I need you to pass judgment on me here, Veeky Forums. The first campaign I've ever GM'd just ended in TPK. Specifically...

OP here. I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, because I just downloaded that image ten minutes ago so I could have an appropriately despondent face to go with my mood. The events described in my post took place earlier today, Not that I understand why someone would copypaste something like this in the first place...

To the rest of you, thanks for chipping in. I'll wait until my players have calmed down a bit and try not to put them in a similar situation again. Although I hope they've learned something as well.

>defending your copypasta this hard
>players learning anything
I see that you haven't learned anything.

>In my opinion I'd have thrown them a "subtle" head up about the deadmans switch, like having the bad dudes all wired up with wires or having them shout something like "kill us all and you're sealing your own fate"

Fucking this.

If this was the case, fine. You were in the right OP. If not... fucking amateur.

Can't believe people are defending this. GM pulls a near-literal "rocks fall, everyone dies" because the PCs weren't keen on taking prisoners, because -they didn't do what the GM WANTED them to do.-

Either way OP, you'll learn. The first game I ever ran was a cringeworthy railroad that ended in a TPK as well. Practice makes perfect.

Was there anything to indicate there was a dead man's switch, any previous indication that they used them or any reason why they should have considered that a dead man's switch would be used?

If not, consider it from their perspective. The campaign came to a sharp and abrupt end and the characters they've poured so much time into are dead because of something they had no reason to consider.

If you didn't drop hints then yes, they have every reason to think that it was a needlessly abrupt end to their enjoyment, punishment for not being able to read the DM's mind.

for what it's worth the first time I DMed
I set up a little mission to go deliver a package to some mob guy's and get in a fire-fight when the mob tried to skip-out on the payment
that ended with 2 guys throwing their guns in a bin and walking in to the fire-fight empty handed and a 3rd triggering his Doc Wagon bracelet when he drove a car through a wall to "save" them.
players will always do the thing you least expect

Was it a "wired to my heart via psuedoscience bullshit" thing or was there a literal switch in his hand? Because if you didn't at least have them make a perception check to spot the literal switch in his hand, you're in the wrong here

Some of the hostiles had wrist computers with "Awaiting check-in" and a single blinking button (the premise was that they had to press the button every five minutes or the countdown would start). I also had it so the countdown would visibly pop up on the wrist computers, but they left all the corpses behind before they could see that. Thinking back on it, I should probably have had the countdown show up when they took down the last baddie. Would have made for a hurried escape rather than a disappointing TPK. Lesson learned, I suppose.

Nobody cares what you're a fan of because campaigns aren't about what YOU want chucklefuck. They're about a MUTUAL respect for crafting an entertaining story. And now none of you have any story because 'muh plot'.

Was it a miscalculation, probably?

The thing is, there was a clearly-defined sequence of events.

Combat-->Investigate-->Defusing/Negotiation

Perhaps if some precaution had been taken, "hmm, there's no sight of the bomb yet," perhaps we should take a more cautious, investigative approach." But there's nothing to indicate that this happened.

Could hints have been dropped, sure. But from what we know, the players blundered into the killchain without proper intelligence.

4plebs and warosu only has that image in one thread...this one.

I think your pasta radar is malfunctioning.

If there is something that would cause a TPK, you should strive to make the players aware of it. They shouldn't have to actively search for anything that will potentially end the campaign.

Like, you should've given each of them a perception check and if there was even one success, you should have informed them of the countdown instead. You effectively punished them for not using exactly the same logic that you did when you designed the adventure.

It's the issue with point-and-click adventure games such as Grim Fandango. You drag an item on to another item or an object in the world and the programmed interaction occurs. Some of these interactions are obtuse and make no sense, because they thought of a bizarre and convoluted puzzle or because they didn't think of what seems like an obvious solution to a puzzle.

You're guilty of the same thing. You operated on a level of logic that your players weren't on, so they missed your 'hints' entirely. If you want to make entertaining stories for them, you have to be on the same level.

Hinting at a bomb countdown sequence wouldn't be too hard.

>"You find the bomb, it's begun beeping and suddenly a countdown starts on a digital display; a deadman's switch has been tripped."
>"The dead hostage-taker has a wrist-mounted smart device which seems have started a countdown sequence."

Now you can explore options for either:
>Escape!
>Attempt to disarm bomb
Rather than:
>While you weren't looking, the bomb exploded and killed you all.

Of course, it's not your job to coddle the players, but if they did their research and due-diligence prior then they'd probably have gotten a hint that a dead man's switch might have been in play. Which is actually very true-to-life. What's the point of a dead man's switch if not advertised? The point is usually to keep people from interfering because if they manage to defeat you, they still lose, and for that they need to be informed that there's a trap that triggers in case of their failure. If it's not advertised, then there's little point to it other than assuming a forgone conclusion that their mission is a failure and was, in fact, entirely contrived to kill whoever intended to interfere. Basically, there's no point to a dead man's switch than to dissuade people acting against you, and in order for it to be effective it needs to be explicit so others keep their distance.

Now, it could be that the hostage-taker's employers or whomever put one secretly in the bomb to ensure that in case of failure they'd destroy their evidence, but then you're playing shadow conspiracy games and if the player's aren't kitted for or expected to take on that role or even have their own intelligence resources to do it for them, then it isn't any different from falling rocks.

Good point's all. I'm screenshotting this thread so I can look at it the next time I want to build a high-risk scenario.

Not only that, but a hostage situation with a bomb seems to be constructed around speed and efficiency on the part of the players, making the logical jump that much more extreme.

This is also true. A bomb on the premises implies that it's dangerous to stick around. Better to get the job done and get the hostages out and to safety than to stick around when the place might go up.

Better to achieve the Primary mission objective and fall back to safety. If nothing seems to happen for a bit, they can collect their resources and go in with drones or bomb-defusing robots to minimize risk. And if the place does go up, all the more dramatic and heroic for them to have gotten out at the last second, perhaps the guy(s) in the rear position being dramatically lifted by the force of the explosion and thrown a few meters forward, as the cliché demands.

Having a deadman's switch on your bomb and not telling everybody is like having nukes and not telling everybody. Like, what is the point of even having this, you don't want to use it you want its existence to make people think twice before fucking with you

Perception checks are gay. As a GM, you should let players know all important clues rather than hiding it behind RNG.

Not saying you have something like that is how you get Dr. Strangelove to happen.

Yes

Also, why would you have a deadman's switch that triggers into a timer?

Its the balance between Players plot armour and realistic challenging actually intelligent foes.

I always fall on the intelligent side myself.

I actually agree. But perception checks in order to spot something important are still a step up from "you need to actively look for this important thing without me giving you any hints that it exists or I'll punish you with a TPK."

He got permabanned, didn't he?

>I'm also a sucker for having the bomb audibly count down when automaticly detonating

"I'm a 30 second bomb! I'm a 30 second bomb! 29...28...27..."

i love this

If the players had a good idea of the bomb situation and their unusual MO lined-up with what you had planned for I say fair game.

Second.

>because they insist I should have dropped the whole dead man's switch shenanigans when they started killing off the hostiles

lol no
The point of GM is to present a plausible world for your PCs to roleplay in, and interesting scenarios with problems for the PC's to solve, not to solve everything for them. You are there simply to allow choices and consequences to follow those choices without a minimum of bias. The fact that you made the mission custom suited for their standard operating procedure is far too permissive as it is.

Your players clearly didn't do enough legwork/research/intel beforehand and so when things went wrong (in a completely plausible manner) it was nobody's fault but their own. If they expect you to pull their ass out of the fire everytime they put themselves in, then they are just crybabies who should stick to videogames on easymode.

Why would he sperg out at this??

>I'm not a bad GM, it's them there video games' fault!

Virt?

Sounds like you a good idea if how you could have done a better job to avoid this outcome.
Always give a heads up when the players might realize spmething that their characters probably would.

>Am I in the wrong here?
Nah.
Their plan assumed no timer on a bomb.
That's just stupid.

Paste the thread or GTFO

Nice to see an actual dm who knows how to run games for adults.

They are doing drugs.
They are getting jacked before getting called to get pumped up for the battle.

Well, a lot of deadman's switches need constant input to keep from setting off, usually a set of several different conditions that need to be met so it doesn't just trigger automatically.

A countdown could just be checking the time after several of the conditions have already been met, and when it runs out its programming assumes the worst since it's gone a certain amount of time without receiving any input to keep it from going off.

I know that this is boring copypasta, but I have to point out that a 'dead man's switch' that only activates after all x hostiles are dead, and THEN is apparently on a timer, is pretty nonsensical.
Assuming this was real - which it wasn't - then I blame everyone for equal levels of incompetence.

What's the system exactly?

Shouldn't a player basically always assume they're risking death when they're about to go do a mission? That's how I play and I GM with that expectation. Either way, sounds like you miscalculated slightly but your players also behaved incredibly thoughtlessly. I'd put more of the blame on them than you.

>Am I in the wrong here?
Nope. Your players dun fucked up.

Well put.

I think a middle ground is better. Skill checks aren't necessarily homosexual in and of themselves, but I like to give skill checks to offer shortcuts to information.

For example, give perception checks on all kills leading up to the last, but towards the last few if they still haven't succeeded then drop it as a "as the body drops you unmistakably notice a flashing countdown from his wrist". That way if they haven't got someone covering perception and they do fail, they still have a last ditch effort to escape, but if they have someone trained up in that they should succeed and be aware of it in time to rearrange their plans.

I feel like neither you nor your players know anything about hostage rescue. Or dead man's switches.

You could honestly just have them wake up in a hospital, rather badly injured and with a concussion or whatever.

Yeah but it's ultimately a game and played for fun, and to throw away a campaign and those characters over a small mistake like "You forgot to check if the bomb was on a dead-man switch" is pretty harsh, I think disproportionately so to the severity of the overlook.

Obviously you shouldn't just explicitly give them that information for nothing, but if you're dropping hints that they're not quite picking up on, maybe drop a marginally less subtle one or two. As a last resort you can just ask the party to makes checks of some kind to see if someone notices and puts two and two together. I don't think it's unreasonable that the characters would notice something like that, and sometimes it's appropriate to give the players a bit of leeway with what THEY might not consider but the PC would.

TPK over a small mistake like that is turbo sperglord shit and I definitely wouldn't play with a DM who did that to me again.

>OP's scenario
>completely plausible

It doesn't take that much effort to google some basics of how hostage rescue and how anyone would use dead man's switches bud

Why didn't you have the hostiles tell them clearly: if we die this whole place goes sky-fucking-high.

Then they would have known there was a risk regarding a dead-man's switch

It's a game in a fictional setting, literally nobody cares.

A fictional setting does not justify an absence of all logic.

This pretty much. Anyone who thinks the gm should change the rules of the game halfway through it is behaving like a child.

Games can only fun and interesting when the possibility of winning and losing exist. Take away the possibility to lose and there's no point in playing.

The better question is why did it take several minutes after they killed the first guy for the bomb to even detonate?

Why the fuck are you waffling?

Either they have dead man's switches which blow up or they don't, none of this 5 minute timer shit.

The most practical way to do a dead man's switch for a situation like this IRL would absolutely be to simply set the bomb on a timer and then have a way to reset said timer.

Logic is simple:
If you didn't reset the timer for some reason, that's because everyone in range needs to die.

It's also a lot simpler than, like, installing a pacemaker or something?

So all the players needed to do was pick up one of these switches and press a button?

Seems way too easy.

They'd have to pick up all those devices, because more than one terrorist apparently had them.

If one guy forgets to press the button, does the bomb go off? If so, best case scenario is that they kill the first guy as he presses the button and no one else they kill has their 5 minute window about to lapse before the first kill. Maximum 5 minutes for entire operation after first kill. Worst case scenario, a single hostage taker dying means the whole scenario is doomed.
Does the bomb only go off after killing everyone? Best case scenario the bomb can never go off if one hostage taker is on the opposite side of the building standing guard because you avoided that hallway. Worst case scenario every watch is fingerprint access only, and cutting one dude's thumb off prevents the bomb from going off.

This so much. I've even had moments of "they might do this, or even this," and planned for multiple possible outcomes, only for them to pick a different option that ended up with more complicated, worse consequences.

>planned for multiple possible outcomes, only for them to pick a different option that ended up with more complicated, worse consequences

I always plan for the three most likely (at least in my opinion) outcomes, but honestly it's fine if they do something else. That's part of the fun of GMing games, is that I can be surprised by what happens too.

I've gotten better at improvising since I started, I suppose it's just a skill like any other. My eventual goal is to sit down and play with nothing more than a simple piece of paper with some names, and some reminders.

If it is mission critical, there is no need to obfuscate it behind RNG.

Give GUMSHOE a shot, or at least read this which imo explains why Perception rolls are, in fact, homosexual

hackslashmaster.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/epic-failure-of-perception-and-stealth.html

This is a pretty great article. I think I'm going to change how perception works in my games.

>crybabies who should stick to videogames on easymode.

Welcome to 2017, where children need babysitters more than proper games.

Perhaps retcon it so they all end up in the hospital, perhaps with some detriments and a hefty bill attached

That's not an absence of all logic at all. There might be very specific reasons why they'd want both deadman's switch and a timer.

Such as...?

Well, it worked to kill the party didn't it?

Yeah, but their goal wasn't to kill the party. Their goal was to, y'know, survive the encounter themselves - something their secret deadman's switch + timer combo didn't help with in the slightest.

Oh I'm sorry, how do you know that? Are you the GM?

Also maybe they were fanatics/terrorists and on a last ditch effort should they all be killed they wanted shit to blow up, on a short timer to hopefully take out whoever killed them. It's not real life mate, they could have been following all sorts of different logic, and they could have even been purposefully incompetent. Stop acting like you know everything.

>they knew the hostiles had a bomb
>didn't bother taking prisoner's and interrogating them about the bomb
I'd say they're in the wrong for not even attempting to gather info while on the job.

What
If their sole goal was to kill the player party (which is, incidentally, truly shitty encounter design) then why have a timer or a deadman switch? Just blow it as soon as the party is in the building.
Why are you so desperate to defend op's stupid encounter? When you have to fall back on "maybe they were acting retarded on purpose" you've fucked up, mate.

...

There's two types of players.

The first want realism. Of course, real life is unfair, so a realistic game world is also unfair. These players know that there's more ways to deal with encounters besides just straight up combat because that often won't work.

The others want a game only. They never want to face anything too weak or too hard because that wouldn't be fair. So when you bring up vidya, it's not even wrong, I blame levelscaling popularized by skyrim and co. Honestly don't even see the appeal. You become stronger, but so do the enemies, so nothing ever changes. Boring as fuck.

cool
thanks

If you're bringing up GNS theory, at least bring up the S part of it.

You're missing out the narrative players, who are in the experience for a coherent and enjoyable narrative. Less focus on playing a balanced game or simulation of reality, more focus on creating an entertaining story for the players.

The instance in the OP caters entirely to the hardcore simulationist, reliant on thinking outside of the box, in order to make them really feel like they're rescuing hostages and defusing bombs. The hardcore simulationist accepts their defeat because they didn't think outside the box enough and therefore deserve the TPK.

But a gamer would be angry that they got a 'game over' just because they played the game in a linear fashion and optimally according to the information they had when the game started. And a storyteller would be angry that the story's come to an abrupt end just because they didn't have the out-of-character foresight to consider all of the options.

If the OP went into this wanting to simulate a real hostage situation and the players failed to adequately complete the situation, then there's a few holes in his simulation (such as dead man's switches not working that way without silly pseudo-science) but for the most part he achieved his goal.
If the OP went into this intending to create a fun and challenging game for the players, he failed by including a 'rocks fall everyone dies' trigger, with almost no hint of that trigger's existence. Unless they were exactly in tune with the OP's logic, they had no reason to guess a dead man's switch would exist.
Similarly, it fails from a storytelling perspective because it's an abrupt and unsatisfactory ending to the story in which the characters are presumably experts or at least knowledgeable when it comes to hostage situations, yet the OP refused to regard this knowledge and punished the players for their lack of OOC knowledge.

So I'd say the OP failed as a GM with that TPK.