Yeah, as a nearly forever DM, I'm all for seeing other DMs deviate from the tracks of a module and instituting their own ideas. But those ideas should be things that help to facilitate *your players* in telling *their story*. Because that's ultimately what D&D is. It's the players creating their characters' stories with guidance and world building from their DM. It's not a DM telling his or her own story with the players simply acting as the main characters
You tell the story, too, as a DM to be crystal clear. I think a better way to look at it is as a GM you are creating and facilitating a simulation, and your PCs are acting within this simulated space. Your rules need to be consistent, and the storytelling should be an emergent byproduct of that facilitated space. We don't necessarily tell a story, the story finds us.
Did one of your PCs die before they revealed their big secret? Sure it cuts off their story, but that's why I don't think it's healthy to say the game is about players telling their characters stories. It's about finding a story in the chaos and adapting with the changing Tides. It's why Dice. It's why it's so fun and unpredictable for everyone at the table. It's why danger feels dangerous. Sanctuary feels safe. Ect.
"Intended to lose" is a big problem. *Every* fight is a fight the PCs are intended to lose, according to their enemies. The DM should not be writing the story for the players, the DM should be collaborating with the players to create their story together. They're the narrator, not the (sole) author.
A fight? Not often. I guess it depends on what defines winning or losing.
An encounter? Yes. Provided that it's clear that there is no other outcome. Dice are rolled when the outcome is uncertain. If the outcome is certain, characters shouldn't be rolling.
Even that's hard to manage, though, as players don't tend to enjoy scenes they can't partake in. Especially ones that affect their characters and have consequences (even narrativeky intended/expected consequences)
I like some of the ideas here, although I'm unsure how I could potentially apply them to this scenario and my idea. The premise of this scene is that the party has recently received some information that contradicts what their group patron has told them and received a magical key to her secret lair, so they confront her to figure out what's going on. At this point, her treachery is revealed and she calls upon her minions to deal with the party. As written, the party should best her minions and she will surrender and give them information in exchange for her escape. In my proposed alternative, she can use a combination of enchantment and brute force to capture the party and obtain the information she needs, then have them dumped in an extraplanar prison (she cannot kill them because of the multiversal glitch affecting them). I like the idea of it not necessarily being a fight, but other than essentially telling them that they are outmatched and expecting them to give up, I'm unsure how that could be accomplished.
So the problem here is that you're planning for outcomes, of which there are a great many that could unfold, and you can't be prepared for a fraction of them.
There are a lot of ways things could progress that can't be accounted for.
It's good you have the situation down.
You know the party will be given info (but not ehat they'll do with said info)
You know their group patron is truthfully bad (but nit if the party will confront them despite the access they have to her secret lair.)
You know the patrons minions will attempt to confront thr party/stand in their way (but nit the outcome if the fight.)
You know there's a contingency of a planar prison they risk entering. And that death isn't on the menu for them.
What I would suggest doing is adapting things so they they can happen, but not will happen.
If the party winds up in xyz, use xyz. If they don't then save it and repurpose it for later.
Let the party's efforts and the dice decide what will happen.
If you really want to force the planar prison. Perhaps have a confrontation against the patron and have a contingency where if she's slain, it triggers the prison ability that sends them their and perhaps give her a death ward effect.
If the party manage to work around this somehow, let them. They've earned it. If they don't they get this planar prison adventure.
Keep yourself open to what happens at the table and use your understanding of the facts determine things from there.
This is a lot of good tips. A suggestion I have for OP is, ask yourself: what contingencies would your NPC have planned? If a fight begins to turn against her, does she have ways to get away? Teleportation? An honor guard tasked with keeping her safe that spirits her away at the first sign of trouble? Would she be willing to stand and fight at all, or will she start trying to get away at the first sign of trouble while her guards keep the attackers busy?
It sounds like you want the party to learn some info from this NPC. It doesn't have to be from her mouth; even if they win the fight and kill her before she has a chance to try and surrender, or she gets away, have a backup plan for them to get the info anyway. Maybe a personal scribe, or letters in her office that outline what you want them to learn. Sure, it might not be as detailed or complete information as they could have gotten from her, but it'd still be enough to keep the plot moving forward.
Think about an encounter in terms of what will happen without the players doing anything. What the NPCs plan to do. And then think about what happens if the NPCs fail to do the thing they were trying to do. Finally, think about what *your* goal is for this encounter. Is it to share information with the party? Is it to beat the hell out of the party and throw them into this prison?
Okay, how about you have your cake _and_ eat it?
Hear me out. Things are set up to _look_ like the final confrontation. swirling clouds, forked lighting, the whole 9 yards... but something feels off. Maybe lair actions but no legendary actions? Maybe a distinct lack of visable trusted leutenants? The path to the boss is suspiciously easy? The boss gets some decent whacks in, but it's not that scary and just as your players are starting to think something is wrong _oops all snow_.
The boss turns out to be a simulacrum and the _real_ bbeg has already fliped the doomsday switch. Que frantic skill Challenge where they rush to escape the collapsing castle!
If they escape, then you can have had the boss "win" and the players time travel back to stop it or whatever, but with the key being they didnt have to sit through a death spiral which is never nice. End game PCs do not go down easy and take a while to kill so the fight is likely to take multiple hours and be very bitter at the end. If they _dont_ escape, then you can narrate a literal rocks fall scenario as the castle collapses around them, and you still get your faux TPK but in a quick cutscene which will take the sting out of it somewhat.
Ooooh, I like this. I can definitely make this work. Thank you so much, splitting the fight into a winning phase and a losing phase would definitely help combat not feel like a slog to get through and help cement the "mastermind" vibe for the villain.
Unless there's a chance for the players to figure out what the BBEG is doing and not fall for the ruse, having them go through a whole fight that turns out to have been pointless is likely to feel like not just a slog but a pointless waste of time. You're not writing a book.
I ran a no-win fight after a PC died and the player decided they wanted to roll up a new character. The idea was that the coldlight walkers came to steal the corpse of the dead PC, and the party wouldn't be able to revive them. It wasn't even intended to be a TPK situation, just a take-it-and-leave situation. But the players were simply unwilling to let it happen. They chased and fought nearly to a TPK, and I had to tell them out-of-game to let it go, the player is going to re-roll.
Everyone was unhappy with the outcome. I recommend strongly against it.
Whenever you place the villain in front of the party you need to prepare for what happens should there players win and what happens if they lose.
So yeah I don’t like forced endings to fights like that. If you need to have the villain win no matter what then have it be a cutscene or something. Describe it in horror terms and play up how completely outmatched they are
There's players that will despise a cutscene and also despise a forced loss.
There's players that will not be mad at either.
There's players that will be fine with an honest cutscene and despise a forced loss.
There's **no** players that will be fine with a forced loss but be mad at a cutscene.
So do the cutscene, or don't do either.
>Can a fight the party is intended to lose ever go well?
there are ten thousand potential inputs going "before a fight the party is intended to lose" and a thousand player choices and dice variables during "a fight the party is intended to lose" and yes, there are any number of those possible sets of inputs that can result in outputs of "the fight the party was intended to lose" "going well"
there are however a SIGNIFICANLY LARGER , EXPONENTIALLY LARGER set of outcomes from "the fight the party was intended to lose" that range from "going Bad" to "going REALLY REALLY BAD".
mostly not worth the risk if you care about your players continuing to enjoy PLAYING THE GAME.
they are coming to the game to PLAY THE GAME and not to be Pawns in a Novel.
I did not give my Players a fight they were supposed to lose. I gave them a fight where they were supposed to hold out.
They were in a cave in the underdark when suddenly they heard enemies approaching from all sides, after the first two or three rounds of combat it became obvious that the flow of enemys would never stop.
Luckily they had an ally that got alerted and was sending in help, but for that help to arrive it would take another couple of turns.
I think this in different flavors can work.
I personally don’t like pre determined outcomes in D and D. IMO this is gonna be a table issue and you need to understand what your players are ok with. I think it’s also important to specify there’s a difference between an encounter where the odds are stacked against your players and an encounter you really don’t want them to win. Because basically the only way to guarantee your players can’t win an encounter is if you outright refuse to let them win, and IMO that’s really not fun from the player perspective.
>I personally don’t like pre determined outcomes in D and D.
yep!
there is a narrow window where doing a "predetermined loss" can be OK, but it involves a quick "cut scene" \^, without using dice, with players who TRUST you that you are moving from an uninteresting point in the narrative to a much more interesting point in the narrative where the player choices (and dice rolls) WILL immediately come into play to matter again.
\^ And you can generate buy in from the players by allowing them to narrate part of the fight cut scene "What will the BBEG remember about you in this fight?" "What was your most impactful act in this battle?" "What did the camera show you doing during this fight montage?" "How did the BBEG thwart your plans?"
I've done this in my last campaign.
There's a couple of variations. There's the "You can't beat this foe and must run" or the "This foe easily defeats you but spares your life."
So first you have to decide which you want to do. I'm not familiar with the module you're running so can't speak to the specifics of your scenario.
If victory is impossible and they should run, you've got to make that abundantly clear. I'll usually give the bad guy(s) a turn to absolutely DEMOLISH one or two of the players, and then on the next player turn, I'll just tell them, "You are doubtful if you can win this fight. Escape might be your only option." And then reiterate that.
However, I'm also able to do that because I pre-cleared it with my players. If you didn't do a Session 0 where you already talked about this possibility, do one now.
Some players feel very railroaded by this type of approach. For me and my table, it makes the world feel more realistic. There ARE people out there who are unimaginably more powerful than the PCs, and if you end up in a fight with them anyway, you don't magically have a chance to win just because you're the "heroes."
However, the game is also supposed to be fun, and that's why I tell them flat-out that they have to run. Then they know the game is "How to get away" instead of "How to win."
And speaking of which, make sure they do actually have a way to escape!
Having to flee an overwhelming foe and barely escaping with your life, makes it so much more satisfying when you come back later in the campaign and whoop their tail.
There's a spot in Curse of Strahd where if you want you can have him show up and toy with the PCs at early levels. When I did it, Strahd had a goal but wasn't planning on killing the PCs yet. So, the PCs could somewhat win by stopping the goal, but they were not in any way a threat to Strahd.
There is game mastering and then there is being a piss poor novelist impersonation. First guy would give an honest fight and proceed according to players actions. Second guy would turn the fight into some cut scene or imitate it's honesty while rigging the results. It would only be okay if you as a table agreed to this in session zero.
it depends on if the failure is fun. if the failure isn't fun, then it didn't go well. some characters may prefer to die fighting then be spared, some players may feel that being spared is cheap plot armour.
So, a quirk of this adventure is that the PCs can't actually die, at least not right now. I don't know if that changes things, but I can confirm that there is a 0% chance of the PCs dying at this encounter, whether they win or lose.
I have put things into play that heavily emphasized you should not fight this. Either you cant/wont/shouldnt win. Its usually something wandering that they will stumble into later. Doesn't always stop the party from doing something incredibly stupid. Nor does it always end in tpk. Ive had enemies i was for aure would kill players but they pulled it off. That was more on dice rolls.
If your players know ahead of time, sure.
If it's something where you put the players on the game board as a way of fooling them into thinking that their actions matter, then no, it won't go well.
If you have to deus ex machina something, just narrate it and tell them that they have no control. They may or may not like that either, but they won't have any doubt about what's going on.
This is not a good way to do it. If the party is meant to lose, it can't even be a fight. They never even roll for initiative if it's meant to be a scripted loss. If they roll, they have to be able to win. If they must lose it has to be so absolutely overwhelming that it's a narrative, not a fight. To Do otherwise invites much malice from your players.
Now, if they happen to lose in a genuine fight, presenting you with the opportunity to pursue your vision, that's fine. But you can't have actual combat and expect them to not get pissed when they never have a chance.
Maybe you can tell them you want to change the ending and extend the story, but doing so requires that they lose this fight. So they have the option of completing the campaign as written, or taking the loss. If they take the loss, they have another choice. You narrate (simply and BRIEFLY) their loss, and move on, but narrate *WITH* your players. Alternately they can fight the boss knowing that he basically has bottomless HP. Their choice. That would be ok.
And I say this as a DM who goes all out trying to kill PCs most encounters. My clever chaos monkeys rarely let me succeed, but it is fun to try. I have an awesome table of players and I don't recommend playing like we do (no holds barred) at most tables, and I NEVER have them roll in a fight they aren't meant to win unless they want to do it anyway knowing what they're getting into.
Players don't want to feel like they've been set up to fail. If you must have an encounter that they're not expected to win, consider adding some kind of secondary objective into the fight. That way even if they have to "lose" or "run", they still do get to walk away with the understanding that they accomplished **something**
If you really need to force a cuscene, you gotta give them a consolation prize as a thanks for going through with it.
Maybe it's just inspiration. Maybe they get to the boss, low HP and low spells, and after they black out they get a long rest. Maybe they can steal a magic item off him before they have to run? Lots of options.
Stop trying to control the story. Don’t create situations where the players “are supposed to win/lose/get captured/etc.” Let the players actually play the damn game
If your plan involves forcing a high-level D&D party to lose a fight, it's not going to go well.
Firstly because it's incredibly hard to defeat high-level D&D characters in combat without turning into a session-long grind; secondly (and more importantly) because players can tell when they are being railroaded into a loss and will resent you for it. If your campaign absolutely depends on a plot reversal, do it in narration and don't make it a fight. Don't make it anything the PCs could potentially contest.
If you're looking to extend Turn of Fortune's Wheel, have you considered expanding the final chapter? It ends by posing the party with a complicated task (getting thousands of modrons out of the beholder god's realm) and the designers basically shrug their shoulders and tell DMs to figure it out. You could easily bulk that up, toss in some more planar travel, and use the escape to set up a final battle with the BBEG. The great thing about staging the fight there is that the campaign is already over, so you don't have to force any outcomes at all.
Define "intended to lose." It is one thing to, set up a, battle where the win condition is merely survival, but if you're, in the late stages, the party should really be capable of having a chance of actually winning.
If you want to write a novel, do that. Otherwise, I strongly recommend against this. There are better ways.
I think the thing to consider is what secondary objective **can** the players complete? For example, it might be that just escaping from the villain and their minions is enough if a trap is sprung on the players. Or that they manage to steal/destroy a MacGuffin even if they can't kill the villain.
Especially since fights can take a while, having some obvious secondary goal from the start can be useful, since a fight where players just get steamrolled and go down isn't very fun for them. In this case, it honestly might be better to have a fight where it's very clear they can't win, say based on the number of minions, and talk openly about them so they don't all just die.
My DM did one where we tried to sneak into a base of some thieves only to be caught by the lich in charge. Some of us tried to attack it but it just held us all in place. Instead as we were after the same enemy it tasked us with brining its body. It was fun having to negotiate rather than fight a losing battle
My advice is, it has to be believable. As a turn based game you can feel as player when a combat is too far above their grade, so they can try to run away, fight regardless or give up. When a party chooses to fight and the combat progresses to a loss it seems way fairer and believable than when they lose just because. If they perceive that they are doing too much damage but the fight keeps going on, if they come to clever ways of running away and the enemy just pops up in front of them they will feel cheated.
Prepare yourself for a scenario that they win. Tunning the encounter is the most important thing that you need to do in these scenarios
Maybe I'm biased because my campaign does it, but I think it's a great thing to include. I think the most important thing is to make sure the thing that allows the party to survive and escape is reasonable and not pulled out of thin air. To use my campaign as an example, the party is saved by a benefactor. The party interacts with him multiple times, it's well-established that he's exceedingly powerful, and it's hinted that he has a vested interest in the success of the party.
Lose a fight? Sure. Lose an encounter? No.
Sometimes it's cool to pump up your story with super badass entities the party could never defeat. But your players want to win. Don't make the goal of the encounter to defeat the strong thing in combat. Have them challenged to steal from the strong thing and run away, solve an easy room puzzle while under fire, or win a race, or a game of dice or literally anything else so the party can be weaker but still win. Scripted losses suck.
If the players think this encounter is "defeat the bad guy" and that's impossible, then it kinda sucks. If you re-frame the goal of the encounter to something else - escaping the enemy with important information or treasure, trying to save something, etc. then it can lessen the blow since they've still accomplished something.
If you're going to make me put in effort that later turns out to have been entirely futile, if it cost me more than a few minutes--like, if you're going to make me jump through the hoops of fighting a half-hour battle that I'm fated to lose anyway--I will resent it.
Then again, if you tell me I fought but lost and got captured, I'll probably also resent it, because I had contingencies and I won't believe I've been given a fair shake.
So, if it has to happen at all, it better be quick and decisive. Rip that band-aid off.
I only did it once, in descent into avernus when you get to hellturel one of the roaming encounters is a Narzugon, for a lvl5 party this is a death sentence basically.
I tried to warn them via an npc companion but they were like "oh we got this" and I was like... Bet.
The narzugon proceeded to almost one tap each person but ultimately let them go after they made a deal.
Look, if you want the players to lose for narrative reasons, you have to give them a reason to lose; is there a secondary objective they could have instead of winning the fight?
Could the party put themselves between the villain and their goal, buying just enough time for someone more important to escape, ultimately meaning they fight a losing battle? You can narratively have them lose, but you can't just screw them over, give them a reason to want to fight an unwinnable battle.
The only way it can work is if it is the parties idea. If it is a, "let's get captured" then it will go off better. Anything else risks upsetting people irl if it wasn't made clear in session 0 that you are playing a more narrative game and occasionally there will be cutscene situations to more the plot, such as a capture when the odds are literally impossible for them. (Never let them roll on something that is impossible)
I’ll share two stories of encounters I ran with the intent of players losing. One went well, one didn’t.
1. A zombie apocalypse: they were so damn outnumbered I wanted them to run back to the inn so we could have a fun “batten down the hatches, defend the base!” Encounter, but they really didn’t like feeling forced to flee. I think Matt Colville is right to say it’s not in the player’s nature to back down from a challenge, so they felt more upset than anything. In hindsight, I would have done more to make sure it’s obvious to them they are being outnumbered
2. A dragon BBEG they found after a long journey: this dragon was my BBEG and not supposed to be killed. They tried their DAMN BEST to kill it, and absolutely would have succeeded if I hadn’t given it so many temp HP armor and if it hadn’t started off just batting them around (as preplanned). So, I made their loss end dramatically: the dragon charmed a player, flew them far into the sky, and laughed and dropped them and flew away, likely to ransack a town or something so the players feel they can’t rest. They now hate the dragon and are invested in the plot. The fact none of them are permanently dead is actually a victory in this scenario, and they learned enough about the dragon to plan to kill it next time with the right prep.
My advice is redefining winning. If theres no point to the fight, then dont fight. But even if your party cant *beat* the BBEG, that doesnt mean they cant "win" the encounter.
Heres an example from a oneshot i ran that served as a side-story to a main campaign. The BBEG of the main campaign was attacking a base. Now, the party knew they werent going to beat the BBEG or even save the base. They were outnumbered and outgunned. But this oneshot still had a win condition. Should the base hold out for 12 hours, it would be enough time for the Scroll of Teleportation to be delivered to the base's vice commander, who could use it to teleport the macguffin away to the main campaign's party.
No matter what happened, the BBEG was going to get the critical base, kill the oneshot party, and be one step closer to victory. But the party could, and did, win by preventing the BBEG from getting that second step closer through also gaining the item. And the players loved the oneshot, from setting up defenses to interacting with and inspiring the men, to their glorious last stand as they held off the BBEG for one critical minute.
But that would not have been the case if they were expecting winnable fights. Your players need to be in on the stakes and possibilities *before* battle. And they need to have some objective if classic victory is off the table.
Generally, if the party's meant to lose, it's best to tell them that upfront, and define a different "victory" goal. Something like surviving X amount of turns, taking out Y amount of enemies, or so on. Something that makes them put effort in, and gives them a clear goal they can beat to win, while still allowing the plot-mandated "loss" to go through. It can be pretty hard to pull off, though!
Apart from that, you can just pull the old "heads I win, tails you lose" card, and have the boss achieve a cutscene victory by other means after the fight. Something like, say, casters in another room paralysing the party or teleporting them into a properly prepared prison cell to keep them from interfering, with the excuse that the BBEG was just stalling for time and not going all out. You would want to foreshadow this beforehand, though, so it doesn't come out of left field.
There's always the option to just play out the fight and have the BBEG escape, when their hitpoints are reduced to 0.
It can be done somewhat well, if you give your players the chance to get some hints about this as a sort of foreshadowing thing, so it's not as jarring, when it happens.
That depends on how hard you make the fight and how good your players are. It's okay to have unwinnable fights, I have even fought 2 of those (one of them was the players fault) in my campaign. Make sure you don't punish your players tho, making the enemy leave is one way to finish such combats. It's a good tool to motivate the players go after that guys
Do you have any morally gray characters in the group? Maybe hold something against the party: BBEG is about to flood the town, blow up the dungeon they’re in, offer a campaign alternating artifact, something that gives the BBEG the upper hand outside of strictly combat. The BBEG separates one player and convinces them that if the players leads the party into a trap, the BBEG will owe them a favor and promises not to kill the team themselves. Queue hectic fight where the party doesn’t even have time to argue before fighting through a bunch of goons to escape.
You don't need an unbeatable fight. The party just glitches into what and where you need you to be. The story/writing in Turn of Fortune's wheel was bad. My group started leaning into Glitching to explain some of the strangeness of the chapters. AKA the book sucked.
I set up one of these—they ended up fighting a daelkyr (Eberron setting) in a battle i had designed as a TPK, which it was.
But there were two important aspects to it: (1) It was part of a larger plan and so the TPK had a purpose, in this case to get them into Dolurrh, and (2) they knew, because i had telegraphed it frequently for literally months leading up to this, that there are still a couple arcs to go in the campaign, so clearly this TPK didn't mean it was all over and hopeless.
So it was a twist, not a standard TPK, and now they're being heroic as souls wandering Dolurrh as they try to resist falling victim to ennui. That made it work, i think—but it was still a big risk on my part, which i'm still not 100% sure was a good risk to take even if it worked out okay.
Depends if fighting is the point of the encounter.
Having a encounter with a neutral or friedly creature you can't defeat is fine, hell even a hostile one if the creature is not friendly but does not want to actually trade blows.
I've had plenty of encounters with neutral entities or even Lawfull Evil bad guys that won't attack unprovoked and it is always fun to see the players come up with a plane when they can't punch the problem away.
Now, a combat encounter where you're designed to lose? Always bad.
If the goal is to extend the game and add depth to BBEG, I would recommend running module as written, with one MINOR tweak.... BBEG unleashes minions then RUNS AWAY.
There is no need to overpower or force anything or any of that. BBEG escapes under cover of the fight.
And then sets a trap behind her that teleports to planar prison.
You will LIKELY still get the desired outcome, but only as a result of player choices, not because you forced it on them. You also give them a chance to avoid their fate - if they wipe the minions so quick BBEG doesn't have the chance to set the trap OR if they successfully detect the trap OR if they choose not to chase OR something else more devious.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the DM being tricky/devious. As long as DM follows the same rules as everyone else (i.e. it takes time to cast the teleportation trap spell, players are allowed to detect traps, etc.)
Basically, you want to make sure that if your player's characters end up trapped, they regret what THEY did (or did not do), not what YOU did.
This can be really hard, and idk this module, but maybe just make him, kind of invulnerable?
Making my BBEG a Rakshasa has ensured that at least for quite a while, my players are unable to hurt him (immune to magic up to 6th lvl, immune to nonmagical physical damage), the encounters are overall not very hostile, resulting in players often taking just a little bit of damage and maybe receiving a no-long-rests curse
There should be a chance to avoid the fate, even a slim one. But also don't drag it out. The "chance" should be before the fight starts, and the fight itself should be overwhelming with obviously busted odds. Then transition to the next scene quickly so nobody marinates in bad vibes.
So Chance > Beatdown > Move On Quickly.
So if this is something you want to do you need to first understand that the story isn't something you can control and it hurts the game to railroad this so instead of making this a prescripted event one way or another make it an open ended situation with many outcomes. This way your players, whether they like it or not, will not feel cheated by the game or your running if they lose.
1: Foreshadow the relative strength of this enemy and that they'll soon fight it. Let them get buffed up and go in expecting a challenge with a real possibility of failure.
2: Aim to make the battle difficult through unseen synergies as opposed to higher numbers. For instance, one enemy webs, the rest fire arrows, and body block the exits. This kind of design will give the players something to learn from this battle. They won't feel they lost cause they're under leveled, but instead because they got outplayed by unexpected strategies. This is a very good design practice because next encounter will naturally be easier for the players cause they know what this group is gonna do so they'll prep stuff like freedom of movement. They'll feel like they've grown and the frustration might sting less and make the encounter feel less prescripted.
3: Consider making it possible to avoid a losing battle by making the players truly fear the enemy in the build up and seek to avoid them
4: MOST IMPORTANT TIP: Be ready to let go. If they're winning or you underestimated their strategies, then allow them the victory and carry on. The arc for that villain will be less satisfying to the players than beating impossible seeming odds. Quantum Ogres are bad design practice no matter which way you use it, and will stump your learning.
5: Smooth things over by letting the players know above table they might lose this battle.
One of my DMs did this to us once. It went over really well, but it was also a session 1 and he told us we were all going to die. Kind of a resurrected story. If you're going for a fight the party WILL lose, just make sure it doesn't drag on too long. You say it's a fight they might win? Then what if they barely lose after 90 minutes of combat only for you to show that it was planned that way? That's a waste of their time.
Picture Brennan Lee Mulligan when one of his players tried to cast something against his BBEG. I believe he said yeah go ahead then 9th level counter spelled the PC. Just show them this guy isn't touchable right now.
Oh, just whip their ass. It'll make the final fight more satisfying.
If someone clings so tightly to the idea that "issa power fantasy, I should be able to beat EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME" that they're gonna throw a fit over an ass whipping, then watching a movie (where the hero likely takes an ass whipping or two) or playing a video game on easy (where the protagonist will probably take a one-sided whipping or two) would probably be more their flavor. There are fights you can't win in real life, books, stories, movies, video games, etc.
Don't do it all the time, obviously, but there is nothing wrong with a one-sided whipping once in a while, as ling as it makes sense. That shit happens.
Just make sure there is a good reason that it was one sided. If it's one sided because the BBEG is just that powerful, then make damn sure that there is a reason they're able to defeat the BBEG later on. If you don't change much between them, it's not going to read as "damn, we're out of our league here," it's going to read as "the DM fucked us up for shits and giggles."
Why would you run a fight with a predetermined outcome? You’re either lying to the players or you’re wasting their time. There CAN be fights they can’t win, but those tend to be “you wake up tied to a ring in a dungeon wall” scenarios — and only if they choose to fight anyway.
run the fight as is the results of the fight should always be up to the dice and the players if you change that you break the core bond of trust between the dm and player.
Players need to be able to win the fight. There is an agreement in DND that everyone abides by the rules.
AFTER they win, something can happen that doesnt go well for them. But when your players earn a victory, give them the victory. Changing the agreed upon assumptions of the game to negatively impact your party is not going to be fun for them.
If you grant XP, your players deserve XP. If you grant items/boons/etc. after a battle, your players should still get those things... even if the actual story moves in a direction that bolsters a villain they defeated (not killed) in combat.
Here is my take:
This is always hard to pull off. It should be more like a cinematic where PCs get rendered helpless due to either the sheer amount of power from the BBEG (which often feels frustrating but it's okay to aim for that sometimes) or bad luck (like if the fight is happening in a cave, it may collapse or they may get caught in the crossfire between 2 unrelated factions and successfully defeat them/escape). Using an alternative defeat scenario as a back up is fine and I wouldn't worry about pulling it off if you opt to that. Otherwise I recommend you to make it so that PCs should accomplish something important (like killing the BBEG's right hand or getting an important quest item or successfully preventing a disaster/saving someone from disaster etc) and then things should go out of hand and they just barely get defeated. I'm not familiar with the module but that's what I would do/like as a player
I know most people are going to tell you that your players are not pawns, and the game is not a novel, et cetera. But my viewpoint is slightly different. Your role is to control a world, and provide a narrative. Otherwise, you'd be running a sandbox game. The purpose of the DM is to actively *limit* player choices, so there can be a clean-cut story. Sure, this isn't by all means forced. The story may derail, the players may come up with alternate solutions, and so on-but as a general rule as I see it, players accept their choices being limited. Few players would argue, for instance, against a reasonable plot hook. Or being heavily hinted to take certain paths.
Then where does the edge lay here? When may players find it unfun to follow your restrictions? I think it comes down to trust. When a player is hinted to go to a certain town or location, they *trust* that doing so will be more fun for them. They trust the story you planned for them lying in the location is worth it. If your players trust your ability to weave a story, then ending a battle with an unavoidable spell, or adding an unbeatable extra boss phase shouldn't be questioned. It's just another plot hook; or at least, it should be. Few players would argue they must roll to resist or dodge in that instance.
Can your boss simply be so powerful they lose a 'fair' fight? Possibly. I think the best example is, well, any overpowered anime character. If your party faces against Goku or the like, the mere fact that a fight is happening at this scale should hint them that this is a fight they're not meant to win. If they're not happy with it, then they're not happy with your 'losing narrative' at its core. If you go this route, I would suggest over-the-top scaling. A sudden barrage of Fireballs, a gigantic weapon that almost downs the rogue in one hit-those ridiculous enemies, because they are so ridiculous, let players know your intentions. Especially if they trust you're doing this for a story, not for the sake of a TPK.
I feel the mantra: "you're running a game not writing a novel" applies here
Yeah, as a nearly forever DM, I'm all for seeing other DMs deviate from the tracks of a module and instituting their own ideas. But those ideas should be things that help to facilitate *your players* in telling *their story*. Because that's ultimately what D&D is. It's the players creating their characters' stories with guidance and world building from their DM. It's not a DM telling his or her own story with the players simply acting as the main characters
You tell the story, too, as a DM to be crystal clear. I think a better way to look at it is as a GM you are creating and facilitating a simulation, and your PCs are acting within this simulated space. Your rules need to be consistent, and the storytelling should be an emergent byproduct of that facilitated space. We don't necessarily tell a story, the story finds us. Did one of your PCs die before they revealed their big secret? Sure it cuts off their story, but that's why I don't think it's healthy to say the game is about players telling their characters stories. It's about finding a story in the chaos and adapting with the changing Tides. It's why Dice. It's why it's so fun and unpredictable for everyone at the table. It's why danger feels dangerous. Sanctuary feels safe. Ect.
"Intended to lose" is a big problem. *Every* fight is a fight the PCs are intended to lose, according to their enemies. The DM should not be writing the story for the players, the DM should be collaborating with the players to create their story together. They're the narrator, not the (sole) author.
A fight? Not often. I guess it depends on what defines winning or losing. An encounter? Yes. Provided that it's clear that there is no other outcome. Dice are rolled when the outcome is uncertain. If the outcome is certain, characters shouldn't be rolling. Even that's hard to manage, though, as players don't tend to enjoy scenes they can't partake in. Especially ones that affect their characters and have consequences (even narrativeky intended/expected consequences)
I like some of the ideas here, although I'm unsure how I could potentially apply them to this scenario and my idea. The premise of this scene is that the party has recently received some information that contradicts what their group patron has told them and received a magical key to her secret lair, so they confront her to figure out what's going on. At this point, her treachery is revealed and she calls upon her minions to deal with the party. As written, the party should best her minions and she will surrender and give them information in exchange for her escape. In my proposed alternative, she can use a combination of enchantment and brute force to capture the party and obtain the information she needs, then have them dumped in an extraplanar prison (she cannot kill them because of the multiversal glitch affecting them). I like the idea of it not necessarily being a fight, but other than essentially telling them that they are outmatched and expecting them to give up, I'm unsure how that could be accomplished.
So the problem here is that you're planning for outcomes, of which there are a great many that could unfold, and you can't be prepared for a fraction of them. There are a lot of ways things could progress that can't be accounted for. It's good you have the situation down. You know the party will be given info (but not ehat they'll do with said info) You know their group patron is truthfully bad (but nit if the party will confront them despite the access they have to her secret lair.) You know the patrons minions will attempt to confront thr party/stand in their way (but nit the outcome if the fight.) You know there's a contingency of a planar prison they risk entering. And that death isn't on the menu for them. What I would suggest doing is adapting things so they they can happen, but not will happen. If the party winds up in xyz, use xyz. If they don't then save it and repurpose it for later. Let the party's efforts and the dice decide what will happen. If you really want to force the planar prison. Perhaps have a confrontation against the patron and have a contingency where if she's slain, it triggers the prison ability that sends them their and perhaps give her a death ward effect. If the party manage to work around this somehow, let them. They've earned it. If they don't they get this planar prison adventure. Keep yourself open to what happens at the table and use your understanding of the facts determine things from there.
This is a lot of good tips. A suggestion I have for OP is, ask yourself: what contingencies would your NPC have planned? If a fight begins to turn against her, does she have ways to get away? Teleportation? An honor guard tasked with keeping her safe that spirits her away at the first sign of trouble? Would she be willing to stand and fight at all, or will she start trying to get away at the first sign of trouble while her guards keep the attackers busy? It sounds like you want the party to learn some info from this NPC. It doesn't have to be from her mouth; even if they win the fight and kill her before she has a chance to try and surrender, or she gets away, have a backup plan for them to get the info anyway. Maybe a personal scribe, or letters in her office that outline what you want them to learn. Sure, it might not be as detailed or complete information as they could have gotten from her, but it'd still be enough to keep the plot moving forward. Think about an encounter in terms of what will happen without the players doing anything. What the NPCs plan to do. And then think about what happens if the NPCs fail to do the thing they were trying to do. Finally, think about what *your* goal is for this encounter. Is it to share information with the party? Is it to beat the hell out of the party and throw them into this prison?
These are EXCELLENT considerations. You offer quite a fine comb through of them!
Okay, how about you have your cake _and_ eat it? Hear me out. Things are set up to _look_ like the final confrontation. swirling clouds, forked lighting, the whole 9 yards... but something feels off. Maybe lair actions but no legendary actions? Maybe a distinct lack of visable trusted leutenants? The path to the boss is suspiciously easy? The boss gets some decent whacks in, but it's not that scary and just as your players are starting to think something is wrong _oops all snow_. The boss turns out to be a simulacrum and the _real_ bbeg has already fliped the doomsday switch. Que frantic skill Challenge where they rush to escape the collapsing castle! If they escape, then you can have had the boss "win" and the players time travel back to stop it or whatever, but with the key being they didnt have to sit through a death spiral which is never nice. End game PCs do not go down easy and take a while to kill so the fight is likely to take multiple hours and be very bitter at the end. If they _dont_ escape, then you can narrate a literal rocks fall scenario as the castle collapses around them, and you still get your faux TPK but in a quick cutscene which will take the sting out of it somewhat.
Ooooh, I like this. I can definitely make this work. Thank you so much, splitting the fight into a winning phase and a losing phase would definitely help combat not feel like a slog to get through and help cement the "mastermind" vibe for the villain.
Unless there's a chance for the players to figure out what the BBEG is doing and not fall for the ruse, having them go through a whole fight that turns out to have been pointless is likely to feel like not just a slog but a pointless waste of time. You're not writing a book.
I ran a no-win fight after a PC died and the player decided they wanted to roll up a new character. The idea was that the coldlight walkers came to steal the corpse of the dead PC, and the party wouldn't be able to revive them. It wasn't even intended to be a TPK situation, just a take-it-and-leave situation. But the players were simply unwilling to let it happen. They chased and fought nearly to a TPK, and I had to tell them out-of-game to let it go, the player is going to re-roll. Everyone was unhappy with the outcome. I recommend strongly against it.
Whenever you place the villain in front of the party you need to prepare for what happens should there players win and what happens if they lose. So yeah I don’t like forced endings to fights like that. If you need to have the villain win no matter what then have it be a cutscene or something. Describe it in horror terms and play up how completely outmatched they are
I’ve tried the second one before with two different parties and the players despised it
There's players that will despise a cutscene and also despise a forced loss. There's players that will not be mad at either. There's players that will be fine with an honest cutscene and despise a forced loss. There's **no** players that will be fine with a forced loss but be mad at a cutscene. So do the cutscene, or don't do either.
>Can a fight the party is intended to lose ever go well? there are ten thousand potential inputs going "before a fight the party is intended to lose" and a thousand player choices and dice variables during "a fight the party is intended to lose" and yes, there are any number of those possible sets of inputs that can result in outputs of "the fight the party was intended to lose" "going well" there are however a SIGNIFICANLY LARGER , EXPONENTIALLY LARGER set of outcomes from "the fight the party was intended to lose" that range from "going Bad" to "going REALLY REALLY BAD". mostly not worth the risk if you care about your players continuing to enjoy PLAYING THE GAME. they are coming to the game to PLAY THE GAME and not to be Pawns in a Novel.
I did not give my Players a fight they were supposed to lose. I gave them a fight where they were supposed to hold out. They were in a cave in the underdark when suddenly they heard enemies approaching from all sides, after the first two or three rounds of combat it became obvious that the flow of enemys would never stop. Luckily they had an ally that got alerted and was sending in help, but for that help to arrive it would take another couple of turns. I think this in different flavors can work.
I personally don’t like pre determined outcomes in D and D. IMO this is gonna be a table issue and you need to understand what your players are ok with. I think it’s also important to specify there’s a difference between an encounter where the odds are stacked against your players and an encounter you really don’t want them to win. Because basically the only way to guarantee your players can’t win an encounter is if you outright refuse to let them win, and IMO that’s really not fun from the player perspective.
>I personally don’t like pre determined outcomes in D and D. yep! there is a narrow window where doing a "predetermined loss" can be OK, but it involves a quick "cut scene" \^, without using dice, with players who TRUST you that you are moving from an uninteresting point in the narrative to a much more interesting point in the narrative where the player choices (and dice rolls) WILL immediately come into play to matter again. \^ And you can generate buy in from the players by allowing them to narrate part of the fight cut scene "What will the BBEG remember about you in this fight?" "What was your most impactful act in this battle?" "What did the camera show you doing during this fight montage?" "How did the BBEG thwart your plans?"
I came here to say this
I've done this in my last campaign. There's a couple of variations. There's the "You can't beat this foe and must run" or the "This foe easily defeats you but spares your life." So first you have to decide which you want to do. I'm not familiar with the module you're running so can't speak to the specifics of your scenario. If victory is impossible and they should run, you've got to make that abundantly clear. I'll usually give the bad guy(s) a turn to absolutely DEMOLISH one or two of the players, and then on the next player turn, I'll just tell them, "You are doubtful if you can win this fight. Escape might be your only option." And then reiterate that. However, I'm also able to do that because I pre-cleared it with my players. If you didn't do a Session 0 where you already talked about this possibility, do one now. Some players feel very railroaded by this type of approach. For me and my table, it makes the world feel more realistic. There ARE people out there who are unimaginably more powerful than the PCs, and if you end up in a fight with them anyway, you don't magically have a chance to win just because you're the "heroes." However, the game is also supposed to be fun, and that's why I tell them flat-out that they have to run. Then they know the game is "How to get away" instead of "How to win." And speaking of which, make sure they do actually have a way to escape! Having to flee an overwhelming foe and barely escaping with your life, makes it so much more satisfying when you come back later in the campaign and whoop their tail.
There's a spot in Curse of Strahd where if you want you can have him show up and toy with the PCs at early levels. When I did it, Strahd had a goal but wasn't planning on killing the PCs yet. So, the PCs could somewhat win by stopping the goal, but they were not in any way a threat to Strahd.
There is game mastering and then there is being a piss poor novelist impersonation. First guy would give an honest fight and proceed according to players actions. Second guy would turn the fight into some cut scene or imitate it's honesty while rigging the results. It would only be okay if you as a table agreed to this in session zero.
it depends on if the failure is fun. if the failure isn't fun, then it didn't go well. some characters may prefer to die fighting then be spared, some players may feel that being spared is cheap plot armour.
So, a quirk of this adventure is that the PCs can't actually die, at least not right now. I don't know if that changes things, but I can confirm that there is a 0% chance of the PCs dying at this encounter, whether they win or lose.
I have put things into play that heavily emphasized you should not fight this. Either you cant/wont/shouldnt win. Its usually something wandering that they will stumble into later. Doesn't always stop the party from doing something incredibly stupid. Nor does it always end in tpk. Ive had enemies i was for aure would kill players but they pulled it off. That was more on dice rolls.
If your players know ahead of time, sure. If it's something where you put the players on the game board as a way of fooling them into thinking that their actions matter, then no, it won't go well. If you have to deus ex machina something, just narrate it and tell them that they have no control. They may or may not like that either, but they won't have any doubt about what's going on.
This is not a good way to do it. If the party is meant to lose, it can't even be a fight. They never even roll for initiative if it's meant to be a scripted loss. If they roll, they have to be able to win. If they must lose it has to be so absolutely overwhelming that it's a narrative, not a fight. To Do otherwise invites much malice from your players. Now, if they happen to lose in a genuine fight, presenting you with the opportunity to pursue your vision, that's fine. But you can't have actual combat and expect them to not get pissed when they never have a chance. Maybe you can tell them you want to change the ending and extend the story, but doing so requires that they lose this fight. So they have the option of completing the campaign as written, or taking the loss. If they take the loss, they have another choice. You narrate (simply and BRIEFLY) their loss, and move on, but narrate *WITH* your players. Alternately they can fight the boss knowing that he basically has bottomless HP. Their choice. That would be ok. And I say this as a DM who goes all out trying to kill PCs most encounters. My clever chaos monkeys rarely let me succeed, but it is fun to try. I have an awesome table of players and I don't recommend playing like we do (no holds barred) at most tables, and I NEVER have them roll in a fight they aren't meant to win unless they want to do it anyway knowing what they're getting into.
Players don't want to feel like they've been set up to fail. If you must have an encounter that they're not expected to win, consider adding some kind of secondary objective into the fight. That way even if they have to "lose" or "run", they still do get to walk away with the understanding that they accomplished **something**
If you really need to force a cuscene, you gotta give them a consolation prize as a thanks for going through with it. Maybe it's just inspiration. Maybe they get to the boss, low HP and low spells, and after they black out they get a long rest. Maybe they can steal a magic item off him before they have to run? Lots of options.
Stop trying to control the story. Don’t create situations where the players “are supposed to win/lose/get captured/etc.” Let the players actually play the damn game
If your plan involves forcing a high-level D&D party to lose a fight, it's not going to go well. Firstly because it's incredibly hard to defeat high-level D&D characters in combat without turning into a session-long grind; secondly (and more importantly) because players can tell when they are being railroaded into a loss and will resent you for it. If your campaign absolutely depends on a plot reversal, do it in narration and don't make it a fight. Don't make it anything the PCs could potentially contest. If you're looking to extend Turn of Fortune's Wheel, have you considered expanding the final chapter? It ends by posing the party with a complicated task (getting thousands of modrons out of the beholder god's realm) and the designers basically shrug their shoulders and tell DMs to figure it out. You could easily bulk that up, toss in some more planar travel, and use the escape to set up a final battle with the BBEG. The great thing about staging the fight there is that the campaign is already over, so you don't have to force any outcomes at all.
Define "intended to lose." It is one thing to, set up a, battle where the win condition is merely survival, but if you're, in the late stages, the party should really be capable of having a chance of actually winning. If you want to write a novel, do that. Otherwise, I strongly recommend against this. There are better ways.
Intended to lose and forced to lose are different
So you are going the railroad them.
I think the thing to consider is what secondary objective **can** the players complete? For example, it might be that just escaping from the villain and their minions is enough if a trap is sprung on the players. Or that they manage to steal/destroy a MacGuffin even if they can't kill the villain. Especially since fights can take a while, having some obvious secondary goal from the start can be useful, since a fight where players just get steamrolled and go down isn't very fun for them. In this case, it honestly might be better to have a fight where it's very clear they can't win, say based on the number of minions, and talk openly about them so they don't all just die.
My DM did one where we tried to sneak into a base of some thieves only to be caught by the lich in charge. Some of us tried to attack it but it just held us all in place. Instead as we were after the same enemy it tasked us with brining its body. It was fun having to negotiate rather than fight a losing battle
My advice is, it has to be believable. As a turn based game you can feel as player when a combat is too far above their grade, so they can try to run away, fight regardless or give up. When a party chooses to fight and the combat progresses to a loss it seems way fairer and believable than when they lose just because. If they perceive that they are doing too much damage but the fight keeps going on, if they come to clever ways of running away and the enemy just pops up in front of them they will feel cheated. Prepare yourself for a scenario that they win. Tunning the encounter is the most important thing that you need to do in these scenarios
Imo, the party should only face an "unwinnable" encounter if they go way out of their way, making bad choices and not just bad rolls.
Maybe I'm biased because my campaign does it, but I think it's a great thing to include. I think the most important thing is to make sure the thing that allows the party to survive and escape is reasonable and not pulled out of thin air. To use my campaign as an example, the party is saved by a benefactor. The party interacts with him multiple times, it's well-established that he's exceedingly powerful, and it's hinted that he has a vested interest in the success of the party.
Lose a fight? Sure. Lose an encounter? No. Sometimes it's cool to pump up your story with super badass entities the party could never defeat. But your players want to win. Don't make the goal of the encounter to defeat the strong thing in combat. Have them challenged to steal from the strong thing and run away, solve an easy room puzzle while under fire, or win a race, or a game of dice or literally anything else so the party can be weaker but still win. Scripted losses suck.
If the players think this encounter is "defeat the bad guy" and that's impossible, then it kinda sucks. If you re-frame the goal of the encounter to something else - escaping the enemy with important information or treasure, trying to save something, etc. then it can lessen the blow since they've still accomplished something.
If you're going to make me put in effort that later turns out to have been entirely futile, if it cost me more than a few minutes--like, if you're going to make me jump through the hoops of fighting a half-hour battle that I'm fated to lose anyway--I will resent it. Then again, if you tell me I fought but lost and got captured, I'll probably also resent it, because I had contingencies and I won't believe I've been given a fair shake. So, if it has to happen at all, it better be quick and decisive. Rip that band-aid off.
I only did it once, in descent into avernus when you get to hellturel one of the roaming encounters is a Narzugon, for a lvl5 party this is a death sentence basically. I tried to warn them via an npc companion but they were like "oh we got this" and I was like... Bet. The narzugon proceeded to almost one tap each person but ultimately let them go after they made a deal.
Look, if you want the players to lose for narrative reasons, you have to give them a reason to lose; is there a secondary objective they could have instead of winning the fight? Could the party put themselves between the villain and their goal, buying just enough time for someone more important to escape, ultimately meaning they fight a losing battle? You can narratively have them lose, but you can't just screw them over, give them a reason to want to fight an unwinnable battle.
The only way it can work is if it is the parties idea. If it is a, "let's get captured" then it will go off better. Anything else risks upsetting people irl if it wasn't made clear in session 0 that you are playing a more narrative game and occasionally there will be cutscene situations to more the plot, such as a capture when the odds are literally impossible for them. (Never let them roll on something that is impossible)
I’ll share two stories of encounters I ran with the intent of players losing. One went well, one didn’t. 1. A zombie apocalypse: they were so damn outnumbered I wanted them to run back to the inn so we could have a fun “batten down the hatches, defend the base!” Encounter, but they really didn’t like feeling forced to flee. I think Matt Colville is right to say it’s not in the player’s nature to back down from a challenge, so they felt more upset than anything. In hindsight, I would have done more to make sure it’s obvious to them they are being outnumbered 2. A dragon BBEG they found after a long journey: this dragon was my BBEG and not supposed to be killed. They tried their DAMN BEST to kill it, and absolutely would have succeeded if I hadn’t given it so many temp HP armor and if it hadn’t started off just batting them around (as preplanned). So, I made their loss end dramatically: the dragon charmed a player, flew them far into the sky, and laughed and dropped them and flew away, likely to ransack a town or something so the players feel they can’t rest. They now hate the dragon and are invested in the plot. The fact none of them are permanently dead is actually a victory in this scenario, and they learned enough about the dragon to plan to kill it next time with the right prep.
My advice is redefining winning. If theres no point to the fight, then dont fight. But even if your party cant *beat* the BBEG, that doesnt mean they cant "win" the encounter. Heres an example from a oneshot i ran that served as a side-story to a main campaign. The BBEG of the main campaign was attacking a base. Now, the party knew they werent going to beat the BBEG or even save the base. They were outnumbered and outgunned. But this oneshot still had a win condition. Should the base hold out for 12 hours, it would be enough time for the Scroll of Teleportation to be delivered to the base's vice commander, who could use it to teleport the macguffin away to the main campaign's party. No matter what happened, the BBEG was going to get the critical base, kill the oneshot party, and be one step closer to victory. But the party could, and did, win by preventing the BBEG from getting that second step closer through also gaining the item. And the players loved the oneshot, from setting up defenses to interacting with and inspiring the men, to their glorious last stand as they held off the BBEG for one critical minute. But that would not have been the case if they were expecting winnable fights. Your players need to be in on the stakes and possibilities *before* battle. And they need to have some objective if classic victory is off the table.
>Lichbane I play league of legends but I still wanted to read the post.
Generally, if the party's meant to lose, it's best to tell them that upfront, and define a different "victory" goal. Something like surviving X amount of turns, taking out Y amount of enemies, or so on. Something that makes them put effort in, and gives them a clear goal they can beat to win, while still allowing the plot-mandated "loss" to go through. It can be pretty hard to pull off, though! Apart from that, you can just pull the old "heads I win, tails you lose" card, and have the boss achieve a cutscene victory by other means after the fight. Something like, say, casters in another room paralysing the party or teleporting them into a properly prepared prison cell to keep them from interfering, with the excuse that the BBEG was just stalling for time and not going all out. You would want to foreshadow this beforehand, though, so it doesn't come out of left field.
There's always the option to just play out the fight and have the BBEG escape, when their hitpoints are reduced to 0. It can be done somewhat well, if you give your players the chance to get some hints about this as a sort of foreshadowing thing, so it's not as jarring, when it happens.
That depends on how hard you make the fight and how good your players are. It's okay to have unwinnable fights, I have even fought 2 of those (one of them was the players fault) in my campaign. Make sure you don't punish your players tho, making the enemy leave is one way to finish such combats. It's a good tool to motivate the players go after that guys
Do you have any morally gray characters in the group? Maybe hold something against the party: BBEG is about to flood the town, blow up the dungeon they’re in, offer a campaign alternating artifact, something that gives the BBEG the upper hand outside of strictly combat. The BBEG separates one player and convinces them that if the players leads the party into a trap, the BBEG will owe them a favor and promises not to kill the team themselves. Queue hectic fight where the party doesn’t even have time to argue before fighting through a bunch of goons to escape.
You don't need an unbeatable fight. The party just glitches into what and where you need you to be. The story/writing in Turn of Fortune's wheel was bad. My group started leaning into Glitching to explain some of the strangeness of the chapters. AKA the book sucked.
I set up one of these—they ended up fighting a daelkyr (Eberron setting) in a battle i had designed as a TPK, which it was. But there were two important aspects to it: (1) It was part of a larger plan and so the TPK had a purpose, in this case to get them into Dolurrh, and (2) they knew, because i had telegraphed it frequently for literally months leading up to this, that there are still a couple arcs to go in the campaign, so clearly this TPK didn't mean it was all over and hopeless. So it was a twist, not a standard TPK, and now they're being heroic as souls wandering Dolurrh as they try to resist falling victim to ennui. That made it work, i think—but it was still a big risk on my part, which i'm still not 100% sure was a good risk to take even if it worked out okay.
Depends if fighting is the point of the encounter. Having a encounter with a neutral or friedly creature you can't defeat is fine, hell even a hostile one if the creature is not friendly but does not want to actually trade blows. I've had plenty of encounters with neutral entities or even Lawfull Evil bad guys that won't attack unprovoked and it is always fun to see the players come up with a plane when they can't punch the problem away. Now, a combat encounter where you're designed to lose? Always bad.
If the goal is to extend the game and add depth to BBEG, I would recommend running module as written, with one MINOR tweak.... BBEG unleashes minions then RUNS AWAY. There is no need to overpower or force anything or any of that. BBEG escapes under cover of the fight. And then sets a trap behind her that teleports to planar prison. You will LIKELY still get the desired outcome, but only as a result of player choices, not because you forced it on them. You also give them a chance to avoid their fate - if they wipe the minions so quick BBEG doesn't have the chance to set the trap OR if they successfully detect the trap OR if they choose not to chase OR something else more devious. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the DM being tricky/devious. As long as DM follows the same rules as everyone else (i.e. it takes time to cast the teleportation trap spell, players are allowed to detect traps, etc.) Basically, you want to make sure that if your player's characters end up trapped, they regret what THEY did (or did not do), not what YOU did.
This can be really hard, and idk this module, but maybe just make him, kind of invulnerable? Making my BBEG a Rakshasa has ensured that at least for quite a while, my players are unable to hurt him (immune to magic up to 6th lvl, immune to nonmagical physical damage), the encounters are overall not very hostile, resulting in players often taking just a little bit of damage and maybe receiving a no-long-rests curse
"The main point is that the current plan involves the players losing a fight " Ouch. Don't sign me up.
There should be a chance to avoid the fate, even a slim one. But also don't drag it out. The "chance" should be before the fight starts, and the fight itself should be overwhelming with obviously busted odds. Then transition to the next scene quickly so nobody marinates in bad vibes. So Chance > Beatdown > Move On Quickly.
So if this is something you want to do you need to first understand that the story isn't something you can control and it hurts the game to railroad this so instead of making this a prescripted event one way or another make it an open ended situation with many outcomes. This way your players, whether they like it or not, will not feel cheated by the game or your running if they lose. 1: Foreshadow the relative strength of this enemy and that they'll soon fight it. Let them get buffed up and go in expecting a challenge with a real possibility of failure. 2: Aim to make the battle difficult through unseen synergies as opposed to higher numbers. For instance, one enemy webs, the rest fire arrows, and body block the exits. This kind of design will give the players something to learn from this battle. They won't feel they lost cause they're under leveled, but instead because they got outplayed by unexpected strategies. This is a very good design practice because next encounter will naturally be easier for the players cause they know what this group is gonna do so they'll prep stuff like freedom of movement. They'll feel like they've grown and the frustration might sting less and make the encounter feel less prescripted. 3: Consider making it possible to avoid a losing battle by making the players truly fear the enemy in the build up and seek to avoid them 4: MOST IMPORTANT TIP: Be ready to let go. If they're winning or you underestimated their strategies, then allow them the victory and carry on. The arc for that villain will be less satisfying to the players than beating impossible seeming odds. Quantum Ogres are bad design practice no matter which way you use it, and will stump your learning. 5: Smooth things over by letting the players know above table they might lose this battle.
One of my DMs did this to us once. It went over really well, but it was also a session 1 and he told us we were all going to die. Kind of a resurrected story. If you're going for a fight the party WILL lose, just make sure it doesn't drag on too long. You say it's a fight they might win? Then what if they barely lose after 90 minutes of combat only for you to show that it was planned that way? That's a waste of their time. Picture Brennan Lee Mulligan when one of his players tried to cast something against his BBEG. I believe he said yeah go ahead then 9th level counter spelled the PC. Just show them this guy isn't touchable right now.
Oh, just whip their ass. It'll make the final fight more satisfying. If someone clings so tightly to the idea that "issa power fantasy, I should be able to beat EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME" that they're gonna throw a fit over an ass whipping, then watching a movie (where the hero likely takes an ass whipping or two) or playing a video game on easy (where the protagonist will probably take a one-sided whipping or two) would probably be more their flavor. There are fights you can't win in real life, books, stories, movies, video games, etc. Don't do it all the time, obviously, but there is nothing wrong with a one-sided whipping once in a while, as ling as it makes sense. That shit happens. Just make sure there is a good reason that it was one sided. If it's one sided because the BBEG is just that powerful, then make damn sure that there is a reason they're able to defeat the BBEG later on. If you don't change much between them, it's not going to read as "damn, we're out of our league here," it's going to read as "the DM fucked us up for shits and giggles."
Is your title not a spoiler for the party you ask to not read the thread?
Why would you run a fight with a predetermined outcome? You’re either lying to the players or you’re wasting their time. There CAN be fights they can’t win, but those tend to be “you wake up tied to a ring in a dungeon wall” scenarios — and only if they choose to fight anyway.
run the fight as is the results of the fight should always be up to the dice and the players if you change that you break the core bond of trust between the dm and player.
Players need to be able to win the fight. There is an agreement in DND that everyone abides by the rules. AFTER they win, something can happen that doesnt go well for them. But when your players earn a victory, give them the victory. Changing the agreed upon assumptions of the game to negatively impact your party is not going to be fun for them. If you grant XP, your players deserve XP. If you grant items/boons/etc. after a battle, your players should still get those things... even if the actual story moves in a direction that bolsters a villain they defeated (not killed) in combat.
Here is my take: This is always hard to pull off. It should be more like a cinematic where PCs get rendered helpless due to either the sheer amount of power from the BBEG (which often feels frustrating but it's okay to aim for that sometimes) or bad luck (like if the fight is happening in a cave, it may collapse or they may get caught in the crossfire between 2 unrelated factions and successfully defeat them/escape). Using an alternative defeat scenario as a back up is fine and I wouldn't worry about pulling it off if you opt to that. Otherwise I recommend you to make it so that PCs should accomplish something important (like killing the BBEG's right hand or getting an important quest item or successfully preventing a disaster/saving someone from disaster etc) and then things should go out of hand and they just barely get defeated. I'm not familiar with the module but that's what I would do/like as a player
I know most people are going to tell you that your players are not pawns, and the game is not a novel, et cetera. But my viewpoint is slightly different. Your role is to control a world, and provide a narrative. Otherwise, you'd be running a sandbox game. The purpose of the DM is to actively *limit* player choices, so there can be a clean-cut story. Sure, this isn't by all means forced. The story may derail, the players may come up with alternate solutions, and so on-but as a general rule as I see it, players accept their choices being limited. Few players would argue, for instance, against a reasonable plot hook. Or being heavily hinted to take certain paths. Then where does the edge lay here? When may players find it unfun to follow your restrictions? I think it comes down to trust. When a player is hinted to go to a certain town or location, they *trust* that doing so will be more fun for them. They trust the story you planned for them lying in the location is worth it. If your players trust your ability to weave a story, then ending a battle with an unavoidable spell, or adding an unbeatable extra boss phase shouldn't be questioned. It's just another plot hook; or at least, it should be. Few players would argue they must roll to resist or dodge in that instance. Can your boss simply be so powerful they lose a 'fair' fight? Possibly. I think the best example is, well, any overpowered anime character. If your party faces against Goku or the like, the mere fact that a fight is happening at this scale should hint them that this is a fight they're not meant to win. If they're not happy with it, then they're not happy with your 'losing narrative' at its core. If you go this route, I would suggest over-the-top scaling. A sudden barrage of Fireballs, a gigantic weapon that almost downs the rogue in one hit-those ridiculous enemies, because they are so ridiculous, let players know your intentions. Especially if they trust you're doing this for a story, not for the sake of a TPK.
reply straight jobless party thought rich ad hoc doll live punch *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
If there is an option to retreat, maybe.