You ever had a campaign get the bad end?
And I don't mean necessarily TPK, but that they get to the end of the campaign and then fail, either through death or just simple failure.
>>47748834
In Shadowrun my players were hired by interests trying to stop Aztlan from taking over a chunk of northern Amazonia. The players were supposed to work in conjunction with a bunch of mercs fighting for Amazonia, with the player team doing wetwork, espionage and sabotage. Unfortunately they derped two missions hard (one ambush, and one base infiltration), mistakenly leaving enough of a trail for Aztlan spec-ops to track them. When they made a break for it, one was killed and the rest barely got out alive. The players enjoyed the whole thing but it ended in abject failure, with the Aztlan military wiping out the mercs and massacring thousands of people.
>>47748834
They got blasted to bits by Tiamat in a pocket dimension that had made to imprison her, essentially.I planned it, though, and let them think session was over for about 5 minutes before I deus ex machina'd them for the actual fight
Yep. My players let themselves get carted off to an alien prison cell when they were the only hope to stop the invasion force from killing everyone they knew.
>>47748834
I've had a couple things like that happen.
I ran a cyberpunk game where the players decided at the end not to take the bribe they were offered by the evil CEO type guy at the end, and instead killed him. Not necessarily the "bad" ending, but they did end up gutter trash again, instead of millionaires.
Some of them were sort of disappointed by this. I don't think all of them quite got the cyberpunk vibe fully at the time, and it put them off a bit that they made the right choice, morally speaking, but got screwed over for it instead of rewarded.
Yes. Well, the bad end for most of us. One player relatively "won" in the end.
Players wanted a hack and slash adventure, set up several orc tribes coming together to burn a town down. Players sent to said town to investigate missing caravans.
Easy enough right?
One player hears a rumor that the thieves guild has been acquirring some of the towns guards weapons and supplies. The party enters CSI mode for days in game and track down the guild and bring it down.
Then the orcs came and pillaged the town. Players hop on a boat mid fight and flee.
>>47749214
I ran an evil game once where the plot of the first half of the campaign was to raise a Cthuloid god from the sea and destroy the world. This was their idea, not mine, I just went along with it. They spent weeks hunting down and killing heroes, gathering artifacts, and creating an army of slaves.
Then halfway through, one of the players, who had ironically been the most sadistic and fucked up of them all, suddenly got cold feet over something, and decided she didn't want to be evil anymore. I can't remember what it was exactly, but this character, who had been murdering children and overseeing forced breeding programs of slaves, suddenly balked and reversed position. Because her boyfriend was playing the leader of the group, more or less, this ended up turning the campaign on a complete 180. So, for no reason ever explained or acknowledged in character, they totally changed course and began saving the world from their own conspirators and half realized plans.
I don't know if that would be considered a bad ending, or a potential bad ending averted for a good one, but it sure pissed me off at the time, since it forced me to re-plan half a campaign, nullified most of the story I had been working on, and made no sense whatsoever. Especially since I had run this campaign because my players specifically wanted to be allowed to play evil characters and not have to follow orders or do good deeds.
Was some of the stupidest meta-gamey roleplaying I ever saw in one of my games.
>>47749282
When I ran Scion, my players killed the son of Zeus and started a war between the Greek and Aztec gods. This was not the game I had planned on.
They ended up getting most of the gods killed and bringing about Ragnarok.
Isn't a bad ending to a campaign the beginning to the next one?
>>47749424
Ideally, yes
>>47749404
In my first attempt to run Vampire, the players were supposed to establish a new Prince in post-WW2 Berlin. They did okay with it until I, foolishly, in retrospect, allowed the brother of one of my players to join the game for one session while he was visiting.
This fucker, whose brother is a very nice guy and good roleplayer, turned out to be some kind of incredible asshole, and decided it would be a fun idea to kill his brother's character. So he conspired with the co-GM (because, again, stupidly in retrospect, I was running the game jointly with a friend) to inform on the players to the Invictus and convince them his brother's character had broken masquerade. By the time the co-GM let me in on what was going on, the Invictus had sent a death squad to Berlin to wipe out all the player characters. The fucker's brother died, the rest of the PCs fled, and I ended the campaign. Pretty terrible. I've never co-GMed anything since.
>>47748834
One member of party betrayed the group real close to the end, joined up with the bad guy.
When the party finally got to the final fight, they were fighting both the bad guy, and a pissed off former friend.
They immediately beelined for the friend, attacking the boss only incidentally.
After a few turns of this, the boss's ride finally showed up, and he skiddaddled out, his plan only marginally hindered, while the party continued beating the traitor into the ground.
The players considered it a good end (other than the traitor), but to the world, it was a REAL bad end.
