My suggestion: be up-front with your players that it's going to be that sort of campaign.
If you sap their will to live without warning, they will walk away from the table.
Lose/ lose scenarios. Sacrifice desicions. Cause their actions to endanger NPCs they care about. Frame them for a crime when they should be hailed as heroes. Kill animal companions and familiars... Out of combat just to let them know that they are never safe. Have them run afoul of a theives guild who wants to facilitate payback.
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To drive home the point, destroy and/or remove things that are important to them, but leave them with their lives. Ultimately, the loot distribution is up to you, so you get to choose when they get what you want them to get.
Have them imprisoned and their gear lost or stolen.
Have an important mount killed (but not one that will damage stats)
Have an important NPC killed because of a party oversight.
Knock two PC's unconscious through damage during combat, leaving them at the brink of death.
Have the king/mayor view them as a threat, and harass them, treat them poorly.
Have the townsfolk observe or misunderstand a misdeed and spread rumors around town, villainizing them unjustly.
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Knock two PC's unconscious through damage during combat, leaving them at the brink of death.
But please note the difference between players and player characters.
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But please note the difference between players and player characters.
Knock two PC's unconscious through damage during combat, leaving them at the brink of death.
My players have been very upfront with me about not having roofies or maces at the gaming table.
I also banned all Clerics and Paladins in this campaign.
It would be very difficult for me not to have said characters fall often considering that the Book of the Damned will play a key part of the storyline, and the release of an age old God (Lucifer) who is Chaotic Neutral and desires only to end faith of his imprisoners, the gods.
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Lol, I want you to do a follow-up post telling everyone how many game sessions go by before everyone mysteriously gets a cold, has family obligations, has to work late, etc.. and your GMing comes to an end.
Remember, the difference between GOD in real life and a GM is that you don't have to play with the GM.
It's not necessary to make the Players hate the game to make their characters suffer. I want a Greek Tragedy not trolling.
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Under the Pathfinder rulesset, it's very hard to have the PCs "lose" without "dying." There are many reasons for this, but one of the largest is lack of a "wound penalty" system to encounter PCs to give up while they still can. Consider adding such a thing as a houserule.
Beyond that, I've always had great success with maiming the characters. Cut off a finger. Put out an eye. Give a permanent limp. And arrange the situation so healing magic can't fix it. It's gotta feel permanent in order for it to feel like a true "loss". Since maiming is fairly underused, it retains a good shock-value, and it actually hurts the one thing players care about: themselves.
Also, if you get the players fully on-board (and really, they should be) pause the game every now and again, and ask the PCs to describe what they are feeling right now. Have them narrate it to the group. By creating an explicit venue for players to think and share (rather than it just be conveyed through potentially poor OOG acting skills), it makes the feelings across the whole table much stronger.
But really, if you want PCs to experience loss, you have to let loss be *somewhat* attractive. Most encounters are set up to look like this: "if you don't stop this enemy, the game is over". And even if you as GM see more nuance than that, they often won't.
So you need to make sure they see a way out. A *reason* to give up, retreat, or back off. Because the mindset of "every fight is a fight to one side's complete annihilation" is a hard mindset to break. So at first, coddle them a bit. Make "retreating" (or whatever) look downright like the best option. Then dial back the attractiveness little by little as you go, until you are able to be running in full tragedy mode.
Also, lead by example. Include older, more seasoned investigators/guards/adventurers/guildmembers/etc who have lost and survived. And make it clear that they made the right decision, and weren't just losers. Have them mentor the PCs. Let them see that "this is how this works in this world", so that it can be more plausible for them to take that path.
'cuz it's hard to break the "fight until you TPK" mentality.
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Lol, I want you to do a follow-up post telling everyone how many game sessions go by before everyone mysteriously gets a cold, has family obligations, has to work late, etc.. and your GMing comes to an end.
Remember, the difference between GOD in real life and a GM is that you don't have to play with the GM.
YMMV.
I've found I never have to play with god either.
In any case, why are you so sure his game is going to fall apart? Done well it can be a fun and different experience to not win all the time.
I'm running a campaign where I really want to make the PCs feel hopeless, fragile and get them to know what it's like to not always win.
What are some suggestions? It's a level 5 group.
My suggestion is don't make them feel hopeless fragile and get them to know what it's like to not always win.
At least, don't do this without PC buy-in. If they actually want this, that's fine, and you don't require any help because they'll feel it as a result of the buy-in.
If you'd like to make the players sad rather than angry maybe you could introduce lovable NPCs who get integrated into the storyline and roleplaying with the PCs and then get abused and or killed by NPCs who the PCs can't immediately take revenge upon. If you're rather make them frustrated and angry try some of the stuff below at your own risk.
DISCLAIMER: Using the following advice might anger your players. Some might feel that it could even make you a jerk!
- send in invisible sneak attackers
- railroad the plot
- Steal or destroy the party's equipment. I've never seen Sunder used much, but I bet it would make players sad and perhaps angry
- Heavily emphasize the use of seemingly random skills so that not having ranks in Knowledge[Nobility] might cause a PC to lose status or even his head
- send in more invisible sneak attackers
- Institute a house rule where if a PC dies and is replaced the new PC starts a level lower and only has basic equipment (or none at all)
- instead of just letting PCs die have Asmodeus (or his agent "Mr. D") make an Infernal Bargain where the PC trades something like 2 points in a random ability score for a new lease on life (else start a new lower level PC with no treasure)
- force a PC to engage in demeaning sex acts in order to get through a roleplaying situation (perhaps to gain a valuable secret needed to save the world)
I've seen most of the above (or something similar) in actual games, and it seemed to bring many of the players down a bit, sometimes to the point of making them question whether they should continue playing. I'm not saying that they're "good ideas", mind you, just that they're things which would likely upset the players. Recent experiences also imply that the Second Darkness AP is full of depressing situations.
The archenemy has a cleric and the town mayor captured, and the pcs only have time to save one.
Be prepared for players to attempt a third option: Save neither and grab the bad guy instead. Because if you just save one and don't catch the bad guy, he'll just do it again.
If the GM wants to play hardball, be prepared for sabotage.
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Old Earthdawn campaign I ran, a pc got cursed tso that evey victory he'd achieve would be tainted by some form of defeat. The Horror (closest approximation would be demons) worded it far better at the time than I'm doing now. Bottom line: the player stopped having fun with his character who he'd thought of as a carefree, swashbuckling hero (a t'skrang swordmaster, for any who know the game). Once he got on the path toward defeating this Horror once and for all, he bounced back.
The lesson I learned is that you can beat pc's and mess with them a whole lot so long as they have hope... Even if they only have hope that there IS hope. So I agree with Gonturan. Talk to the players... even if all you tell them is that hope isn't presenting itself to the PC's and they'll have to work to find it,
Make the 3.5 book of exalted deeds a valid source. Little other incentive will be necessary to convince the wizard that a descent to darkness is warranted.
Fixed that for you.
I would pull of a close TPK, and then have an NPC save them. That NPC is Lucifer, or an Avatar of Lucifer in disguise, who then uses his godly powers to screw with them royally.
He would do things with Godly powers that they could not detect. Set up scenarios that they seem to be fighting the big bad villain, when they are actually attacking the good and faithful of the Gods. These good and faithful would be very upset at the party of apparently evil beings.
Create a series of very subtle clues so that the party over several levels will find out that this paragon of virtue, this hero who has befriended and helped them is a supreme SOB using them to his own nefarious ends.
If you do it right, the followers of the Gods won't trust the characters. They will find themselves utterly isolated and alone, trying to do the right thing, while everybody thinks they are evil incarnate.
Sadists, the lot of you.
The greatest equalizer is the dice. Sometimes a spot of bad rolling is all players need to feel pretty fragile and hopeless. Or just frustrated.
As a GM, I want my players to succeed, despite setbacks. YMMV.
What I'm getting is that you want them to feel that giant fall before the final act. The real trick is that you can't just force upon them, you have to make them take some bait. Make them the cause of their own downfall. Lure them in with power (use multiple hooks and try to appeal to their senses) perhaps to defeat an even more powerful enemy. After they beat themselves up though, you have to give them some handholds to pull themselves back up. If you don't give them that afterwards, the game will just be lousy and unfun.
Let player actions, and especially player inactions, have real consequences. I don't mean that the player characters should be explicitly punished for making choices you don't like, but if they fail to deal with or address a problem, the problem should often get bigger. If they decide to deal with a given problem later, when they've leveled up a bit, have it become even tougher in the interim (as problems often do) and/or more disastrous for the innocent bystanders.
Dialing that approach up a little, put them in situations where there are multiple problems to deal with, and they cannot possibly deal with all of them. They can still succeed on a small scale, can still point to bright spots for which they are responsible amid the overall gloom, but the world around them is falling apart and there is nothing they seem to be able to do about it.
Have adventures in which even the best success the party can reasonably achieve looks like a failure from the outside. They CAN stop the ongoing horrendously evil ritual that is attempting to create a god, but the result is an explosion that reactivates the dormant volcano, that sort of thing.
BTW, this is my current campaign. The party started at 1st and is now 16th level. Although they are good-aligned, they have have picked up a very dicey reputation in some quarters as reckless maniacs who make bad situations worse. Some call them the Worldbreakers. Despite that, they persevere.
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Two opposites :
A big monster far above their CR who toys with them before leaving them wounded and lying in the dirt but still alive while NPCs around have all turned into heaps of collateral damage.
A small people revolution. All the peasants, henchmen, followers of the area have decided that they had enough of the mighty people playing with their lives and whose antics with monsters only end up in their loved ones being turned in the aforementioned heaps. They will take their revenge in small doses because they can never hope of beating the PCs. The valet will steal the magic sword and throw it in the moat. The midwife will deliberately kill the newborn child of her lord or lady. The accountant will make mistakes that will end up ruining the PCs. And for each culprit that is caught and punished, a thousand nobodies rise to take his place. Viva la revolucion.