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Yes. OOC he knew it was a bad idea, but he was an Orc Bloodrager and I had Harrigan talking all kinds of shit about how he barely limped to the finish line (Hirgenzosk really did a number on their boat. As in it would have sunk without Make Whole) and would have been third place or less if he hadn't cheated, Jrahk is an incompetent captain, etc.
Ended it with "Come at me, bro" and Orc pride and all that.
He got resurrected only to be trapped by the Immortal Dreamstone in the next book.
Very interesting takes, loving the posts so far. I really like the idea of having mechanics for a chase, would give the players a sense of accomplishment at beating something, even if they had to leave the battle.What mechanics do you use? I created my own homebrew rules for chases that my group really enjoys using.I don't use any mechanics. I was referring to the people that posted. For now, from what is written, I figure:
1. One roll and decide whether retreat is successful or now.
2. Homebrew mechanics. Would be interested to know how you set this up.
3. Let them retreat and pay the consequences in the story. I kinda like this idea. It makes the PCs actions important.
If you're asking me this question (and if not, please forgive the intrusion), I just plain didn't like the "official" chase and run away rules, so I created my own.
In my mind, it was just much simpler to have an opposed roll for chases, so I divided the character's speed by 5 in order to get a base number augmented by a d20 roll. I give as many as necessary to travel the distance they need (one roll for 30 feet, two rolls for 60, etc).
And retreating bad guys do make the PCs actions important. They can try to chase them down or just let them go; either way they've defeated the bad guys for that encounter.
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Truly unwinnable encounters are bad GMing, IMO.
Not every encounter is something your PCs will be able to easily handle, but anything you can throw at them within the rules (and within reasonable homebrew bounds) should be possible to beat.
I totally disagree. I think every encounter should be survivable, but not winnable.
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I'm also a little bothered by "Who knows? He could have rolled a bunch of crits and won somehow."
That's not a winnable fight. Theoretically (nearly) any fight is winnable if I roll all 1s and the player rolls all 20s. Just because you roll the dice in the open doesn't make it a winnable fight. The GM has the responsibility of setting the scenario to be fair.
In that case, if I'm reading it correctly, it was basically a case of suicide by duel. If the player's cool with it and knows what they're getting into, that's fine by me.
Also since it was a single PC down, not a TPK, it would be easier to recover from.
He went in knowing there was an upwards of 90% chance they were going to die, but did it anyway. They had enough extra loot and Plunder saved up to afford a Resurrection, and he was curious as to how strong exactly Harrigan was.
The character was actually capable of dealing enough damage to murderize Harrigan in a round or two because...Bloodrager, he just had the world's shittiest AC for the same reason and never got a chance to make more than one swing.
I also disagree that the fight is unwinnable even if it requires immense luck to pull off. Chances are slim, but it's a possible fight. It's the difference between tangling with something stronger than you and tangling with a ball of fiat that says "You lose, no matter what".
That really boils down to different definitions of "unwinnable" though.
I wouldn't make a habit of throwing those kinds of encounters at them, but if they pick a fight with something they know is way stronger than they are, that's how it goes.
Funnily enough, someone did challenge Harrigan in book 1 as well, to much the same result (except nonlethal damage was dealt instead. I wanted to set him up as someone not to mes with, so he issued a challenge that amounted to "Beat me in a fight and earn your freedom, swabbie").
That guy did almost hit though.
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It's been a long time since I've run a continuous campaign that wasn't published, but here are my thoughts.
Normally I wouldn't send my players up against something they couldn't handle. I can think of two circumstances where I might:
1. The bad guys are specifically aiming to capture the PCs, not kill them. I'd try to plan for the PCs being captured, the PCs escaping, and for some PCs being captured and the others retreating.
2. The bad guy has been specifically set up as a major threat for a while, like a Ringwraith or a Dark Jedi. Something where the metagame thinking "the DM wouldn't send us up against something we couldn't beat" is countered by the metagame thinking "wait, we can't be this far along in the story yet, can we?" The PCs might even know that the enemy has some form of invulnerability ("only the magic sword 'Elgamyr' can harm him") or have been told something like "your mission here is stealth-recon, under no circumstances should you engage the enemy commander".
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I think that it's OK to give the PCs an ememy who is above their capacities so they have to wait to face it or to look for alternative ways of dealing with him.
As long as the PCs have enough clues to know they can't face that enemy.
I've seen GMs setting powerful enemies, not giving any kind of clues about them and letting the PCs die a horrible death trying to fight them.
«I'm sorry that you are dead, but you attacked that humble peasant who was really a God in disguise. You couldn't have known.»
That's not cool.
Yes, the GM has to handle it with care so they know an enemy is beyond their capacities but they don't get too paranoid.
I developed a game where the 5 level players had to defeat a red great wyrm and a lot of high level enemies. I never stated when they should do it, the enemies were there and when and how they defeated them was up to the players.
They did it at level 11 or 12 with a carefully planned strategy.
I personally wouldn't pull the "peasant is a god" trick on any players because that's just plain not fair. I try to present foes that are on a same or slightly higher level than that of the party as a challenge that *can* be won if they play smart enough. Or in my case, get the highest initiatives nearly every time and do so much damage the first round that the bad guys never recover enough to reciprocate. The advice I asked for in another thread about help with a Drow magus has been terrific, and I hope to challenge the smug little bastards that are my PC group with something that'll put the fear of the gods in them.. lol
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My players, after five years, have only managed to get into one TPK (and that was a Paizo module where they split the party). Anytime I've written the endless wave of enemies scenario they find someway to circumvent it. The most notable was when they had to fight an endless spawn of kobolds in a cave system. The alchemist and fighter used various knowledge checks to figure out how to start a cave-in, and cut off one of the major kobold reinforcement lines. They marched through every part of that encounter. In regards to retreating from a difficult fight, the party came across a hydra as a random encounter and the oracle hypnotized it so they could get by. I rewarded them full experience and they carried on.
It really depends on the players and the DM. I don't advise constantly designing unwinnable fights. I use them sparingly to create dramatic tension for the story (the kobold encounter was designed to introduce them to a powerful boss for later in the campaign). In conjunction, I constantly remind them that they don't need to kill everything to win the encounter and sometimes, retreating and regrouping is an option. When my players hit situations like this, they tend to at least make an attempt to sabotage the enemy that forced them to retreat.
The closest my players were to a TPK was in the boss fight of Price of Courage and finally, the only loss was the dragon mount of our knight, but they were close.
As a player my closest moment to a TPK was in Rasputin Must Die, in the previous fight to Rasputin. No PC died but we had to run away.
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I've been a gamer for long enough to know that, in the "Old School" days, there was NO assumption that any given encounter was survivable... or even fair. Parties that lived to see mid- or high levels were parties that learned that there's no shame in running from a fight that's going to end badly.
There was no concept of Challenge Rating, or level-appropriate encounters, other than the level of the dungeon you were on. (The deeper you went, the tougher the monsters!)
The most dangerous thing a party could do in those days was to take an overland journey. Unlike when dungeon-delving, there were no "dungeon level" tables on the overland wandering monster tables. If you were traveling through the mountains, you could get attacked by anything from a mountain lion, to a band of ogres, to 1d4 red dragons! It didn't matter if you were only 4th level!
Sometimes I miss the Old School Days.
Those tables were there and some advice to that effect, but little of it was represented in modules, which is where most of the people I knew learned our GM adventure design skills from. There, like now, things were pretty much set up to be beaten. In some cases you could wander off to face the most dangerous stuff out of order, but there were usually strong hints to avoid it.I've been a gamer for long enough to know that, in the "Old School" days, there was NO assumption that any given encounter was survivable... or even fair. Parties that lived to see mid- or high levels were parties that learned that there's no shame in running from a fight that's going to end badly.
The most dangerous thing a party could do in those days was to take an overland journey. Unlike when dungeon-delving, there were no "dungeon level" tables on the overland wandering monster tables. If you were traveling through the mountains, you could get attacked by anything from a mountain lion, to a band of ogres, to 1d4 red dragons! It didn't matter if you were only 4th level!
I've been a gamer for long enough to know that, in the "Old School" days, things varied an awful lot from group to group.
Yeah, I guess it really did depend on play style. Back in the '80s, my group rarely ran through prepared modules: It was nearly 100% homebrew, more-or-less what we'd call "Sandbox-style" play today. We did a whole lot of hex exploration, and while the DM certainly had some pre-planned encounter areas, he rolled a LOT of random wilderness encounters for us.
I specifically recall once time when we were climbing through the mountains following a treasure map, and we were attacked by three huge very old blue dragons.
We were 5th level.
We ran.
As we were running away/hiding from the dragons, we stumbled across a war band of evil stone giants.
Like I said, we were 5th level.
The only way we got out of that was to convince the giants that the dragons were actually our friends and that our buddies the dragons were going to kick their giant asses. That so incensed the giants that they attacked the dragons... which allowd us to get away from both of them!
I started relying a bit on modules and prewritten stuff when I found things that I actually liked.
I started playing V:tM and other WoD and the modules were often awful so I wrote my own stories.
Now even when I GM prewritten stuff I don't feel confident enough until I change enough content to fit my players and to make it my own.