All Good Things…Break, Part IV

On Saturday, March 11th, 2023, my D&D 5e game crashed and burned. A Total Party Kill. A wipe. There were tears. There red faces. There were raised voices. There was rage.

…the story continues from Part III: The Tactical Fight

The Aftermath

The tension was palpable.

“And good game,” one of the players declared with resignation.

“I assume she’s going to kill all of us now,” another said.  Though implied, it wasn’t a question.

One of the players apologized to everyone else.

One of the players was crying quietly as they packed up their stuff. Another was red in the face.

I tried to calm the room. I realize now it was way too late, but I had dropped out of the focus I was maintaining to run the combat and could see how upset folks were. I tried to assure them that they weren’t aware of the reinforcements. They weren’t aware of the giant spiders. I didn’t feel like it was time for a post mortem on how those things could’ve been mitigated or avoided.

“Can I ask for a clarification on something,” one player began to ask carefully. “When we are down people, you have not been scaling down the combat encounters in light of how many people we currently have?”

“Mmhmm,” I replied and nodded, probably too glibly…trying to keep things light and airy sometimes comes across as glib. I knew where this was going, we’d already touched on it a bit earlier in the night as tensions rose. I was as devastated as they were but I felt this wasn’t the time to indulge in my own emotions.

“If that is the case…what is the point of us doing a game where we are missing people, because we’re knowingly putting ourselves where we could be at a significant handicap and get killed?”

I explained that I didn’t think that was the problem with the encounter. I walked through how I just increased the number of bugbears to try to balance the encounter for 7 characters. The debate continued and my ability to keep my own emotions under check faltered as well.

“You’re saying that the number of monsters are sitting in a room only exist when you open up a door,” I said to another player.

“Considering they’re only existing in your head…until we open the door, yes.” The volume in the room was increasing to uncomfortable levels.

“That’s not how I’ve ever run a game,” I replied quietly. I was exasperated, flustered and feeling more than a bit defeated. I was trying to regain my calm.

”In that case, if anybodys’ ever missing a game, so am I. I can’t do that. I highly disagree with that idea, very much so.”

There were some more heated, angry words, but that was the gist of the post-game disagreement. The implication was that because I’d planned out the encounter for seven players who were in my game and didn’t decrease the number of bugbears in the room to accommodate the six players who were actually at the table, the disastrous conclusion to the campaign was my fault.

A few players stayed behind afterwards and we chatted for some time. I don’t remember much of it, other than they had both been through TPKs before and weren’t all that upset. They were disappointed that the game had concluded as it had, but they weren’t upset with me. Over the next few days, my internal turmoil deepened. At one point, I was fairly convinced I’d lost the entirety of my gaming group. This was my primary artistic outlet and the ethics I’d long stood by were being blamed for an unfair ending. It was more than a little soul-crushing.

The Post-Mortem

I wasn’t sure what to do next. The following Monday, though, I got a text from one of the players who’d been blaming the end of the game on me not weakening the encounters at the table. He was asking to run the next game in my stead.

All that hurt turned to rage. I kinda blew up on him.

I told him I wasn’t interested in playing in the sort of game he wanted to run. Where encounters were modified at any time based on out-of-game factors, like number of players physically at the table. I wasn’t interested in playing in a world that didn’t have any semblance of verisimilitude. I wanted to play in a game like what I ran, with the same aversion to metagaming and adherence to some consistent ethical standard.

I also pointed out that the encounter design rules in D&D5e, though very math intensive, aren’t even remotely an exact science. One less PC isn’t going to make much of a difference at the table and no system can truly determine a Deadly encounter vs an Easy one. This group had absolutely sailed through several Deadly encounters with barely a scratch. Some Easy encounters had become deadly when mistakes were made and multiple encounters were pulled at once.

The conversation, of course, went nowhere. We both were still pretty upset. Both that night and during this conversation, I said repeatedly that we needed to simmer down, but I let myself be drawn into an emotional conversation twice. I regret it still.

It was relatively soon after this disastrous conversation that I decided I was going to continue the tradition I’d done at the end of previous campaigns and do a post-mortem. Usually, I did it with the whole group over a meal, but this time, I decided to talk to each person one-on-one.
Some were done that night, in retrospect, with the folks who remained behind afterwards. Some I did over Messenger. Some I did in person.

All of the points raised were valid, though some more than others.

One important point that was made to me was the order in which I was having monsters of the same type take move and attack actions, specifically my bugbears. The bugbears were all moving on the same initiative beat, so I’d stand up, move them as necessary to a new position, then return to my desk and start rolling to hit. This meant they got more flanking bonuses than they really should have. I don’t think it would’ve made that drastic of a difference to the conclusion of the fight, but maybe it would’ve. Either way, it’s a lesson I’ll certainly carry with me into future games.

Some of the other points were more painful to hear. I was told my attempts at levity during the fight were cruel. That I should have just ended the battle early and prolonging a fight I knew would end the campaign was unnecessary. Mention was made that some thought I’d promised the PCs ‘plot armor’ for the course of the first module and felt betrayed when that wasn’t the case. The stance on changing encounters in the moment also came up again and I pointed out that I’d run the numbers… the encounter was already weaker than it should’ve been for 7 players. I also pointed out that we’d had a situation earlier in the game where a player who was thinking about not coming to game was asked to show up because they were in that fight with Venomfang and I asked should I have increased that encounter in the middle of it because they added another PC? That seemed to help, at least some, with finally calming the opposition to me not metagaming encounters at the table.

Though these conversations, I did realize something though: because GMs so often fudge dice and lie about what goes on behind their screen, players feel betrayed when they’re allowed to fail. You can find scores of what we used to call ‘powergamers’ on YouTube telling you which build is so powerful it’ll break your game and how to stack the system in your favor. And people believe them, because the math seems to add up. What they don’t tell you is that, because most GMs cheat, no one really thinks through how these builds might take away from the game or harm a game. Because most GMs pretend to have their encounters fail, players think they’re actually overcoming encounters without having to think. Because GMs are advised to fudge, players think the encounter builder system is a science… not the absolute guesswork and guideline it’s intended to be. Players don’t think failure is an option because in most games, the possibility of failure isn’t real. It’s faked. They’ve been lied to.

There was another factor that I’d failed to realize until well after the dust had settled. I was struck how, in this one campaign, in twelve sessions, the group had TPK’d twice and almost TPK’d a third time (during that assault on Cragmaw Castle). I hadn’t had a true TPK end a campaign in probably 20 years, since an Earthdawn campaign that ended with a Horror ripping through the party. Once I realized that, I realized one thing was missing… our group planner. One player had always been the one to take the brunt of the grumbling and whining when the group was determining how to handle the challenges before them. She was the planner of the group, the one person at the table who knew me best and knew that I’d let the party fail if that’s what the dice determined. So she knew planning was necessary… you had to think in my games. You had to play smart. And she helped everyone else at the table play smart too.

She died in April of 2022: my wife, Chelle, who’d been a player in every campaign I’d run since 1991. She wasn’t there to push folks to think and play smart and take time to plan. And so they didn’t. Everyone felt her absence, but I don’t think anyone, myself included, really perceived how her absence would affect us as players.

Other points were certainly reassuring, but they were hard to really take in. We tend to focus on the negative and I’m no exception.

…the story concludes in Part V: The Conclusion!