On Monday I talked about coming back from breaks and giving the PCs a chance to feel powerful. I talked about it, because at the time of writing it was my plan for my game on Sunday (that night). The fun thing is, I did the session, set the scenario up, and then watched the dice make it a closer fight than it was ever meant to be.
We still had fun, and the PCs could still see some of how strong they were now, but the fight went a lot longer than it was originally meant to, and the bad guys did a lot better, because for some reason the dice hated the PCs, and weren't too fond of the NPCs either.
This is part of the reality of RPGs. The dice can ruin, or make epic, almost anything. I've been in several games intended to be super gritty only for them to turn cinematic as the PCs rolled ridiculously high roll after ridiculously high roll. Combine near constant max damage crits with a damage threshold set for super gritty and you have a lot of dead bad guys...more than should be possible for the PCs without tons of luck because that is what happened.
The dice are also famous for giving PCs critical strikes to insta-kill the campaign's big bad boss when they appear as a cameo early on in the game.
The dice, in short, do what they like. It's the fun part of random chance. You never know what's going to happen. That's part of the fun.
What have the dice done in your game of late?
Also, as a note, no post on Friday as it is a holiday.
The main thing the dice have done, of late, is have most NPCs be uncooperative with the PCs. The main reason for this though, is not the dice. It's because the player who naturally takes the lead for the group has a particularly uncharismatic loner assassin character.
ReplyDeleteThis has been going on for years - in real time - and still offers a fair amount of comic relief. The player is far more capable in this regards than his character, and the player has a naturally leading personality. So he makes a good point/pitch/demand in-game, but then, a decent amount of the time, I then tell him to go ahead and give me a Charm or Command Test - to which multiple players moan, as we've all seen this movie many times.
Usually his nemesis are Charm Tests, but lately his character has been trying to get uniformed personnel to do his bidding. His Command Tests haven't gone very well. Good times.