Did you ever put your players infront of a No Win scenario, where they couldn't win per say, but at most minimize harm? How did that go?

>>96160395 (OP)
no but i played pathfinder once, its pretty much the same concept

>>96160395 (OP)
Yes, not on purpose but my players "no win scenario" is basic stuff, like not walking into a bottomless pit or breathing.

>>96160395 (OP)
Yeah its called delta green.

>>96160395 (OP)
>per say
Kill yourself.

>>96160395 (OP)
I do that in Dark Heresy campaigns.
Shit is going downhill by the time someone calls for the Inquisition, so the PCs scramble to eliminate the problem while the body count rises.

During one mission on an agri-world cultists started destroying holy statues that kept a warp rift closed. PCs were trying to bust a smuggling operation and had no idea.
A combination of good investigation, luck and an aggressive approach got them to the best outcome. Only about 80% of the pop of the local village/production center mutated and rampaged, before being killed. Worst planned outcome included full-scale demonic invasion of the planet and permanent warp rift.

>per say

>>96160395 (OP)
Not intentionally, but when we all started playing TTRPGs they would often end up pushing into that sort of situation. I think it was a video game mentality where if they could get into a situation they could get out of it. But that doesn't work as well in a less gamey system.

>>96160395 (OP)
They cried and moaned and had a melty instead of accepting the simple fact that not every fight is winnable. Worse, they're the ones that picked a fight with an elite special ops team.

>>96161758
My favorite players are the ones who think they can win every fight they pick, because if they couldn't win, the GM wouldn't let them pick the fight in the first place.

>>96160395 (OP)
Have you tried playing tabletop RPGs, instead of asking those inane, theory-floating-in-a-vacuum questions?

>>96161795
yeah im considering either a dogfighting 'aces of aces' kinda game, or an x-com expy

>>96160395 (OP)
Yeah, after they've spent whole campaign alienating or killing every potential ally, wasted all their limited use resources in the process, and pawned off equipment purpose-made to counter the threat they were facing, it felt appropriate.

>>96160395 (OP)
colville watching nogames

>>96160395 (OP)
A lot of game settings intrinsically are no-win scenarios like World of Darkness or Delta Green or even 40k, but as for games I've personally run, I've only done it once where the lifeforce/souls of the world stopped getting recycled and reused and so life was slowly perishing by problems conceiving or giving birth. The players set out on a journey to fix it, but there was no way to put things back the way they were.

The best everyone could do was figure out how to preserve parts of humanity and life in the world without it in its original form. There were a few different lines of thought from preserving humanity's art and culture for those who came after, using alternative means to sustain people indefinitely through necromancy, making robots that would be our "children" to take over after we're gone, and a few other ideas. In the end, the players decided to go the route of preserving themselves with necromancy, turning the majority of the remaining humans into undead such as demi-liches, revenants, etc. Unfortunately, this also robbed people of their purpose and brought the entire world into an eventual stasis since there was no needs or desires from the population anymore from the majority of people--there's just a few undead who aren't in a deep sleep and still continue to do things like research magic or whatever.

>>96160395 (OP)
Gonna do that soon.
Godbound campaign, they will face the big bad early on which, by design, is supposed to be unkillable at this stage by virtue of it only dying when healing rather than suffering damage, only one PC having the ability to heal and the big bad being able to suppress gifts.
I'm curious to see how they handle the scene.

>>96160395 (OP)
No because I'm not a cunt.

>>96160395 (OP)
Yes, we escorted a girl to a shrine where she had to be sacrificed to stop an unspeakable evil from breaking free.
The rest of the party wanted to try and rescue her, but the party Wizard said:
>"Don't fuck this up you faggots if you fuck this up we all die, I'll fucking kill you of you do anything stupid"
and the Ranger agreed but in less words.
So the girl was sacrificed, the evil was sealed away, and the party split up because none of them liked each other by that point.

>>96167848
Sounds like you're a bunch of bitchmade losers who weren't willing to PvP both the wizard and god.
>B-but he's powerful

Not even a simping or sex thing, just a 'Man, you weak chinned fuckers' thing.

>>96167856
>sacrifice one girl
>the entire world gets fucked up if we lose
I feel we were supposed to fight the evil God, but we had no hope of winning with only 3 members.
So we just ended things there.

>>96160395 (OP)
You first.

>>96167863
>We had no hope of winning
There's a temple right on top of it bro.
If nothing else you had the Samson option.
More importantly you had the narrative on your side, which of these is a stronger tale
>Yeah so we dropped the kid off and went home
Or
>We refused to drop the kid off, turned up at the temple, pushed the high priest out the way then gelded god with our bare hands, Omelas shall not stand, not while I live
And as we all know, at the tabletop narrative has its own weight most the time. Having a strong aura is a power in and of itself.

I know someone is going to say 'But the Samson option kills 3 people instead of 1, you're just saying it because it's a gir-'
No, I'm just saying it because it's an innocent child vs 3 older people.
You, quite literally, played out sacrificing the next generation in order to save yourselves. You chose to be Chronos, to consume your own children.

I don't know what to tell you man, except that you made a mistake.

>>96167878
If anything I blame the Wizard, who wanted to go with the safe option.
Like we could have argued with him, but he was so stubborn about it that by the end none of us wanted to work together any more.

>>96167898
>I didn't do the evil, it was someone else! I just stood by and did nothing to stop it. Well, alright, I helped them do it, but I was just following orders, they would've killed me if I hadn't
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR86maYvuUI
Like I said, I don't know what to tell you man, except that you made a mistake.

>>96160395 (OP)
Yes. I called it elf 'nam.
>setup
Each player would roll a d6 and the combined result would give an event.
I have a random encounter table that is used when the PCs needed to cross a bit of distance and each region had good, neutral and bad events happening depending on results. I had a rule where they would heal much less than the system allowed (D&D 3.5e) so I could force them to spend the items they're hoarding.
>Elf 'Nam
One of the regions where the players spent a lot of time in is a dark forest filled with various creatures and tribes of wood elves. Some are neutral, some are hostile and some are specialized in killing outsiders.
The specialized ones (I'll call them sappers) are small squads that consist of very stealthy elves (that lay traps and backstab) and snipers (that attack the PCs from very long range). The encounter would happen by either straight up ambush where the elves have the surprise round or the spotter or ranger in the party have a chance to notice something and I would grant them an initiative roll before the combat starts.
>How the ambush works
It always happens in a dense forest. Both sappers and PCs had plenty of heavy and light cover to exploit
Since the PCs had a warmage that really likes her evocation/fire spells, she would use them to clear up the trees and foliage so the sappers would run out of hiding/sniping spots, however this would result in fires spreading that would break visual contact. The fire would also produce no-go zones for the players. Since the players are usually attacked from multiple sides, the players are inclined/forced to burn a forest to create a "wall" to turn their back to.
>How it resolved
Every encounter ended by players and sappers being forced to retreat from combat due to spreading fires. They always took damage and usually at the start of the encounter. They would also always fail to kill any sapper so I could say that the next encounter would be the same squad that was stalking them.

>>96167918
Sounds to me like they should've just left the forest, thrown on some Fortunate Son and had the warmage throw mass fire into the forest until nothing remained.
Maybe send messengers to the neutrals to give them the heads up ahead of time but on the other hand, fuck 'em, they weren't helping regardless and there's no mass media or warcrimes tribunals to ruin the one good solution to such bullshit.