Just have them fail forward :^)

>>46149960
Well there are a couple of school of thought on this. Going with the G.G. method, you could allow turnover to be an expected and frequent result. This can be fun if you're more invested in combat or willing to see the sessions as a sort of Game of Thrones turnover drama, but most players end up connected to the person they play as week to week.

Alternatively, you could use a failure to bog down the group. TPK? Maybe slavers find them, strip them of their equipment, and sell them off. Players would need to think of a way out of their situation and back to the plot. One character is having a bad streak of rolls? Maybe they've been cursed / caught sickness. It'll be a good tie in for that witch stalking them, or a hint that the host feeding them might not be so benevolent.

I've come to see that rival characters can be useful here- have the Gary Oak of the game mock the character for poor performance, and turn a streak of poor luck into a point of revenge to be made later.

>>46150502
>Alternatively, you could use a failure to bog down the group.
This is not a problem to me, the problem is that death tends to bog things down way too much. I doubt there would be a lot to capture if the character fell from a 10 story building.

>>46150544
>I doubt there would be a lot to capture if the character fell from a 10 story building.
For the last time! We did not order a giant trampoline!

>>46149960
If a character can't fail, then they can't really succeed. All they can do is follow the dotted line.

With that said, failure doesn't need to be end. People live through car crashes all the time - most of the time, they're not even that badly injured. So they're maybe walking around with some injuries, and they've lost their vehicle so the bad guy gets away. As for the leaping from rooftops? They slam into a fire escape or something, hurting themselves a lot, and - again - letting the bad guy escape.

>>46150620
That's the kind of thing I'm trying to avoid though, things like that make the victories feel much less rewarding, since there was virtually no way they could fail enough to make reaching their goal impossible.

>>46150623
I guess. It just seems to be such a delicate balance to me. It's almost as if it would be great if they died if they failed, but only if they never failed, if you know what I mean.

>>46149960
You're just going to have to learn to improvise friend, but I understand that sometimes there's the real life problem where a player dies at the beginning of a session and now has nothing to do for several hours because they have no character anymore, but you're going to have to learn how to give players punishment for failing while still progressing with your story. I'll give you an example of mine.

I planned a whole new arc for my group, brand new city, plot and NPCs. Since the last arc ended with the party becoming wanted criminals, I made it so that they would have to sneak through customs when they entered this new city (they were going via boat). It was a pretty simple task since I didn't want to bog down the story there but one player rolled three successive 1s when trying to disguise, deceive and then sleight of hand his way through customs. Due to this, the next two sessions all involved the party trying to break him out of jail. This delay resulted in the main villain of the arc having several days to enact his plan without interference and has left the party with almost no time left to stop him. This arc has not gone the way I planned at all, but it's actually gotten more interesting because of the incredible failure at the beginning.

I prefer to spin failure in a way such that bad things happen to the world, the players then have a new problem to confront. It's important that your plots change the setting, for better or for worse.

The car crash may not be fatal, but the terrorist escaped with the WMD and killed a million people, or they're at least one step closer to doing so.

It's okay for characters to fail catastrophically, if the villain manages to bring back the old gods it's no longer a campaign about stopping him but one about surviving in a new hellish world.

>>46149960

I deal with this in a Savage Worlds campaign I run. Some guy took all of the Luck edges he could, I even invented some for him. The guy is a kleptomaniac and also a complete idiot who thinks he can do anything. However whenever it looks like he is about to really bite the dust, it is never in something major and important, it is always when he does something stupid like pick a fight with 10 guys he just robbed or something else.

It doesn't help that this guy rolls insanely high. he has made me cap exploding dice at one reroll due to his ability to somehow roll insane fucking damage and to-hit rolls. He once shot a man in the head with a flintlock pistol from like 1000 feet because he rolled a 24 to hit. In Savage Worlds where you usually only need a 4 to hit a target in combat, assuming he's in the open, ideal conditions, etc.

I look forward to running my sandbox zombie apocalypse campaign so high character turnover will be a thing and I expect only 1 to 2 of the original characters to survive to "the end" if any of them do.

If TPK then just make the next arc about adventuring in the spirit world to come back to life.

> forgot advice

My advice is, fail forward. This is coming from someone who hates all this narrativist wankery. But seriously, if the PCs fuck up, have it move the story forward. It doesn't mean sucking their cock, it means using failure to make the story interesting. So no, if they fail a diplomacy check, that doesn't mean some guy shows up and offers them a roundabout way of doing it. It means the guy gets angry, maybe shouts out something that turns out to be a clue, or some other shit. At the VERY most make the failure have some kind of interesting cascading consequence that moves the story somewhere else.

You don't have to ALWAYS do this, but if the PCs get stuck adn start turtling, then you must do something or your campaign is ruined.

Do what justin alexander says and start waving the solution in their faces slowly. Keep bringing up a certain aspect that you want them to gravitate toward. Or just let them fuck up, miss the opportunity, and bullshit the rest of the session. Then make up a new adventure when you get home.

I've had PCs take what was meant to be a small sidequest and turn it into an entire campaign, then ignore the main plotline even when they had nothing better to do. It came back to bite them and it was interesting. They emerged triumphant but it was a close one.

Be dispassionate but know when to steer. That is my advice from like 10 years of GMing.

Depending on the setting, death might not be that big of a thing. Full on coming back to life is not unheard of, or they might continue to exist as an undead, ghost in a shell or something like that.

I have no real issue with killing off player PCs if they fail but what I tend to do is give them multiple chances to fail before finally kicking the bucket when it comes to skill rolls.

For example, fall down between rooftop buildings? You can roll again to try and grab a ledge and possibly have another PC help them up, then if that fails, another roll to react in time to find something to cushion their fall or brace themselves (still take heavy damage).

I try to not make fail rolls a automatic failure, but rather a bad result that can lead to different choices.

No player will ever accept that their character is mortal, and that their actions can have potentially lethal consequences.

No player will ever be able to accept the fact that if they can swing an sword and end an enemy, an enemy can swing a sword and end them.

They will cry and throw a tantrum if they fail.

Your job as a DM is to coddle them and make sure that they never fail, so they never have to cry.

It doesn't matter what SHOULD happen, and how failure SHOULD be a real possibility in the game. What matters is what IS.

>>46149960

OP, listen to this:

>>46151467

With a side order of a straight talk about consequences and death. I want you to run an OSR one-shot. I want you to kill at least one person. Preferably, it should be a TPK.

No, you should not TRY to kill them by being unfair. OSR type games tend to be pretty brutal, particularly to level one characters. If they push combat against something that they can't handle, the PCs will die. It'll not only be a good experience for you, but also for them.

Be upfront at the beginning of the game that if they dice say someone is dead, they're dead.

Stakes and consequences are essential to roleplaying, without them, we're might as well just be playing pretend without any rules. You and your players need to get used to the idea of death among player characters so you can distance yourselves emotionally from it, and so that you (and they) can handle it when it comes up and might have drastic campaign/story consequences.

The nature of RPGs allows the story to emerge from player actions, which is why players don't actually need fate/hero points - all the agency they need is "I do X". The natural consequences of X should be the direction the story takes.

And sometimes, we make a bad decision, the dice don't favor us, and we die.

But then some bystander sees a chromed out cyborg burning to death in the wreck of his lamborgini, and with the last of his strength throws the data chip to said bystander and says "Don't let THEM have it" with his final breath.

And the campaign continues.

>>46150544
>I doubt there would be a lot to capture if the character fell from a 10 story building.
If it's in jumping from one building to another, remember that it's parabolic so he misses the roof but hits the window a couple floors down, takes damage and is delayed by having to go up the stairs.

If it's just falling down, convenient open trash container cushions the fall, still take a lot of damage but not dead.

>>46151396
Check his dice, might be loaded.

>>46152003
You need to stop playing with children.