I've been DMing for 25 years now, playing D&D for even longer but Age of Worms AP introduced something that has never even come close to happening ever before ... one fateful night, the entire campaign crashed and burned!
The AoW AP has been, in my opinion and I *thought* my players agreed, the best, most exciting campaign we've ever tackled. My small band of players are all old-timers who have been having fun for decades under my leadership (one is my wife, who's been involved with D&D even longer than me!). Everyone has developed complex but wonderful characters and we've all been having a great time.
Then, for no foreseeable reason, we were playing along and suddenly all my players "got attitude". Without warning they abruptly seemed to just no longer care whether their characters lived or died. No player made any comment illuminating this plan nor did anyone express any discontent with the campaign or my DMing style (which as I've said, they've all played happily under for decades). I was oblivious to what was even happening at first. A bad choice, a character drops. A foolish move, another one drops. I began to feel puzzled. The encounter was difficult but not impossible and the PCs certainly had the resources (both fantasy and real world knowledge and accumen) to resolve the conflict. I started wondering what was up with these people. Why were they playing like they'd never seen dice before? One character died, followed quickly by another, then another. Anyone who knows me from previous posts knows I'm nearly a Fate Nazi - I hold players responsible to the Nth degree for their choices and the fate of the dice roll - I never "fudge" anything. But at this point I saw TPK approaching on a fast horse with players who were literally offering themselves up to death. I have spent hours reading, plotting, and preparing for the Age of Worms and more than anything (even more than my own homebrew) I didn't want to see the campaign end. So against all my better judgement, I started to "fudge" - just a little. I held back a couple of monsters, purposely ignored some tactical advantages, wasted enemy resources, etc. but it didn't help. The characters just stood there and took it on the chin. One of my players seemed as bewildered as I was to his compatriots' behavior. He was struggling, basically alone at this point, to survive the encounter and actually PLAY the game. It was he and I against the world it seemed. Clearly, in hindsight, we should've just stopped the game at that point but it all seemed to happen so fast. The entire campaign crashed and burned. His brave efforts (and mine) failed and the party was totally wiped out.
I was angry and frustrated. Everyone went home without comment. Even my wife was silent and indifferent about the whole thing. The one player and I were both furious but there seemed nothing we could do.
Time heals all wounds and a few days perspective was the first step toward the rebirth of the adventure path. I wasn't sure how to relaunch the campaign and I was quite determined not to let it go. Everyone's characters were so rich and interesting it seemed an equal shame to let them fall by the wayside.
My wife, whose only explanation for the entire incident was "I don't know, I just got frustrated and overwhelmed so I gave up", eventually provided the answer. During character creation I have each player roll on a random chart to receive a feat or fault. These are "natural" flaws or benefits. My wife's character had scored a great natural benefit - prophecy. She had created a monk and he would have prophetic dreams. This turned out to be a great tool to advance the plot line and {spoiler} ....
when the campaign notes suggested players eventually realize they were "destined" to be involved in this Age of Worms cosmic struggle, I was pleased that this plot device fit in perfectly with the monk's mysterious visions.
Anyway, my wife asked if we could pull a Bobby Ewing and have the whole night's session be one of her monk's visions. This would allow us to relaunch the campaign at it ending point (rather than just start again at Whispering Cairn) and everyone would be allowed to keep their characters too. Now I realize this is pretty corny and hokey, not at all ideal, but it allows (hopefully just this once) for the campaign to be reborn and for all of us to continue with the plotline with a fresh attitude.
To this day, I'm still not sure exactly what happened or why. Everyone insists they are having lots of fun and are fully motivated to continue/complete this adventure path. I begged for criticism of my DMing style so I could adjust/correct any problems but everyone insisted that they were perfectly content with my style (which I humbly admit is supported by the decades of smooth play we've enjoyed).
Anyway, bottom line (forgive the babble), the campaign inexplicably crashed and burned; and then just as miraculously (if a bit ridiculously) was reborn.
I'm not really sure what my point is ... except maybe "anything can and does happen". I'm thankful that we've all come together again and that we once again are enjoying this great Age of Worms adventure path.
First of all, I sypathize with your situation SirMarcus; it must have felt like a mutiny of sorts :(
I think it's within everyone's best interests to count that gaming session as a 'mulligan'. This sort of fix isn't something any DM wants to use, but I think keeping a decades old group together warrants it. Hopefully there were no further (unshared) motivations behind the actions of these players. The many years of enjoyment your group has had & everyone's wish to continue should take precedence over worry about story continuity! That can be worked around.
I applaud your willingness to forgive your players & interest in continuing the AP...for their enjoyment! While it was definitely an odd situation, it's far from irrecoverable. The alternative is not playing, and that doesn't appeal to anyone ;-)
J-
This happened in my game before. Here's my psychoanalysis:
Sometimes the players just want to roll dice and kill bad guys.
Sometimes the players don't want to have to excessively tax their brains to come up with the perfect combination of tactics/spells/etc to solve what may appear at first to be an insurmountable problem.
So, this "passive resistance" thing kicks in--"go ahead and just kill my character, that's really what this is about isn't it?"
Whenever I detect this in myself when playing or in others when DMing,I S...L...O...W... things down. When playing, I try to hang back or try to get others to go back and camp, take a break, recharge spells, while taking a REAL break in real life.
When DMing, I state that we should all take a break for 20-30 minutes. I let the players freely talk about their tactical options while they have a beer, grab a smoke, etc. Sometimes that fixes it, but if the "passive resistance" mood strikes, sometimes it takes a break for a few weeks or months to recharge everyone's batteries.
When getting too frustrated with my players, I have to remember to apply this rule to myself ;)
The AoW AP has many difficult battles that can become a drain on the players. There's only so much they can take before they start to feel overburdened by the stress of trying to stay alive. Perhaps if you made several encounters easier you wouldn't get player burnout.
I know that I am going to be making some changes in my game, as I can already see the burnout coming. First, I'm cutting the number of encounters, as I feel there is just too much fighting in most of these modules. Second, I'm going to make several encounters easier, leaving the tough encounters for the boss fights.
Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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My house rules includes a TPK rule. Basically, if more than half the party dies, the characters get resurrected and lose all equipment. The in game explanation is that they were left for dead and had their equipment taken. Because we have it in writing, we (hopefully) won't feel bad about "cheating" in that way. The rule hasn't come into play yet, thankfully.
My players are also good about not meta-gaming the rule. They don't start throwing fights just to get the benefit of the TPK ressurection when someone dies.
TPK's and replacement characters are two things that are not well covered by the rules and which should (IMO) be part of any set of house rules. In fact, if you do nothing else with house rules, you should come up with an answer to this question before it gets asked.
Anyway, I suppose this is a round about way of saying that I think you did the right thing and that a TPK shouldn't ruin a campaign if the players are still going. However, I would consider putting together a rule so that you have a method of handling this situation in in the future.
AOW is a very draining campaign. I didn't run it simply for the fact that some of my players would have complained about the difficulty of some of the fights and encounters, particularly in the HOHR and the SOLS. Not that I haven't used elements from the adventures, though :)
Thank you all for your comments. I think both Jimmy and Farewell2Kings probably understand the situation pretty well and I appreciate your advice. Sebastian, you are right, as well. I now see that a TPK rule should've been established (I LOVE house rules and heavily modify my games so one more won't make a difference). Part of the reason this whole thing caught me off-guard was because after all these years together and probably character deaths approaching triple-digits I can still count on one hand how many TPKs or near TPKs we've ever had (two of the near-TPKs occurred earlier in AoW AP). I just wasn't prepared for the impact of a TPK on the campaign or the players themselves.
I agree that attitude is what it's all about, both mine as the DM and theirs as players. Slowing things down and taking breaks, especially in the combat heavy adventure path sessions, I now see is imperitive. The more time that passes since the "incident", the calmer and more rational I think we all are. I guess I should've seen the burn-out coming. I'll try to be more aware in the future.
HOHR is where it all went bad for us. I now recognize that I should've tweaked the module a little better for my players so they didn't feel quite so overwhelmed. Hopefully with my new insight, I will adapt the coming adventures somewhat better.
Didn't mean to omit your name, Dungeonblaster (or Phil L's either). I completely agree with the whole "draining" aspect of the Age of Worms. It's great fun but you're right about the inevitable overload for players who are constantly struggling to merely survive just about every encounter. I play with a pretty small group and only 5 characters are involved in this campaign. Though this could be considered "average", the style of gaming in our group is best suited to strategizing and puzzle-solving at some points (usually to advance the plot) followed by brief bursts of pretty straight-forward combat. None of us are as young as we used to be and some of our game sessions (the one in question being a prime example) are interrupted/influence by outside real-world influences (whiny children, sleep deprivation during the work week, etc). Looking back I can now see why the players, amidst all the real world distraction, took stock of the fantasy scenario and went "oh great, the next few hours will consist of a futile battle against overwhelming odds followed by a hideous death - why not just skip to the end?"
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While I love the adventure paths (I'm playing in Shackled City and afterwards I'll be running Age of Worms), I've noticed a design flaw in the adventures: since most of the adventures expect the PC's to go up two levels and dungeons with 50+ rooms and too many encounters are frowned upon, the solution the designers usually come up with is to throw difficult encounters against the players in order to give them enough XP to be the appropriate level for the next adventure. While I understand why this is necessary, the barrage of near TPK's can hurt a group's morale, as well as prevent some players from playing characters they want to play to instead play characters that are needed for the group to survive. Try playing a stand-alone Dungeon adventure compared to the typical adventure path adventure and you'll immediately notice how much easier it is.
Having played through the first five Shackled City adventures, we've had very few easy encounters and lots of hard encounters with near-death experiences (we even use action points!). Having read all twelve Age of Worm adventures, I realise it is much the same. While I don't have a problem with my players getting killed by the Aspect of the Overgod, I definitely don't want them to get killed by some wolves at the entrance of the Whispering Cairn. I'm thinking of toning down the adventures when I run them and replacing the missing XP with story awards and some additional encounters I've been wanting to add to make the adventure path more Greyhawkish.
I wasn't going to say this, but reading that last post kinda set me off. I've been DM'ing for years, and my players are the same guys I gamed with in the 80's. But, the Age of Worms is lethal. The whole party was killed by wolves in the Whispering Cairn. It was tragic, because everyone had made fun characters that they really liked, but now for the restart they all made characters that are optimized for combat, at the expense of personality and style. Hopefully something can still be salvaged, but after seeing the second adventure in the series, I don't have high hopes. I don't see how a party of four 3rd level characters can hope to survive in The Three Faces of Evil; I intend to run an adventure between the Whispering Cairn and The Three faces of Evil so that my players' characters can reach fourth level before starting. Supplemental adventures are, I think, the only way to avoid "total party kills".
Oddly enough, all the frustration in my AoW campaign has been on my part. My party pretty much breezed through the Whispering Cairn, occasionally one would drop into negatives, but nothing approaching a TPK. It took until the end of 3FoE when the party overextended and took on the Faceless One and minions instead of falling back to rest at the top of the lift to actually cause a casualty. I don't expect the Mistmarsh to hold any party killers, so we'll see how they do in HoHR.
I noticed that a lot of the encounters were going to be difficult for my group. My solution was to have the PC's start 2 levels higher going into the first adventure (3 faces for us) This made most routine encounters easier, but the bosses still a challange. Plus if they die and come back a level lower they are still above the curve "slightly". So far 5 of the players have had characters die of the 6 so they are all pretty close to on level with 1 player a level ahead. They are finishing Hall of harsh reflections and things have been challanging yet fun still. Less grind, more action!
“…with death spells being tossed around like kobolds at a fire giant kegger…”
LOL !!!
jjust4me, what a great image. :-)
On the subject of when dice go bad, one thing I have been using in my campaigns for years is some form of Karma mechanic to help reduce the damage cause by bad dice. Here lately, I have been using the Action Points as presented in the Unearthed Arcana and I highly recommend them.
Before Action Points, I used what I called Group Karma, modeled after the idea as presented in Shadowrun. Basically, the group had a number of Karma Points equal to half the number of players that were present at the session. The Karma Points allowed any die roll to be re-rolled twice more, with the player taking the most advantageous roll of the three. Any player could use a Karma Point, but the group had to agree to allow the player their use. The points were only good for the given session and only refreshed at the next session.
In the years I used them, I very rarely saw them used for attack or damage rolls (though occasionally they were used to devastating effect in that manner). The majority of the points were used for saving throws or ability check situations.
Anyway, I hope the idea is of some use and good gaming all.
Mark