Campaign's End

[Old_Dr_Skull]

Well I wrapped up a 16-session campaign last night. While I intended it to be the last session, it was rather punctuated. It ended with a space battle between the PC's forces: a suped-up armored 400-ton blockade runner, a standard patrol cruiser, and a safari ship, vs. the villain's 2 close escorts and a Mercenary cruiser.

They wiped out the close escorts with relative ease, but the mercenary cruiser scored a critical hit on the blockade runner, and the result was a "Crew" hit. I had softened it from "all crew dead" to "all crew attacked", but the results were about 3/4 of the PC's wounded or dead. The NPC pilot punched the jump drive, but we found that the ship was just within 100 diameters of the planet, and ended up with a misjump into the middle of nowhere.

The safari ship and patrol cruiser escaped, but the main ship was lost forever with all hands.

I've been thinking back, and remember one other campaign ending in a similar fashion, with the PC"s asteroid ship being hit by a nuclear missile battery from a defense satellite and cracking wide open, exploding with all hands.

I suppose that if you have a campaign with a lot of space battles this is pretty inevitable. The chance of a critical hit coming up is pretty high, and the chance of that ending up with everyone dead is then pretty high. I suppose that's one of the reasons I try to stay away from space combat, but it was what the players were interested in doing.

In any case, how many games have ended for you folk with a catastrophic failure in the depths of space?

 

[Hemdian]

It wasn’t in the depths of space but I did have a total party wipe out once. I was at GenCon UK several years back and at the last minute I was roped in to run a sanctioned game using an adventure I’d never read. I had about 15 minutes to skim the adventure, a cut down version of “Delta 3 is Down” by BITS, before the session. It was my first ever experience at running a game at a convention, so there’s me (unprepared but willing to have a go) and several players (none of whom I’d met before).

At one point, the PC’s (trying to escape offworld) reach the starport and decide to crash the perimeter fence. They’re in a grav car equivalent of a Ford transit van. As they approach, Starport Security orders them away. They continue on in a straight line. The starport planetary defense battery fires a warning shot. They still continue on in a straight line. The starport planetary defense battery fires at them. “Er … you’re all dead.”

I’m used to players doing stupid and inexplicable things, and to be fair they took the result with good grace, but this left me a little gun-shy about running convention games.

 

[BytePro]

...
In any case, how many games have ended for you folk with a catastrophic failure in the depths of space?

None. See no point in that level of dice/table controlled simulation when we are gathered for a roleplaying game - unless we were to the point of game's end and Players are RPing a do or die scenario...

Unless we are all done, as the Ref I say when the game ends and would just adjust to leave options for Players. <shrug>

PCs can (and do - sometimes frequently :devil die in my games, but Players would still continue with alternate characters (taking over NPC's, or one of their other PCs they are playing in that game). Most of my games average 3 Players and in around half, (the intended higher mortality ones) typically play 2 or more PCs. [Keeps them from 'PC attachment syndrome' and busier!]

In Hemdian's scenario seems like they would have attempted to incapacitate the vehicle first before escalating to a massacre - but, there could be other details that make it more plausible...

 

[Blue Ghost]

*snip*

In any case, how many games have ended for you folk with a catastrophic failure in the depths of space?

The last gaming session with my original group from way back when ended in a brutal fire fight on the Efate downport facility. A G-carrier with a Z-gun did a number on the players. It was for "the best" so to speak, as we had been gaming with these same characters for years now.

I can't remember all of the circumstances, but I think it involved a hijacked Kinuner class "cruiser", and the players were asked to intervene on behalf of the company that had salvaged the vessel, even though the starport's Imperial Marines were running to the scene. The players, not wanting to miss out on a bounty, and being forewarned that a highly paid and well equipped merc unit had taken the vessel, opted to chance it.

The final stages involved the players taking cover behind air rafts, luggage carriers, crates, fuel trucks and other stuff on the tarmac. The firefight was intense, and the hijackers had had enough, wanting to make their getaway. All they needed was to load up their G-carrier which they had used in the assault to take the vessel.

That's when the G-carrier let fly with the Z-gun. Nasty stuff. I seem to recall the hijackers got away with their prize, and my character, one of six PCs, and one of an assault team of 24 combatants, survived the engagement. The rest weren't so lucky.

The epilogue was that my character went off to adventure in the Vargr extents. Our heavy gunner, another survivor, journeyed back to Earth, while the one other survivor stayed in the Marches.

What was interesting was that our group didn't do much Striker stuff. I rarely remember a tank or any other heavy armor in any of our adventures, and this one time when we faced one, we were just out of our depth as to how to attack. Not one of us had the 3I equivalent of any anti-armor ordinance. We had one or two high energy weapons in our ranks, but that's not enough to punch through the side of a TL15 grav driven APC....apparently.

It was the most brutal fire fight we'd ever had, and probably the most fool hearty. I was against the assault because of the light armor, but the guys were gung ho, so we gave it a shot.

Result; ouchness o:

 

[PFVA63]

Hi,

I guess in some ways, some of these stories sound a bit like maybe the players were taking too many chances and paid the price. As such, I guess it all depends on what kind of GM you are and what kind of games your players like to play, but maybe such events might serve as a reminder to people in your group that not everything is going to always work out for the best, so that going in with all guns blazing might not be the right approach in every situation.

But like I said, it really depends on what you and your group likes/wants to do.

 

[sabredog]

Not so many party annihilations in Traveller. Used to happen very rarely in the original early days of MTU, but back then everyone was pushing the envelope of the game. Jump while in orbit - sure, we're that desperate....ship breaking up and we have to 'bail out' and make re-entry in our vacc suits...

Since those early fiascoes I just tended to bang up the players badly enough to send them off bruised, bloodied, and with their tails between their legs (and yet another world they could never go back to), but only the ones who really deserved it (or the terminally unlucky) usually end up dead. Maimed, yeah...broke, stranded on some hellworld with their ship flying off in the hands of pirates, yup, but the whole party doesn't die. I wouldn't have any players after a while and I'm too old to hang around comic book and game stores trying to recruit new ones - I'd look like some creepy fatcoat.

Now in my Call of Cthulhu campaigns - well, heck yeah! Everyone dies and goes insane (not always in that order depending on available spells) while saving the world in that game - it's half the fun! But at least everyone knows that, too, so the whole dynamic of PC and party deaths (among other kinds of casualties in that game) are different than in Traveller, and nobody gets too upset about it.

 

[Icosahedron]

I'm with Bytepro and Sabredog. I'd only do a Blake's Seven ending to a campaign if all the players were up for it and wanted to see their characters crash and burn at the hands of the bad guys (and strangely enough, I've never known a group of players to want that...)

Otherwise, at worst they're badly wounded and the ship has misjumped to an unknown location.

Unless, as the others said, the players have done something monumentally stupid and continually ignored the Ref's implicit or explicit warnings. In that case, yes, a short campaign might serve to sober them for the next one.

In my games the dice aid the story, they don't dictate it.

 

[rancke]

I guess in some ways, some of these stories sound a bit like maybe the players were taking too many chances and paid the price. As such, I guess it all depends on what kind of GM you are and what kind of games your players like to play, but maybe such events might serve as a reminder to people in your group that not everything is going to always work out for the best, so that going in with all guns blazing might not be the right approach in every situation.

I'm quite ambivalent about killing PCs for taking risks. On the one hand, when the players have their characters do something particularily stupid, I feel they deserve whatever the dice hand out. On the other hand, a lot of adventure fiction and truly specatuclar roleplaying is about heroes running horrible risks and prevailing against the odds. These action/adventure heroes run risks that give them very low survival odds, yet (thanks to the author not actually rolling dice to see if his heroes make it) survive anyway. Likewise, when you hear about real life heroes that survive spectacular risk-taking, you usually forget about the 999 would-be heroes who tried the same and died.


Note that action/adventure heroes rarely are being stupid. They often act quite intelligently to maximize their odds. It's just that they start out so far behind that even maximizing odds leaves them running horrible risks. As I said, that works in fiction where the author is on their side, but in a roleplaying game, if you improve your odds from 1% to 5%, you still die 19 times out of 20.

The result is that PCs either behave in very non-heroic, not to say pusillanimous, ways or they die with depressing regularity.

I use fate points to alleviate the problem, but that's not entirely satisfactory, since fate points allow PCs to survive stupid risk-taking just as much as heroic risk-taking.


Hans

 

[PFVA63]

Hi,

I guess what I'm getting at is that maybe if its just a bad die-roll or something that lead to a bad result I wouldn't be adverse to adjusting the outcome, or if its early in an adventure and players are still feeling their characters out I might easily see changing a disastorous die roll into something a little less severe.

But unless the whole campaign has kind of been along a "Star Wars"-esque bent where your small group of dashing adventurers have come to expect that being only armed with blaster pitols they could hold off an entire squad or two of amored stormtroopers, then my feelings will probably be different. And specifically, if they intentionally get into a situation where it should be pretty clear to them that there's a good chance of a bad outcome then I would more likely be of the mind of playing the rules as written.

To me, in the OP it seems like there might have been a fair chance for taking heavy damage, but I think I could go either way with either playing it strictlyby the rules or by downgrading a completely disasterous result into a "almost completely disasterous one - but at least your characters live -but with heavy damage". I don't think I'd be willing to go for anything less severe though, since the players probably should be very well aware that what they were trying to do was very risky, and sometimes that means a very bad result.

As for some of the other cases though, it seems like the players may have just really been pushing to see what they could get away with, and as such to me "they took their chances so they should be willing to deal with the results".

But like I said above, if its a new group, or if the players don't really seem to be aware that what they are trying to do is really not that smart I could see toming things down a little, while still trying to make the outcome a good "lesson learned" for the players.

I think there's a quote form one of the Dirty Harry movies that might sum things up best, where Clint Eastwood says o Hal Holbrooke (I think) "A man's got to learn his limitations" or something like that, and if a group pushes the boundaries a little too far then maybe a bad result will help them see what their limitations were.

 

[samuelvss]

Unless, as the others said, the players have done something monumentally stupid and continually ignored the Ref's implicit or explicit warnings. In that case, yes, a short campaign might serve to sober them for the next one.

In my games the dice aid the story, they don't dictate it.

I agree. I have had players jump into a system with an A2, and run into a Type C run by pirates; I leaned on the chances to get them through it. A few wounded, they need to send help to get their ship jumpworthy, but without my thumb on the scales they would have been space toast. Of course, they were trying to maximize their chances and not looking for trouble.

This is an RPG, not a simulation (ran those with the Army), and the point is to have fun.

I think a campaign is different from a Con game, though, and stupidity should never be rewarded.

 

[Limburger59]

In my games the dice aid the story, they don't dictate it.

I agree with this quote. I probably would have fudged and had the ship end up in a system with a habitable, low TL planet.

 

[mike wightman]

Virtually every early official Traveller adventure I ran ended up with a TPK.

Kinunir - never trust a lying AI - this one did end in a catastrophic failure in deep space.

RSG - don't open the cages or trust the robots.

TP - I've never seen a party survive it ever.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Virtually every early official Traveller adventure I ran ended up with a TPK.

Kinunir - never trust a lying AI - this one did end in a catastrophic failure in deep space.

RSG - don't open the cages or trust the robots.

TP - I've never seen a party survive it ever.

What are RSG or TP?

 

[DarkAngelCryo]

What are RSG or TP?

research station gamma and twilights peak would be my guess

 

[soloprobe]

The last Game I ran in which the player characters all got killed ,was In the first traveller campiagn I ever ran . The P.C.s boarded a delelict vessel, and they all died at the Hands(?) of the robots still onboard. They rolled up new characters and went back to that ship . and looted the bodies of their old characters, but still failedd to salvage the ship.

 

[SpaceBadger]

I use fate points to alleviate the problem, but that's not entirely satisfactory, since fate points allow PCs to survive stupid risk-taking just as much as heroic risk-taking.

I like fate points also (we call them drama points), but like you haven't yet found a satisfactory balance point for them. To me, the main idea of using a drama point is that if the hero has managed to get to a point where he can save the day with a dramatic dagger throw, the whole thing shouldn't go down the tubes because he rolls badly and misses the target. But, as you say, the points are also subject to abuse to save the PCs from something they really shouldn't be doing.

Example: in a Pathfinder game, typical D&D-ish setting, there was an obvious route to the goal that I did not want the PCs to take, so I let them see that there were some monsters along that path that were clearly out of their league to fight. They didn't take the hint, and ended up scrambling up an icy cliff to try to escape a white dragon. One of the NPCs fell back behind the rest, and my eldest son had his PC turn back to try to save him. Some bad rolls foiled the rescue and the dragon was getting close, so he used some fire spell that I've forgotten, adding a drama point to make it critical, and killed a dragon he never should have been fighting. I let it stand due to the circumstances, but warned them not to count on hunting dragons that way, as it wouldn't work again. They took the hint and turned back and found a different way to the goal.

Long-winded example, but I think that shows why I still have some problems with a drama/fate point system, but am still working at it as i like the concept.

 

[Whipsnade]

In any case, how many games have ended for you folk with a catastrophic failure in the depths of space?

An interesting question and one that doesn't lend itself to an easy answer.

I've had adventures and campaigns end in "Full Party Wipeouts". However, those endings depended more on the who, what, and when of the players themselves rather than the situations the player-characters found themselves in.

I saw more PC deaths and more near or full party wipeouts when I was a younger player and GM. I remember playing the first adventure in the classic "Against the Giants" trilogy and our party being killed off rather rapidly. We laughed it off, put together higher level PCs, and started the module again all during the same session. Similar things happened during our very early CT/non-OTU sessions. We used the rules more like a man-to-man miniature combat system than a RPG and the body count reflected that.

Looking back I have to assume that we weren't worried about PC deaths because we weren't worried about continuity, either with PCs or players. We could always roll up a new character or find a new player, we could always restart an adventure, and we nearly always finished any given adventure during a single session.

As others have noted, I've seen more deaths and wipeouts in convention games. Again, there's no desire for continuity in those cases.

When we began running campaigns in our RPGs, when we began playing RPGs more as RPGs and less as war games, and when we began playing with the same core of players, deaths dropped not because the GM routinely fudged die rolls but because the players acted with more thought. Continuity counted now. We wanted our PCs to last and we didn't want to exit a campaign early as a player.

As a GM I never apologized for punishing stupidity. I fudged die rolls and massaged encounters when the plot demanded it, but the PCs' actions had consequences and the players were well aware of it. There was no free lunch.

Similarly, if a player decided to sacrifice their PC for some reason, the die rolls remained untouched. Interfering in such a situation to reward the player's selfless decision and ensure their PC's survival would make a mockery of that decision. Also, if a GM develops a reputation of fiddling die rolls to save PCs in selfless situations, the players will quickly fall into the habit of announcing sacrificial intentions in order to dodge the consequences of their earlier actions.

In the end, a player's reaction to their character's death is going to depend on many separate factors. However, if a GM has run the adventure/campaign with a consistent, honest, and transparent application of the rules, there shouldn't be too many hurt feelings.

 

[Blue Ghost]

research station gamma and twilights peak would be my guess

Gotcha.

mike; I'm guessing someone always fired a shot off when exploring the Droyne Frozen watch berth?

 

[HiverLord]

In any case, how many games have ended for you folk with a catastrophic failure in the depths of space?

My long-running HS campaign ended with one of the players attempting a TPK suicide mission on the rest of the party! (He and a couple others were heading off to college; the campaign had lasted four years.)

This player took his ship to where the Chamax planet was locate IMTU (they had been there years earlier, and survived somehow). He remembered a lot about the situation, and captured several Chamax... don't remember how anymore, but it took him a while (and some casualties... :devil

Anyway, long story short, he put some Chamax in low berth, returned, invited the rest of the party aboard for a 'planning session', released the Chamax just as the ship entered jump space...

As I recall, the ship was trashed completely, misjumped 'quite nicely', and took out most of the party and npcs...

When I ran into them 20+ years later, they STILL talk about it.

 

[rancke]

My long-running HS campaign ended with one of the players attempting a TPK suicide mission on the rest of the party! (He and a couple others were heading off to college; the campaign had lasted four years.)

Was that his character's motivation? That his player was going off to college?

[snip]

Anyway, long story short, he put some Chamax in low berth, returned, invited the rest of the party aboard for a 'planning session', released the Chamax just as the ship entered jump space...

As I recall, the ship was trashed completely, misjumped 'quite nicely', and took out most of the party and npcs...

To me that just sounds so wrong in so many ways.

When I ran into them 20+ years later, they STILL talk about it.

Oh, I'd be talking about it after 20+ years too.


Hans