Thursday, 3 March 2016
10th Anniversary Classic Rant: Playing "Chicken" With Your Players
I want to present you all today with an important GMing Law: You can play a game of "chicken" with your players if that's what they want, but you can't lose it.
There are times when a GM may decide to have his Players encounter an opponent or a group of opponents that vastly outmatch them, a situation where combat would be essentially suicide. That's the GM's RIGHT.
Unfortunately, there are also players (and often entire player groups) whose response to this would be to charge forward and attack that unstoppable foe, deciding that they want to play a game of "chicken" with the GM. Their logic is "well, the GM won't just kill us all, because otherwise the campaign he loves so much will come to an end".
You know what? Sometimes, you have to be willing to kill what you love. If your players put you in this kind of a situation, you have to RUN the fucking thing, and let the dice fall where they may (which is, statistically, the massacre of the entire party). If the players somehow squeak through that, fine. That doesn't mean you lost, it means they got lucky.
If they don't, however, they're all DEAD. Start over, new players or a new campaign or whatever.
The crucial thing is, you cannot be seen to "lose" that game of Chicken in the sense of having been the one to flinch first, or else the players will know that they have you forever, they will never again fear any monster you might throw at them. You've just said that you are a complete wuss without the courage of your convictions, and that all your big scary opponents will just be paper tigers; the PCs WILL always win, and you might as well have been sending them "challenge rating appropriate" stuff!
I mean fuck, if the point of sending them ridiculously tough opponents is that in that moment in the game they're NOT supposed to fight (they're supposed to surrender, or run away, or be creative), then the lesson that you must teach is "Fight This and You'll Almost Certainly Die".
Otherwise, you're fucked.
RPGPundit
(Originally posted December 11, 2009)
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Damn true. Killing them all may bring this particular campaign to an end, but saving them by fiat will for sure ruin this campaign and all the ones thereafter.
ReplyDeleteKILL 'EM ALL!!!!
ReplyDeleteSince when does dead PCs = end of campaign? You roll up your PC's brother/cousin/roommate/whatever and seek vengeance!
ReplyDeleteIn my Albion campaign players always have two characters going at a time (but not at the same time; they pick one to play in each adventure).
DeleteThis is exactly why I never understood 4e where it seems like the party is supposed to expect to win each battle. Maybe I misunderstood the rules but that just sounded lame.
ReplyDeleteNever played that version but if that's how they did it, I call it lame indeed. Does everyone get a trophy for showing up, too?
DeleteI don't see why gaming is a game of kill or be killed. I'd have them horribly lose, wake up in a cellar, and have a whole new adventure of "how do we get out of this brig".
ReplyDeleteIf you read again Pundit said "if they put you in that position." Whole different thing from what you inferred.
DeleteDo that, and your players will assume that from then on they will always just get captured instead of killed, and take risks accordingly, thinking themselves invulnerable.
DeleteSometimes I do like a pulp style of play. Like, how is the hero going to get out of this alive? I think that is the main difference between pulp and grimdark.
ReplyDeleteGonna post anything about Lula over in Brazil?
ReplyDeleteDon't know yet.
Delete