Pathfinder

He just rolled shit for stealth, like a 7 total. The other one just counter-stealthed the dude. The poison save was like 12 though.

>living in a world where the destined heroes failed and dealing with the consequences
This is a really cool concept. If a TPK happens somewhere in a campaing where I am DMing this will totally happen

No. The choices the players made led to the deaths of their characters, when they could have fled or surrendered or done anything but keep throwing dice at an encounter they were not capable of handling. Of you keep protecting them from their choices how will they ever learn any better?

I would advise you to start a new game based on the world that the previous characters died in, with all the consequences that entails, like said.

Just make sure that in this game you are going to use a GM screen to roll your dice behind.

Not him, but aren't you going on a bit too much on assumptions?

We don't know if the players tried diplomacy first or if they even could run away, we only know that their characters all died at a point that for the GM was very unsatisfying.

>Story gives depth to an adventure

Story is the weakest and most replaceable element of the campaign.

If you do not make a story, one will be conjured for you free of charge in short order.

Well, story hook generators, random terrain generators, and location generators are pretty easy to come by, but I am not sure what I would do with a random weather generator.

Anyone have those runs of bad luck where the players are going to die to a Giant Mantis at level 3 because nobody can make a damn hit?

With or without advantage?

Did you remember to get dungeon insurance?

Even better is when the barbarian with a +14 to hit while raging manages to miss the CR 2 creature.

Death isn't the only consequence. There are plenty of systems where PC death isn't really a thing, but where you can still suffer severe consequences for dumb decisions or poor luck.

The party should be able to beat a CR 4 encounter at levels 1-2

How much bonus EXP should I give for overcoming a much higher CR encounter? Like +3 CR.

What edition are we even talking about? 3e already covers it. I'm not even sure if 5e needs it.

Assuming they aren't resource-drained, the party holds the advantage until CR +3. CR +4 is 50/50, +5 means the enemy has the better odds of winning, +6 and forward has you heavily risking the TPK unless the party sets up an spectacular battle plan/is optimized to hell and back.

Depends if the creature ratings are tied to the exp.
In theory defeating a stronger creature would level them up faster without any bonuses and might yield loot of higher level.

At one point I had to start rolling saves in the open for our Wizard after he failed to be useful for about 1 and a half sessions.

Guy still thinks my dice are loaded to land on 17.

Uhm you can give them the ability to flee, get captured, wizard ex machina etc.

>The first one is basically just you being an asshole.

Goddamn 4e and 5e have made people pussified. Not even that guy, but holy shit. It's one thing if there are loads of other enemies still up to fight, but if you are alone and get paralyzed, yeah the guy might stab you in the throat while you stare up at him helplessly. It makes for a good story and makes you fucking hate the guys youre fighting instead of fighting them because muh plot says so.

My Pathfinder party (6 players of level 4) recently defeated an ettin, and four level 5 rogues who got the drop on the main character while he was literally singing as he walked down the corridor. He has like a 29 AC and an 18 flat-footed. They won without ANY losses, and the singing guy was the only person to go down at all.

Scouting ahead just means you're going to be facing encounter meant for four alone. It's a stupid thing to do in games.

You're retarded. You don't engage the encounter, dumbass. Do you even understand what scouting is? You move up stealthily, ready to duck back the second you see bad shit, so that you can form a battle plan to more easily beat encounters, or know what encounters to run away from.

Have PCs battle their way out of hell

And when you roll poorly on stealth and the enemy moves in to engage you, what then? Face it, while scouting ahead is a good idea in real life, in games it tends to cut short your character's lifespan.

In D&D you can't really run away effectively when you're discovered. You get a huge penalty to hide, and if they see you, they get a surprise round to get close; at that point all it takes is for them to win initiative and charge and you literally can't get away.

>Scouting ahead just means you're going to be facing encounter meant for four alone. It's a stupid thing to do in games.
See
>You're retarded. You don't engage the encounter, dumbass.
This

Worst case scenario and you get spotted, you shouldn't be so far from the party that they can't hear you fighting or call for help.

Getting out-stealthed by an enemy with instantly paralyzing darts that coup de grace's you is fucking harsh, but not unfair if they had a clue of what they were up against.
Moments like that make me grimace and shrug as a GM.

>Face it, while scouting ahead is a good idea in real life, in games it tends to cut short your character's lifespan.
It's good for the group.
Scouting is dangerous in real life too.
Ya dip.

>you literally can't get away
But you can call your team for back-up, right?

>Try again, this time with a sandbox instead of a pig disgusting railroad.
I don't think you understand any of those terms you just used.

>His stealth is not good enough to beat any CR-appropriate enemy's perception on a nat 1

Did you know that a 18 DEX goblin rogue can have +16 to stealth at level 1?

Actually if you want to scout sensibly you use divination spells, like a normal person. Feel free to play a suicidal rogue, but I'm not keen on rerolling my character on a regular basis.

>How do you recover/handle TPKs when they happen at the worst moments?
1: apologize, this way the players know the TPK was unintentional, best if the apology is genuine.
2: set the next session aside for character creation.
3: is where things get tricky, while I've been admittedly getting spoiled by FFG's Star wars RPG; The best thing to do is to listen to character backstories being developed there and try to come up with something, if you are a little stuck or the generated characters still need time to develop, it might be best to just put together a short 4-session adventure, that doesn't necessarily tie into their specific backstories but would still give them room to grow. Since this is pathfinder it might be good to skip the session after character creation to write-up any necessary NPC profiles and/or bookmark relevant charts for the adventure.

At anywhere from levels 1-3 you'll be eating a lot of attacks before then. Above that, you've got some options, but a rogue is squishy and probably will die under concentrated fire.

You timeskip and let whatever events PCs actions would have prevented/hindered happen. Roll a few dice to determine which of your villains end up moving on with their plans, which ones are intercepted or setback, and which ones get blown the fuck out by other adventurers/factions/countries/whatever. TPKs aren't the worst thing, infact, it can be fun going from a world that's kind of shitty to a world that's now mostly shitty with a new band of heroes rising to the occasion.

>any story at all means railroad
Entitled asshole detected.

It kinda depends on the execution. If the GM has a story in mind what should happen and refuses to budge from that then yeah it is railroading.

Well, yeah. But just having a story doesn't imply also having railroad.

But what if the story happens regardless? Like a war party of orcs going to destroy a town. The town is gonna be fucked if the PCs don't do something.

I don't play Pathfinder, but if the story is supposed to be some epic plot-focused fantasy, they get left for dead, miraculously saved or captured by the enemy.

If the story isn't of cosmic importance or is a sandbox, then characters die, tough tits. If it's plausible i'll still go towards "capture/save" route, but otherwise, tough luck, roll a new character.

If players go full roaming murderhobos, only their wits and their dice can save them.

Be DM

Be having a campaign, been playing with your friends for several weeks now, they all went from 1 to ten in time. Plots happening, backstory events triggered, whole shindig.

Some fucker rolls one on a teleport spell and everyone's dead. What do?

>Some fucker rolls one on a teleport spell and everyone's dead.

0/10 GMing. One roll shouldn't lead to "welp, TPK, especially if there's much more fun opportunity to be had.

And with teleport spell, opportunities are literally endless
>stranded in another land (with mystical masters and personal challenges before PCs return home)
>teleported to a meeting of a secret cult
>teleported to fancy royal ball
>same as the above, but sans clothes
>teleported to another plane
>teleported to Sigil (i don't give a shit that it's pathfinder, if your campaign setting doesn't include possibility for Sigil, it's shit campaign setting)
>teleported to the same place, but a week after
>teleported to a sailing ship

TPKs are for boring sadistic GMs, not creative sadistic GMs.

You're right, the DM could have put them in an unwinnable situation, but then we're dealing with a completely different kind of problem and the question becomes: why is OP asking for help after he deliberately killed his players?

Don't be a DM. Be a GM.

Assuming the only requirement for a solution is that the story can be kept intact, you either
A) Roll a new party in the same world that have to pick up the remains of the previous party's quest
or
B) Shoehorn in an afterlife and some way for the PCs to get their lives back, be it through divine intervention or NPC help, you name it. Give them a challenge in the afterlife to overcome or something. Maybe a god ressurects them because they are invested in the quest being completed by the PCs, and then reveal to them later that the god who saved them was executed or punished similarly for meddling in mortal affairs. It heavily depends on the setting honestly, but the solutions are endless.

Something like this. Don't treat everyone's health being at 0 as a finality. Have them fight out of hell, give them a deal with a devil, resurrected them as undead and tell them they need to find a way to regain their lives, have them all take non-lethal damage and wake up later without some of their best gear (if the enemy is intelligent), have them taken prisoner and have to break out.

Basically, screw the rule that says people die at negative whatever HP and let them get back up again on this plane or on another.

Then the town is fucked. The party goes elsewhere, adventuring, and when they return it's to fly-blown corpses; raped, beheaded goats; smouldering ruins, and the few survivors of the townspeople, who blame the characters and form a mob.

They raped he goats? Before or after beheading them?

While.

No, it's D&D who has attracted different players, which honestly don't belong there. Some people want to experience a narrative with consistent characters in a heroic high fantasy setting.

However, if you don't pull punches, 3.PF, especially at low levels is surprisingly brutal and gritty, since you're very reliant on dice, healing or other defensive/counter magic isn't easily availiable yet so poisons and diseases can be problems.

Sadly not all get that this is how 3.PF works and you get GMs and players alike that expect, well, more heroic stories, like from movies and books. Which is fine, really, but it's not what 3.PF provides.

If you start at low lvl, you have to consider your character expendable, at least up to a certain point - but if you don't expect that and your GM goes with the dice and the tools he's given, he might seem like an asshole to you because you expected your character to last longer.

TL;DR: People who expect different things sometimes play unfitting systems and it makes them look like idiots/pussies/assholes

You have never been with unmotivated players. I have had players ask for a sand box and flounder because they were incapable of setting their own goals.

Double-dubs is correct and wins best of thread.

I'm a huge fan of story-centric roleplaying, but the risk is that players start fucking around because they know you won't TPK them. Without a sense of risk and consequences, the story loses all its dramatic punch.

Yes, you can fake it, but ultimately if you keep pulling excuses out of your ass to spare a party that's actively daring you to kill them off, then you'll lose all credibility.

That being said, it's ok to fudge a die roll or two if they're genuinely getting unrecoverably fucked with by bad luck rather than bad choices.

Which wouldn't be that much of a problem if the system made its own assumptions and goals clear.
Of course, that would require its authors to know about those in the first place, which obviously wasn't the case.

So, you need a 'teleport mishap table' to roll on.

PC deaths should be avoidable. Even save-or-die effects should have some hint they're possible.
One roll by a friendly NPC should never TPK.

>'teleport mishap table

Absolutely. More mishap tables the better.

Potion Mixing tables, Scroll Mishap tables, Lingering Injury tables, Wild Magic tables.
Trinket tables. It's free random adventure fodder and fun for all.

No you move back to your group as quick as you can you moron. You don't stay and fight the encounter alone. Withdraw action, numbnuts.

>In D&D you can't really run away effectively when you're discovered.

Run. Back. To. Your. Group.

Carry. A. Potion. Of. Invisibility.

Jesus christ, do you people even think?

Guy you replied to here, I agree. 3PF does provide heroic gameplay... all D&D does, but you have to get past 1st level first.

Don't like it? Start at a higher level. That's what my group did for a lot of our campaigns, generally started at 4th level. It allowed us to have actual backstories that involved previous combats without the "then how the fuck are you still 1st level" issue.

Also this. I love starting a new campaign in the world where the old ones failed/succeeded. It makes it feel like the characters' actions actually mattered. Like, they succeed, but you just stop the campaign? Okay big reward, fuck that. Start new players in a world where there aren't as many undead now because they killed the BBEG lich, or whatever the fuck. I love this trope and I use it as often as I can.

You. I like you.

It's not my style to run games around an epic story. I generally have a world that I put some effort into feeling natural, and my players forge their own path and I create the story around that.

You probably didn't put goals for the characters.

Thank you.
I'm just not sure whether those who need that advice the most actually understand it.

>Have them fight out of hell,
I like this

If a TPK is that much of a problem don't let it happen. Roll in secret and fudge the dice just enough for them to barely win. Or beat them into the dirt, have them imprisoned/left for dead but able to escape/recover/get rescued.

>Story is gay
Kill yourself, faggot.

Resurrection, obviously, but make it a challenge. Is there an allied/friendly organization that would rather the main party not die? If so, have them make some characters from that organization, and have them do the quest to bring them back.

Last campaign I played in, reviving was made difficult, but not impossible, by requiring the players to gather up negative energy by defeating undead to be used as an extra step (the amount depending on level). The idea was that for the gods to allow someone to come back to life, a significant number of undead need to be put back to rest and their negative energy given to the gods to be purified in order to balance things out.

Or we can assume that the GM put the players against a challenging situations, they fucked up their diplomacy part to defuse the situation and then they had terrible luck with their saves and got knocked out and executed.

Which is what I would actually infer from the OP, because he sounds like he wanted to have a challenging and deadly encounter but RNGesus decided to have a team wipe.

From what I understand, the GM doesn't actually like open rolling and would much prefer to fudge some dice in order to provide a fun story for his players and a good conclusion for his campaign, which would be fun for him, too.

>Assuming the worst of GMs

along with what I've seen on Veeky Forums these last few months, when did this place become so player-bitch enabling?
Things were better back then...

The barbarian doesn't gain modifiers to hit while he's raging in 5e.

one of my house rules is I allow a re-do of a tpk. Bog-standard fights that you tpk, your re-do is at no reward for 3 standard fights. Boss-style fights are half reward for that fight and no rewards for 3 standard fights afterwards. If you die in the re-do, new character.

If that's word-for-word how you explain the mechanic to your players, it sounds stupid and videogamey. Maybe you've got better in-universe reasons for having one-ups or something like that, but on paper it sounds contrived.

Want to know the shittiest TPK story I've been involved in, or have probably ever heard?

My friends and I started a campaign with a guy we met through a hobby store a few years back. He warned us he was a real ball busting DM, hard encounters, play it smart or you'll die, and we were up for it.

It was true, every character had close calls our first two or three games with him. We made it to lvl 2, and had an encounter with this weird witch woman. She offered us a wish each if we accomplished a task for her.

This task was insane, involving us somehow managing to help an imp survive this massive battle, using our wits alone. We managed it, we got this little imp past an army of angels that were trying to kill it, and to a portal, where it promptly disappeared, and we returned, got our wishes, and went on our way.

We were later told that our actions, through a butterfly effect seen ONLY to this DM, destroyed the world that another campaign was being set in with his other group. Their high level characters, and the entire world they played in, was destroyed by a demon king, who was of course the imp we helped. He let them know that they would be starting anew with new lvl 1 characters, in the war torn apocalyptic world that my group had inadvertently created.

A thinking person's solution to scouting is to use magic, though. A shapeshifting Druid is ten times more effective at scouting than a Rogue could ever hope to be, and a Wizard sitting at home with his crystal ball is ten times more effective than the Druid. All a Rogue brings to the table is low hit dice and penchant into triggering ambushes alone.

This is amazing, user, gonna throw this at my Level 2 party that's entering the Underdark as part of an expeditionary force (the world has only just become aware of the Underdark, and has no idea what lies down there, though the players do)

Any more like this?

archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/51511091/#51548019

I don't know if any of the rest are specifically an afterlife type adventure

I hope you aren't playing with such a shit gm anymore

>Things were better back then...
I was gonna find and post my "Veeky Forums has changed" screencap, then I just checked the OP.
OP is from the GM's perspective, posts as if from or supporting whiny-bitch-players are to be expected.
Nothing's changed there.