funny - I've had this syndrome occur in rttToEE AND in K&C's ToEE conversion to HackMaster.

I don't run that mod anymore. If I'm going to be doing the amount of modification required to get a party through it, I'm going to write my own

 

[the Jester]

What I'm wondering if there is a way to have a continuous story when players keep rolling up new characters when they die instead of being raised? Also, how do you have a continuous story if players aren't there one session and they are suddenly there the next?

I'm going to answer these in reverse order.

I have a pool of ten players. I run three games, though one of them is new and is an experimental campaign to explore a number of different rules and tweaks. Of the ten players, one plays pretty much only in one of the games, but everyone else plays in all three. One of the main advantages of a large group is that the game goes on. Only once can I recall cancelling or changing the game to a different campaign because a specific player couldn't show, and that wasn't really necessary, but since it was a session that player had been really looking forward to, and one in which his pc and cohort were both among the central characters, everyone agreed to play our halfling game instead when that player couldn't show at the last minute (for very good reasons, I might add). Every other time, when we're gonna play, we play. If we cannot achieve a quorum of three players plus me as dm we won't; but that is very rare- once that I can recall in the last, er, ten years or so.

If a player isn't present, his pc 'fades into the background.' There's usually an in-game excuse for it- maybe he's sick, maybe he's in the outhouse ("still? man, that's some constipation, it's kept you out of action all day!"!), maybe he's sick (tricky in a party with clerics or paladins), maybe he's scouting ahead or guarding the mounts or prisoners.

Now, as to a continuous storyline with an evolving party:

As long as the new characters travel with surviving pcs for enough time to take up the quest, it can still work to follow the original plot. However, another interesting idea is to advance time. So none of the original pcs are still around? All righty, then- advance time five, ten, fifty or even a hundred years, with the villains (mostly) unopposed. Suddenly they have summoned a powerful outsider/taken control of the kingdom/poisoned the entire lake/enslaved the dwarven kingdom or whatever you like; the bad guys have won. Now, the new party lives in a stark reminder of their previous failure. The players will realize that giving up their quest has consequences.

If you tpk them, let them play the successors to the old party, before the grim future they have witnessed, and give them a chance to stop it from happening.