Campaign's End

[warwizard]

Way back when I had a new party choose to try being pirates, they even took in an Ex Navy PC that rolled snake eyes on continuing in a very good navy carreer up to that point. That player decieded to try to get back into the navy by getting the pirate ship captured....

I used a firey escort and it's one gig for the no notice inspection , the players shot at the Imperials who then auto returned fire & took out the laser turret they used, and the gig clamps onto the hull before the PC's can get their collective thumbs out. We use a deck plan and mini's, they were still under atmosphere, and the breeching charge vents the hull to vacuum, most of the pirates do not have their vacc suits on and are in the process of explosive decompression and my three naval ratings board , all in combat armor, 2 gauss rifles and one RAM gernade launcher... the fight ended with the pirate captan abandoning ship in his combat armor (through the shattered bridge windows), and critical failure rolling his reentry burn on his personal reentry kit, too steep and one crispie critter pirate captan later the PC Ex naval officer is in the sickbay for shrapnel and vaccuum exposure and back in the navy, and everybody rolls up new characters. Fun was had by all.

 

[Garyius2003]

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.

In Twilight's Peak once they cross the bridge (assuming they have a laser carbine and ACR or three) they should make it to the help. How hard were you pushing them? The snowcats shouldn't be that bad, even with an ATV. The trapper is way overpowered, I just looked again to make sure that even the cute kitten is 25 pounds.

But, once you cross the bridge as long as you killed the officer in the first gunfight and deleted the battle dress wearers, the adventure is playable with 2-3 PCs holding the bridge until the sleepers get involved.

I agree the battle dress fire team was way too much fire power for the bad guys.

 

[DangerousThing]

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


Hans

I agree. I still remember the time I was invited to play in a DnD campaign by the best GM at college. Another player decided to kill my hobbit because his character was chaotic. So during the night he back stabbed my character, I had one hit point left, managed to barely hit him back and was finished off.

I had the character for a total of fifteen minutes. The GM graduated. His campaigns were legendary, but this game really sucked for me.

I caution players now that I do not sanction PCs killing other PCs without a really good reason. I've only had to intervine a couple of times over the years to deal with this.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

I caution players now that I do not sanction PCs killing other PCs without a really good reason. I've only had to intervine a couple of times over the years to deal with this.

Anyone committing that sort of act will have inevitably pissed off all sorts of people in my universe - who will all show up together one evening, do a coin toss as to who gets to start, then proceed to take him down. I handle munchkins with the same sort of thing: there is *always* someone bigger and badder than you in the universe... and he's heard about you and wants to see if you're as bad as you claim.

 

[McPerth]

I had one campaign and one adventure ending with party defeated.

The campaign was my first AD&D campaign, when the party thought they could make a stand against a full orc tribe... They described it as Custer's end, and the only survivors were taken away while KO by some wiser NPCs that decided it was time to call retreat.

The adventure was a Traveller adventure with players that had never played Traveller (except one) that occurred in Earth just after Strephon assasination. The veteran player played a SolSec agent (undercover as a free trader) looking for a Phoenix cell SolSec had had clue was still active. the rest were Imperial citizens.

Once they located the cell, they (used to Fantasy heroic games) to take care of it themselves instead of calling the autorities. They were at least wise enough to surrunder, so no fatalities occurred...

Sadly, they blamed Traveller, not me or the veteran player, for their failure, and I'm afrain none of them played Traveller again (they were not Sci-fi fans, anyway).

 

[Whipsnade]

I caution players now that I do not sanction PCs killing other PCs without a really good reason. I've only had to intervine a couple of times over the years to deal with this.

In all my years of RPG play on both sides of the table, I never saw one PC maliciously kill another PC. I've seen mercy killings and I've seen accidental killings, but I've never seen one PC kill another with "malice aforethought".

When I first heard other players and GMs talk about PCs maliciously killing other PCs, I wasn't exactly shocked but I was definitely surprised.

I suppose I'm lucky that I never had to deal with the issue.

 

[Putraack]

To the original question: not in Traveller, but I ran a Star Frontiers game that nearly ended with the PCs' ship (planetary militia) getting torn apart in combat. Since it was the first space-fight, I was generous in allowing the crew to bail out and get rescued by allies. And get another ship (though they were not in command anymore).

 

[Blue Ghost]

In Twilight's Peak once they cross the bridge (assuming they have a laser carbine and ACR or three) they should make it to the help. How hard were you pushing them? The snowcats shouldn't be that bad, even with an ATV. The trapper is way overpowered, I just looked again to make sure that even the cute kitten is 25 pounds.

But, once you cross the bridge as long as you killed the officer in the first gunfight and deleted the battle dress wearers, the adventure is playable with 2-3 PCs holding the bridge until the sleepers get involved.

I agree the battle dress fire team was way too much fire power for the bad guys.

Guilty admittance here, I castigated our GM that night for running the adventure. I deplored his implementation and berated him for using battle dressed NPCs to chase us, and explained how he didn't know the rules, what the consequences were of his actions and generation of such an overpowering foe, and the like.

He shut me up by showing me that it was in the adventure. I hadn't thought about that for a long time, and really regret getting all hot and bothered by that. I seem to recall that he made one other modification to the adventure, and that the "survival tower" turned out to be the barrel of an underground Droyne planetary defense battery.

Things evened out at that point

 

[Icosahedron]

I agree. I still remember the time I was invited to play in a DnD campaign by the best GM at college. Another player decided to kill my hobbit because his character was chaotic. So during the night he back stabbed my character, I had one hit point left, managed to barely hit him back and was finished off.

I had the character for a total of fifteen minutes. The GM graduated. His campaigns were legendary, but this game really sucked for me.

I caution players now that I do not sanction PCs killing other PCs without a really good reason. I've only had to intervine a couple of times over the years to deal with this.

I usually have a couple of red shirt NPCs in any party. In a situation like this, one of the NPCs would have wondered if he was next and taken steps later that night or the next to ensure he wasn't...

 

[DangerousThing]

I usually have a couple of red shirt NPCs in any party. In a situation like this, one of the NPCs would have wondered if he was next and taken steps later that night or the next to ensure he wasn't...

One of the two times I had to enforce this rule was in Shadowrun. The group had taken a loyalty oath to each other with the party's shaman officiating.

So when Wabbit shot another player in the back, he had time to realize that the other player was turning to him with concern, no fear so he shot off a couple more rounds before he realized that he was shooting himself in the abdomen. He didn't think that a magically powered loyalty oath would bother him, and the extra shots were more than enough to get through his regeneration.

The guy was a real bastard and I didn't realize how much of one until I saw his conviction notice in a paper several years later.