In RPGs, it can be hard to get people to understand the “lethality” of the game (depending on the style of game you play). So it’s important to have that discussion with your players early, or set some encounters up at the start of the game, to give them an idea how grim and dark your game is. If your players are expecting that each encounter will be a by-the-numbers cakewalk, and you’ll fudge dice to let them live, then they’ll have no frame of reference for when you actually throw and encounter at them that they *should* run away from, or at least buy some time (without you specifically saying “you’re not going to beat all of these- you need to run”). Pathfinder’s Rise of the Runelords started well with a Goblin raid on a farming village. It broke up into some little vignettes that let you set expectations for the game- by the time the players get to the right house, the small children caught by the goblins might be cowering in a corner, captured in a feed-bag, or messily carved apart on the floor, depending on where the GM wanted to set their game on the sliding scale of lethality. Not everyone wants to play a horrific Grimdark experience- for some of us, Friday night’s gaming is a chance to chill with our friends and do heroic stuff, so reaching kids from a bag is going to be much more fun than venting rage onto little green guys. When you’ve got this established, and your players understand that sometimes it’s better to retreat than just to charge headlong into every encounter, you get some really interesting and exciting ways of dealing with things- your players may (shock, horror) *PLAN* for an encounter. If they do, try to reward that! Let them be successful, because no-one is turning up just to get repeatedly ground into the floor and spend their weekend making yet another new character. TL;DR: talk to your players. Establish how lethal your game will be. Encourage them to run away sometimes. Let them make plans, and succeed at stuff. Any ideas, or ways this has worked for you? (Originally posted on Game Masters Stash on 11 June 2018) Categories All Comments are closed.
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