I'm making a post apocalyptic one off taking huge inspiration from Fury. Army remnants coming from the NCR have headed east abandoning their posts in an endless war to instead travel east towards TN. They have access to a heavily salvaged tank. Crew is 4 players and DMNPC as commander to introduce them into the world and show them the ropes etc. They have one of the last tanks in the wastes and are a huge target for any scavengers and raiders in the area. They will eventually come into a destroyed city filled with raiders. I want them to feel the oppressing nature of being constantly under fire but I want them to have outs. I want them to have hope but being surrounded by a grim reality will take its toll.
so have you ever had a doomed scenario that still gave your players an enjoyable experience?
Have you ever done a No win scenario and how would you?
Bumping with shitty post apocalyptic art and inspirations
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Score-based system. You're going to die in the end, but what matters is how much damage you did.
So kind of like an after action report or recap?
You guys made it this far and did X amount of damage to this group, caused X amount of casualties etc?
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There's an osr module called Thulian Echos that basically has the players find an ancient journal of an adventuring party that all died. The players take the roles of the deceased party and go into a high fatality oriented dungeon. Later they come back with their current characters to a familiar but changed by the ages.
It works well for osr, which is already sort of about seeing how far you can get before you die, but its adaptable to different settings.
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>back to a familiar death trap, with plans, but it has been changed by the ages and the dm
sorry, tired
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Did a one shot where I, in the opening monologue, told the players that die during the one shot.
It WAS a Halloween thing so I figured it was acceptable. And my players fucking loved the one shot because the fact that they were doomed didn't affect their progression. I didn't railroad it. They were free to play like they wouldn't die at the end. Honestly, they just happened to die anyways.
If you're creative and can still be able to form a campaign without everything centering around DOESNT MATTER ANYWAYS LOL UR DOOMD.
It takes more than just pounding on all sides to to overwhelm someone, I'd make every bit of scrap, fuel, ammo, and equipment count. Items are options for players to work with, by running out items they get more desperate. Having a lack of items may also help the group decide how they should act and plan. How will spare parts feed the crew? Can they bluff their way to safety with no shells? Should we steal from these poor wanderers? Of course finding a stockpile of goods or having a helpful stranger once in a while is good way to not make the whole game a slog.
Reminds me of some guy's Only War campaign, where basically they played out a shitton of separate characters and could see where their successes bought time/held the line/all that.
literally just play Twilight 2000
>Have you ever done a No win scenario
No, of course not. there's nothing rewarding about that except that you get to look smugly at your now frustrated players,I'm sure this isn't 100% of cases, but that's how I feel about it.
It's not fun for me, even as a GM, to see the PC's fail miserably.
>Dmitrys
Those girls have dicks.
But it's not failing miserably, it's going out in a blaze of glory. If you think the only option is a miserable failure then that's your fault as a DM. Look at examples of doomed storytelling, Halo fall of reach. That game had an great story and players felt very connected to the characters even though they knew they would all die. But that just made it that much more tragic, seeing them fall one by one as they tried their hardest. You knew they were going to fail but you still played the game and got to the end.
I don't want my players to think that death is them failing, and I think if I open up by saying that your chances of survival are low they might not take death as seriously, while still aim for the goal of ultimate survival.
But that's just the humble opinion of a DM who just wants to live out his Bonded-In-Battle fantasies.
>But it's not failing miserably, it's going out in a blaze of glory.
I just don't particularly like to tell those kinds of stories, It SOUNDS like you do and I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that necessarily, provided the other players share your sentiment and enjoyed themselves. I just don't think I can agree.
I hear you. Thanks for not calling me a nigger
Don't mention it.
Ran a homebrew setting where something like that happened once. There were technologically advanced ancient civilizations that destroyed each other in a global war. At some point actual magic came into the setting and thousands of years later a generic fantasy setting grew atop the dead civilization's ruins. Players were adventurers who eventually got involved in a plot to stop an evil mage who wanted to try carrying out an ancient summoning ritual that was actually just a startup sequence for an ancient anti-matter bomb.
At one point the party got sidetracked in one of the ruins while chasing after the mage. They found their way to the logistics center and after a long string of questions and lucky rolls they found out about a system that basically let them reenact the last records before the base became abandoned. One of the players got really excited about the idea and got the others on board with wanting to run a one-shot about how the base fell. I told them it wasn't something that could rewrite history, but if they were fine with that I'd run it.
Next session we played it out with a different system. They went from fantasy adventurers to cybernetically enhanced soldiers fending off an enemy attack that culminated in a nuclear strike on surface level of the base. They went into the one-shot knowing that their temporary characters were going to die, but they still played it out really well. They managed to hold an armory during the initial battle so as a reward later on their adventurers found out the armory was still mostly intact and their adventurers got to loot a bit of what survived the ages.
Not sure if it counts OP but I think those kind of setups can work just fine as long as everyone agrees to it being a possibility.