What do you do when your players win and/or kill an encounter they weren't supposed too?

They're going to get some special rewards that's for sure.

What about when they were supposed to win, but after actually struggling and not one-rounding the guy and all of his allies?

You mean like murdering their way through parley that was supposed to be peaceful? At first I was perplexed too but now I just shrug it off carry on.

I either learn from my mistake and recalibrate my standards and expectations for planning future encounters (if it was just plain not as tough as I'd planned), or I award the players some action dice for good thinking (if they thwarted me with a clever plan I wasn't expecting).

>weren't supposed too?
Realize this isn't a book, it's an RPG, and rethink my DMing methods.

The only time I ever set my players up with an unbeatable encounter was to demonstrate that a certain entity was not to be fucked with until they got much stronger.

I kill myself for writing a scenario where my players have to ride the railroad that hard. Seriously, if they can't make dynamic choices in the game, they're better off playing video games.

Same linear plot, less fucking around with dice.

What's this "weren't suppose to"? Did they just pick up the minis representing the opponents and squirrel them up their asses till you said they won? Because that's time for a new group.

>an encounter they weren't supposed to?
You're a bad GM

I'm pretty sure I always make sure they're never put into that kind of situation. Call it hand-holding if you want.

Happens occasionally that players defeat an encounter in a way I didn't anticipate them doing so, whether it be by causing the enemy to retreat or something else. In my last session, I designed an encounter to begin after an enemy exploded out of their box. Shortly before it did so, the party quickly held the lid down. Three rounds of opposed strength checks later, rope had been fetched and the monster was bound and stored away to be dealt with later.

That's fooken backward tho

If they're not supposed to win, and you don't make it unwinnable, they're going to figure out some bullshit method of winning

>unless you go "lol the goblin is actually unwinnable tough luck biatch"

Once had the BBEG ride down into battle to trash the players around a bit as a warning

Well, they kind of critrolled too many times, and the BBEG died before escaping

So in the end, they had to fight BBEG's nephew, Bob

Worked out well, had a few laughs, game continued on

Plan B

you do have a plan B right?

>all this player agency cocksucking
>abloo bloo a good gm would never do something as dramatic as beating the party intentionally no matter what you always gotta polish their little PC knobs

Not if it is obvious that aren't gonna win and have to work out something else.

>playing 4E DnD with some friends and a literal aspie DM years back
>bunch of bullshit happens
>get into an absolutely unfair encounter because DM clearly wants to railroad us in a particular direction
>friends and I go master tactician and manage to win
>aspie DM looks utterly defeated
>"I need a break to figure out where to go from here"

Well, the GM runs with an infinite budget so of course he can win any encounter he wants to. Knowing this beating the party intentionally feels just like bullying, so why do that?

What were you doing the GM didn't want? I have a feeling you just tried to kill the king or some quest-giving NPC.

I once had a group who, through sheer idiocy, fucked up their first quest beyond any hope of fixing. I learned a couple of things about GMing that day; the first was never expect the players to follow a story, the second was always have a pre-written adventure you can default to just in case you need to reset your campaign.

The game isn't "players vs gm", it's "players as narrated by gm". Sure players can lose fights but intentional TPKs are lame.

Is this thread a joke?

If the players aren't supposed to kill something, don't let them fight it. If they're not supposed to succeed, don't make them roll for it.

If you're giving them the opportunity to roll the dice, it means there's an inherent chance of success. If you think planning a fight "too hard for them to beat because mechanics" is a real thing, then you don't understand the point of DMing.

Wanna beat them down? Sure, whatever, go ahead. Just don't make it a fight. Don't let them roll at all. At least that way they can't accuse you of being a cheating retard who says "Whoops I gave this enemy 300 health didn't think you'd do all that damage! Oh well, he still kills you anyway." when your shit flops.

Seriously, is this really how Veeky Forums thinks?

It's sort of hard to remember, but I'll try my best. What I do recall is that we had helped some faction that was being oppressed and afterwards with their blessing we made their homeland our party's base of operations, moved a bunch of our followers and character families there and stuff. We went off on one adventure and came back to find that the faction we had helped had randomly decided to kill all of the followers and family for pretty much next to no reason. We wanted to get answers so we tried to get into contact with one of the leaders of this faction to try and get some answers to "why" and arranged a place to meet. The "unwinnable" encounter was them ambushing us. If it was more recent, I could probably make a guess as to the direction the DM was trying to point us in, but years later I can't remember enough to figure what the hell was going on.

ITT: People who don't understand the difference between an intentional engineered unwinnable encounter and an optional "whoa fuck, we probably should not go near that shit" scenario.

If you're a level 1 PC in the tavern and the kingdom's archmage is out for a stroll on the town while dressed like a trillionaire decked out in all sorts of magical shit they've never seen before and your PCs still decide to fight him and then get TPK'd in the first 10 minutes, was the GM really to blame for the "unwinnable encounter"? The GM only becomes a dick if you're sitting in the tavern and the archmage kicks open the door and starts hurling spells at the party just because you wanted to TPK them.

You shouldn't avoid having incredibly powerful creatures in your worlds just because your players are dumbfuck murderhobos who kill/resort to violence before assessing a situation. I get that it's a game and the players want to "win", but come on, they shouldn't be able to defeat every situation they come across because they wanted to. Bad shit exists in the world and NOW isn't always the best time to get bloody with it, they can level up and come back.

You're free to criticize me and call me a shit GM for not handholding my players.

Kinda late to the game but this is something I've considered before. Scripted losses are cool as hell in video games and stuff so implementing ones crossed my mind before.

The issue being, you're running a game completely controlled by the decisions of other people. if your players decide they want to walk over to Zeus and punch him in the dick, they're going in with the understanding that they're now rolling for initiative against something with fifteen hundred HP and an attack that can be cast six times a turn. If they do manage to discover some insane out of the box way of actually winning the fight, using a macguffin of power, rigging the mountain your standing on to explode, whatever it may be, then that's a fucking incredible accomplishment and should be rewarded in it. They weren't "supposed to" win due to sheer numbers and circumstance, but they pulled it off so good for them. You don't just say "nah you lose anyway"

And if you plan for an encounter like that to literally fall out of the sky as part of your grand plot or whatever, at least present it outright it's going to be that way. Don't even do the song and dance of pretending it's a real fight. And even then, assuming it's not directly and clearly instigated by the players decisions up to that point, you're still being kind of a shit for pulling that.

There's a very, very big difference between players walking up to the High Archmage of Fuckoff Tower and punching him in the face to start a fight, and the DM creating an encounter they're not "supposed to" win.

Even if they punch the Archmage in the face, they can still win the encounter, they're not "supposed to" lose. The NPC was not created to kill them, and the encounter is not designed such that they are intended to lose should it happen.

When you create something the players are "supposed to" lose, what you're doing is putting them in a scenario where they lack a key piece of information, which is "You are meant to lose this fight, regardless of what effort you put into it."

Now lemme bring this back around for a second. I am not saying that fights that SEEM unwinnable are not fun. In fact, memory brings me to this FPS (Medal of Honor? I don't remember) where you're holed up in this town while enemies swarm in and you're just using all your ammo not knowing if you're meant to lose, or what. It's tense, it's a good moment. Not because you are not meant to win, but because up until the end it SEEMS that way.

But if that event had actually just been infinite enemies spawning until you run out of ammo and die? Yeah, that'd be shit story design.

Unwinnable encounters that are the result of stupid decision making and explicit pointless derailing are fine by me, speaking as a player. What bothers me more than that sort of thing is an unfinishable encounter.

What I mean by that is a situation in which an antagonist who by all rights should be forced to either fight to the death or surrender, somehow, through GM fiat, manages to slip away and we have to deal with their stupid ass later. Yeah, I'll totally buy that this dude in plate armor has a fast enough movement speed to outpace our fastest runner and a high enough stealth score to quickly fade into the crowd so that we couldn't just ask around to find their location. Sure. Sounds legit.

My players know that I don't have static worlds. Actions might have consequences. However, they seem to take perverse joy in seeing how deep into the shit they can go before they die. They have wiped three different parties now...

I don't run into that problem, because I'm competent.

>What do you do when your players do X when they weren't supposed too?
????
Does anyone actually seriously design their games like this?

Never help the fantasy nignogs. They're nignogs for a reason.

My GM didn't mind it when we got clever and won when we weren't really supposed to.

But he did take steps to ensure that we didn't become a one-trick pony, which was too bad because I think orbital bombardments are something you don't get to do enough of in Rogue Trader.

If you want an encounter to be unkillable, don't give them fucking hitpoints, you retard.

I've never had that happen, because I've never designed encounters my players weren't supposed to win. I've designed encounters they probably couldn't win, but I've always figured out what would happen if they did anyway because making it so they can only take a certain path means I don't have a game, I have a novel I'm reading to them.