Know When to Hold 'em... Know When to Fold 'em?

[Severus Snape]

I think the biggest issue here is that you have become afraid to challenge the players. You are afraid of what may happen or be said if a PC has his butt kicked, and you've started making excuses to give them a win button if they need it. In your example of the SAMAS pilot, there is no way on god's green earth the players should have been able to find out about the black pepper allergy without doing a whole lot of major research BEFORE they stepped into combat with him. But you didn't want to kill the character and hurt the feelings of a 12 year old kid in the process, so you basically said "Hey, you can take this guy out if you do this".

Nobody likes to have their characters killed. Especially if you've been playing that character for a long time. But people die, and characters should be no exception.

Don't take this the wrong way, but you need to grow a spine. Stand up to your players. Let them know that if they just waltz in with the invulnerability attitude (ie, they just wade in and feel like nothing bad is going to happen) that bad things will happen. If they complain about you killing their characters, remind them of what THEY did to be in that situation, how THEY could have avoided death, and that THEY chose to continue even though death was pretty much imminent. After that happens a few times, they'll start singing a new tune. But YOU have to play the role of bad guy once or twice before it sinks in. You may have to do that more than once or twice seeing as your players know that you will give them the out if they complain enough.

[kamikazzijoe]

Insanitary tables are great for this kind of situation. I have a player with the immortal regeneration mega power (similar to highlander for those not playing Heroes Unlimited.) He has bio armor which makes him a pain to damage and his ability to flee while at negative HP is amazing. I could kill him easily enough with a bio-manip villain, but rather than do that, I capture and torture/abuse him. Insanities have done strange things to players and its usually funny. Another option is cutting off body parts. Lets see how cocky that mage is after he loses his hand.

But on the whole a good philosophy is this:
GMs don't kill players, players kill players. If you set up an ambush, you don't kill them and do the stuff you've been doing. If they're warned of the ambush and still walk into it with just bravado and no plan then some of them die.

One thing I build into my games are "get out of jail" cards where an NPC they've rescued/helped will come back at a dramatic moment.

[St. Evil]

I think a TPK is in order but seriously if a situation calls for them to die & they acted appropriately stupid mahaps they will learn something.

[Killer Cyborg]

But I get the feeling that as a result, my players are way too cocky. It may be due to their experience (they've played for years) and the hubris that follows, or the fact that nobody's died in awhile, but I get the feeling that they don't believe anything is a threat to them.

They're the kind of group that knows every way to storm a dungeon, but won't back down when the fight's too big for them. They're the kind of group that would whack a CS scouting party, and complain when they stick around too long and the reinforcements blow the party to smithereens.

If they "know every way to storm a dungeon," then they're ready to pull on the Big Boy Pants and stop using training wheels.

Normally, I give them an out (such as an easy retreat, negotiation, etc...) but then I get accused of cheating in favour of myself in order to make more of a challege (Killer GM). Such a headache sometimes.

That's another problem. You have to be sure you're not going out of your way to "provide a challenge" for the party; if you accidentally low-ball one encounter, don't try to compensate by making the next one extra hard.
While I have absolutely no problem with PCs dying, a lack of PC deaths (or even close calls) doesn't necessarily mean that you need to kick things up a notch.
I've had several D&D GMs that acted that way, and the result was that things were too easy one fight, and a TPK the next.
Part of balancing each encounter is taking into account what the PCs have available, and this is something that those GMs weren't very good at. We'd run into a tough encounter, throw everything we had at it, and blow through it pretty easily.... the GM, thinking that we'd had too easy a time of it, would throw another encounter at us that was just a bit harder than the last one.
But in the last one, we had all our daily abilities and other limited-use tricks; in this next one, we're tapped out, so we get stomped.

In Rifts, resources are even more important.
An easy encounter against a group that has some missiles to spare might be a deadly encounter against a group that's used their missiles up.
An encounter where the PCs only lose 10-15 MDC each is generally pretty easy... until the PCs only have 10-15 MDC left, THEN it becomes a TPK.

It sounds like you have a good handle on running things, but it's important to keep in mind that you have to balance encounters against the PCs current abilities, not their maximum.
As long as you do that, you should be safe from any fair accusations of being a Killer GM.

The point is, I want to make it clear that for each challenge, they have to start using their better judgement and determine whether or not the encounter is something that they can handle. My group does not do this. They assume when a threat is dangled out, they have to fight it no matter what.

Good habit to break them of.
You might need to literally change the game, though, for this kind of game-change.
Try a BtS Victims adventure or two.
Or a low-powered Rifts adventure/campaign where the PCs start off with little to no Mega-Damage capability.

I've even stated this clearly to the group. I told them they may encounter things they can't handle as a group. It's up to them to figure out when such situations arise and what to do about. They still haven't figured this out.

So I have to keep making flimsy excuses to make an easy out. Villains who pause at the moment to do a campy villain dialogue. NPC's with an unnatural amount of restraint towards verbal abuse, theft and property damage. Barrooms with patrons that will accidentally start a barroom brawl rather than drag the character out back. Stuff like that. I want to put an end to that.

Sounds like you need to put an end to that.
It's not your job to bail them out of trouble that they got themselves into.
You're the referee, not the babysitter.

How can I put my group through danger and actually have the prospect of failure become a possibility... without looking like a GM that's out to get them?

Tell them what you're doing before you do it.
Then do what you tell them you were going to.
If they complain, point out that you told them exactly what to expect, and they didn't plan accordingly.

If they get word that there's an "unkillable" super-villain out there, and they come after him/her/it without trying to find out exactly what that means, and/or without coming up with any ideas on how to get around it, then they've got nothing to complain about; they were warned what they were getting into.

So what do you think? I need more backbone?

Yeah.

That, or outright ask the players if they think they still need the training wheels. If they admit that they prefer you to lowball things and to throw them ropes when they need it, you might try to adjust your own expectations and just give them what they want.
But not if it's not what YOU want; you're there to help the players have a good time, not to service them at their whim.
Your fun is just as important as theirs.

[jedi078]

Personally many GM's out there seem too afraid to kill off a PC because it might mean the player will leave your game. They way I see it is this: If you don't cheap shot the player and it is really the characters actions why he/she was singled out to be shot/hacked at and it happens to be an attack the kills them they shouldn't complain. In fact mature players won' whine and cry, it's the immature ones who do cry or simply leave the game.

If a player does something really stupid, such as trying to look though the freshly made bullet hole in a door when you know bad guys are on the other side of it they deserve for someone to try to shoot them int he eye. This actually happened in one of my games and I did make a strike roll, which the PC failed to dodge.

I have had nat 20's blow PC's away in the first melee of combat on several occasions. Once I killed a PC on the very first strike roll of the game.

and to quote some of my players as to my style of GMing and the high body counts....

For those that haven't played in one of Darkside Trooper's games before, he's not kidding. He's not an evil GM, but he doesn't coddle players. If your character dies, s/he's dead. He'll probably let you get a new character rolled up and in ASAP. Natural 20's make a HUGE difference. Hope for them when you roll, and curse the dice roller when you're not rolling.

Personally, the fear of death make's DST's games incredible. Everyone hates when s/he loses a character, but without that fear a story gets stagnant.

And he doesn't always have to have 20s. I've lost one to just overwhelming firepower in a matter of 2 or 3 rounds. Granted the character is in a coma, and can be saved, but given that he is on a battlefield, seperated from his squadmates, it's not a given. But still, DST is fair, if a bit rough, but fear of losing a character just means you appreciate that character more when they narrowly survive death. And if/when that one dies, as long as you didn't screww yourself over, you get to try out yet another idea! No real downside....except the dying part, that sucks.

I agree with the danger = spice of life stuff. You certainly appreciate your guy more when you realize that he could be vaporized the instant a combat round starts. Of course, knowing that body count is a prime aspect of these games also makes one feel like less of a craven coward for hiding behind cover instead of charging headlong into the breach...

You can find the actual posts here: http://www.rpol.net/display.cgi?gi=3927 ... &msgpage=2

[Rallan]

Put the Rifts books down and play a completely different game by a completely different company. The rules aren't really hte problem here (although they don't help, because chargen is such a long and drawn-out pain in the ass that it makes character death a serious hassle), it's that your players have built up a bunch of expectations about how things are going to pan out for them in Rifts.

So play something different for a while and start from scratch. Play a survival horror game like Call of Cthulhu, where having your character survive (and be sane enough to keep adventuring) at the end of a game is a major victory. Or a transhumanist game like Eclipse Phase where body death is frequent but not life-threatening. Or a comedy RPG like HoL or Macho Women With Guns or Paranoia were everyone dies often and hilariously. Or a game with hella unforgiving combat mechanics where you need to be on your best tactical game every time there's an encounter.

Or hell, anything as long as it's not by Palladium. It's a clean break. It lets you start from scratch and be less forgiving without coming off as unfair because the players don't have any preconceptions about how lethal the game is or how carefully they should play it. Hopefully by the time you get back to your Rifts campaign after an extended vacation in other game systems, everyone'll be refreshed and have a new perspective and won't automatically fall into their old habit of assuming that they can just stand their ground and open fire on everything without thinking because you'll always give them an out.

Alternatively, just dragoon someone else into GMing so they can get a taste for just how much work you have to put into keeping the party alive in a world where there's no such thing as game balance and where all the default NPCs (including nameless soldiers) are the same classes with the same equipment as typical PCs.

[kamikazzijoe]

Just another thought: you can always fill there heads with thoughts of a glorious death. Hold the mountain pass, sabotage the reactor core, etc. For King and Country!

[kamikazzijoe]

Just another thought: you can always fill there heads with thoughts of a glorious death. Hold the mountain pass, sabotage the reactor core, etc. For King and Country!

Trimming the fat was our euphemism for that. Can't go battle a dragon with a weak link can you?

[drakinn]

There are consequences for actions and not thinking. first come the warning in the form of a beat down but let them live. next comes the you didn't learn so now you are dead.
here is my example of the latter. 5 characters hear about a valuable shipment that comes through the area twice a year. they didn't look any further and hit the shipment and made 250 million each. it is lightly armored and protected. they never asked where the money came from and went out and spent it on new stuff. they were all assassinated within a year in the game by the black market.
an example of the beat down the group finds a maxprey tunnel and take all the orbs and are rolling in it until cyberknights attack them and take their stuff and the stolen items to return to the maxprey look at the alignments of the rcc in the conversion book.

[Looonatic]

A death doesn't have to be permanent to get the message across. I had a cocky player with a superhuman mutant with the power of Invulnerability. He was annoyingly overconfident so I had a Coalition Jannisary snap his neck like a twig. He got better, but lesson learned.

[psam_rage]

Beat one player's character to a pulp, where the character is 50%+ crippled, and make the party work for his bionic upgrade/bio-system replacements. (Give him a pre-made temp character obviously)

Just my Idea... Though I know where the party gets this Idea... I never died until I switched groups recently and now I die left and right, even when I'm careful.

[Razzinold]

I also have had this problem with a player, they were in their vehicle, at it's maximum altitude which i believe was 1000 feet, and were basically having a dog fight against a couple of the New West Samas variants. Anyway they are dodging, being shot at, returning fire, when some of them manage to magnet themselves onto the roof, they being the SAMAS, and one of them opens up the passenger side door. Well the player has the brilliant idea to grab onto the SAMAS (he is a full conversion Borg) and when the SAMAS turns to shoot, he leaps onto him. So the pilot instantly rockets up to his maximum altitude and shoves the borg off him. The borg launches some mini missiles (Which missed) so the SAMAS returns fire with his. So between getting hit with the missiles and hitting the ground from that height, dude was actually pissed at me and claims that I "killed his character".
I asked him what his expectations were when he decided to jump from a flying vehicle onto a man sized flying vehicle, when said people were trying to murder them to take their vehicle. I guess he figured he could kill him and some how safely get back into his vehicle.
So being new to GMing, I thought fine, the group is only me plus 3 people I don't want to lose a member and maybe I was being to rough on him. So I said you survived the missile but lost half your body and you are still falling to your death. So I allowed the group to try and save him, the guy piloting rolled a natural 20 to "catch" him with the cargo part of the vehicle.
After doing that people were happy, except me, next time I'm just going to let the character die. I realized that was a BIG mistake to cuddle a character like that because now everyone else might expect that treatment, hopefully not since I've played with the other guys longer and they don't seem the type.

[Noon]

It sounds like your not pitching encounters that your not sure they can win, it sounds like your pitching encounters you know they can't win?

Why are you doing this? The outcome is predictable - there is no gameplay. Better to simply take control of their characters over in such a case and say "You all run away to X location". Because if you know they can't win, your just passive aggressively doing that, while pretending the players have control? If you want to force them to retreat, just take away control of their characters, make their characters do as you wish, then hand back control when your done. Quit trying to use impossible encounters but pretend the players have some sort of choice as to what to do. It's simply a form of railroading. That, or kill them.

Your probably, with honest intent, thinking they have a choice in retreating. Really, they don't have a choice when you know they can't win (unless by chance you are wrong as they win by pure good luck on their rolls). They only have a choice about retreating when your uncertain as to the battles outcome.

Your giving out false choices. If X is too powerful to fight, then retreating isn't a choice - the players hand is forced, to tie this into the thread title. The choice would come as to how they encountered X to begin with - did they have a choice in that? And was it a classic "do you turn left or right" blind choice? Which again, isn't really a choice (it's actually a coin flip).

Or the TL;DR version, a technique might be to have a map. On the map, draw a black circle. Say that if the group travels inside it, anything might kill them. Never ever force them into the black circle - only tempt them with riches or whatever tempts. And make sure there's always something to do outside the black circle, otherwise it's using boredom to railroad. This way, they have a real choice.

[Rallan]

Beat one player's character to a pulp, where the character is 50%+ crippled, and make the party work for his bionic upgrade/bio-system replacements. (Give him a pre-made temp character obviously)

Just my Idea... Though I know where the party gets this Idea... I never died until I switched groups recently and now I die left and right, even when I'm careful.

Yeah but... no. The "teaching them a lesson" approach generally doesn't achieve anything except ruining everyone's fun and making the GM look like a jerk.

[Noon]

Beat one player's character to a pulp, where the character is 50%+ crippled, and make the party work for his bionic upgrade/bio-system replacements. (Give him a pre-made temp character obviously)

Just my Idea... Though I know where the party gets this Idea... I never died until I switched groups recently and now I die left and right, even when I'm careful.

Yeah but... no. The "teaching them a lesson" approach generally doesn't achieve anything except ruining everyone's fun and making the GM look like a jerk.

Pretty much. As a game world god, you no longer work in terms of altering peoples behaviour - you simply decide what their choices are. You don't need to punish them out of doing an action - simply don't give that action as an available choice to begin with.

Granted, some people want to give the illusion of 'you can do anything' while quietly smacking players over the head for doing certain things (thus you can't do 'anything', only some things, thus it's an illusion of being able to 'do anything'). I have no idea how to unravel that ball of string.

[Rallan]

Beat one player's character to a pulp, where the character is 50%+ crippled, and make the party work for his bionic upgrade/bio-system replacements. (Give him a pre-made temp character obviously)

Just my Idea... Though I know where the party gets this Idea... I never died until I switched groups recently and now I die left and right, even when I'm careful.

Yeah but... no. The "teaching them a lesson" approach generally doesn't achieve anything except ruining everyone's fun and making the GM look like a jerk.

Pretty much. As a game world god, you no longer work in terms of altering peoples behaviour - you simply decide what their choices are. You don't need to punish them out of doing an action - simply don't give that action as an available choice to begin with.

Not to mention that if you're dealing with players who are used to steamrolling over everything and you decide to give them an "educational" ass kicking, the lesson they're most likely to learn is "make a more powerful character".

[Noon]

Not to mention that if you're dealing with players who are used to steamrolling over everything and you decide to give them an "educational" ass kicking, the lesson they're most likely to learn is "make a more powerful character".

Yeah, the 'punishment' just feels like a personal challenge from the GM to the players - so they take up the gauntlet with even more ass kicking charactes, as you say.

[Razzinold]

It sounds like your not pitching encounters that your not sure they can win, it sounds like your pitching encounters you know they can't win?

Why are you doing this? The outcome is predictable - there is no gameplay. Better to simply take control of their characters over in such a case and say "You all run away to X location". Because if you know they can't win, your just passive aggressively doing that, while pretending the players have control? If you want to force them to retreat, just take away control of their characters, make their characters do as you wish, then hand back control when your done. Quit trying to use impossible encounters but pretend the players have some sort of choice as to what to do. It's simply a form of railroading. That, or kill them.

Your probably, with honest intent, thinking they have a choice in retreating. Really, they don't have a choice when you know they can't win (unless by chance you are wrong as they win by pure good luck on their rolls). They only have a choice about retreating when your uncertain as to the battles outcome.

Your giving out false choices. If X is too powerful to fight, then retreating isn't a choice - the players hand is forced, to tie this into the thread title. The choice would come as to how they encountered X to begin with - did they have a choice in that? And was it a classic "do you turn left or right" blind choice? Which again, isn't really a choice (it's actually a coin flip).

Or the TL;DR version, a technique might be to have a map. On the map, draw a black circle. Say that if the group travels inside it, anything might kill them. Never ever force them into the black circle - only tempt them with riches or whatever tempts. And make sure there's always something to do outside the black circle, otherwise it's using boredom to railroad. This way, they have a real choice.

I'll assume this was directed at me, since it was posted right after my post (if it's not then I apologise).

There were multiple outcomes to this scenario, fight and win (which they did), fight and lose, run away, or land and hand over their vehicle (which is what the bandits wanted them to do). I don't see how control was taken from the players, I didn't railroad them into anything. They were flying across the desert heading from their town to the town they were traveling to for their paid job they accepted. They chose the direction they took, they told me we drive there in as straight as a line as possible, no detours, only stopping to let the vehicle jets cool down. I rolled a random encounter and rolled randomly on what kind of foe they faced and how many.

As stated above though Noon, if your post wasn't directed at me then I guess I wrote this out for nothing.

[Noon]

Sorry Razzinold, I should have noted it was for the OP! I'll read your reply through, as a consolation prize! Though I'm not sure I'll have anything to say!

[jedi078]

After doing that people were happy, except me, next time I'm just going to let the character die. I realized that was a BIG mistake to cuddle a character like that because now everyone else might expect that treatment, hopefully not since I've played with the other guys longer and they don't seem the type.

Yeah you can't coddle one player because he made a stupid decision.

The safe way to go about it is state to any new players to your group that there are consequences to your character decisions in game. I once had a player split up her fire team of four veritechs into two elements of two. She sent two VT's to help out other players while she continued on with her fire teams assigned task, which was to find and rescue some POW's. The POW's were found and rescued (they were in stasis pods) but then the two VT's were over whelmed by an Zent fire team led by an established enemy NPC. While I did reduce the Zent fire team from five to three, bad rolls on the part of the players resulted in a total party kill of five characters. The simple decision to split the fire team and bad rolls is what resulted in the TPK.

[Display-Name-Alpha]

First Time Poster!

I've been a GM for more than 20 years, I've been a player longer. Here is the first thing I say to a group of players when we get together.

"I'm going to try an kill you. I'm gonna be fair about it, but I'm gonna throw everything within your threat level at you. I'm going to try an kill you." First thing I say.

"PC's are exceptional by default. They are not the run of the mill vagabond who found a gun, they are not d-bee's just in from a rift. PC's have trained thier whole lives to become the best. The best starts at level 1 and just keep getting better." Second thing I say.

The third thing I say is refer to the first thing I said.

Now having been 'by my own admission' an icon of role-playing in the North Georgia area since the 80's (Sorry Kevin it's not been straight palladium and a shout out to my good friend Steve, wish the two of you would collaborate sometime *lightstrike!*). I can tell you that you have to be striaght up with the PC's about death. I usually have them roll up a couple of characters just in case, the squire who picks up his fallen knights weapon is a good example of how a player death can actually enhance the game. I usually kill off the first characters they roll up simply because they have no background as of yet. This allows the 2nd character to come in with a story that involves the part of the world the players are already familiar with and allows them to have a sense of purpose, even if only for vengance.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 7821122670
regarding the underlined if I come to georgia, will you sign my chesticles?

[Spinachcat]

I tell players that I am from the Sam Raimi school. Look at what he puts Ash through in Evil Dead. He's gotta do everything to win and take a tremendous beating along the way.

I also tell players that I am rooting for their players to win. However, my villains are going to do everything possible to kill them, destroy their loved ones and succeed in their evil plans. This is the world they have entered.