Players wrecked their prototype ship, now what?
- Thread starter renski
- Start date
far-trader said:
Yeh that's fun too
So far what cracked me up best was this commentary:
"Never provide a dungeon without treasure. The longer they search and find nothing, the more your players will be convinced that the treasure is bountiful and exceptionally well-hidden. If left unchecked, they will eventually dismantle and excavate the entire site in their search for loot."
Oh so true! Hell screw dungeon! Players in one of old campaigns opted to raid entire frigging planet for loot with their mercenary army
Of course that sorta backfired when Imperial Fleet came, arrested(for some reason mercenaries decided to disobey, surrender and blead mercy on ground of "we only followed orders"...) and executed
(note GM'ing that result wasn't THAT evil as we had already been talking about wrapping this campaign and starting another from scratch so this seemed as funny and unexpected way to wrap campaign up. Players sure did not expect to get summarily executed
)tneva82 said:Of course that sorta backfired when Imperial Fleet came, arrested(for some reason mercenaries decided to disobey, surrender and blead mercy on ground of "we only followed orders"...) and executed
(note GM'ing that result wasn't THAT evil as we had already been talking about wrapping this campaign and starting another from scratch so this seemed as funny and unexpected way to wrap campaign up. Players sure did not expect to get summarily executed
The thing I love about traveller is that it's fairly easy to make very open campaigns, where players can get themselves in to all sorts of unexpected trouble. But there should be realistic consequences to their actions. Summary execution might be a bit harsh, but I certainly put them through a trial and have them spend 2d6x5 years in prison. That way you can reuse them as NPCs in your next campaign!
renski said:
Well let's see. They had raided Imperial armoury sometime earlier, stolen whole bunch of nuke's(and sacrificed about half the mercenaries in the process...), invaded productive mining planet, used stolen nuke's wantomly against military and civilian targets(not a bunch of friendly players....
We did have fun when players were planning their coup and how to defeat army that vastly outnumbers you with smaller but technologically vastly superior army.), enslaved planet's population, committed planet-wide theft, attempted armed resistance against Imperial Forces...Yeh Imperial authorities were sorta pissed off 
Seriously anything short of life-time imprisoment would seem very weird considering just what they did!I don't think they would be that needed as NPC's and as we had already been talking about wrapping it up(which gave the idea for this result) it's not like players really lost anything valuable. And certainly drove home the idea of "there's consequences on what you do. Don't go around breaking every single frigging law and expect to not be punished for it"
Not to mention good laugh! At RPG's you kinda get used to idea that provided dices don't go horribly wrong you can always get away with it somehow. Having your characters executed without being able to do anything is...Different!Now mind you if there hadn't been talks of starting new campaign with fresh characters players would have been instead thrown into life imprisoment from which they could have escaped(prison planet ahoy!). Obviously this would have resulted in still consequences(no going back to law obeying guys...Renegades they are!) but not this permanent. But as it was it gave good excuse to pull up unexpectedly ultimate price to pay for your crimes.
Well, I had player characters summarily executed for less severe
crimes in my campaigns. For me it is a matter of the plausibility
of the setting. If the setting has the death penalty for a specific
crime and the player characters get caught after committing that
crime and have no extraordinarily good plan to escape the punish-
ment, they die.
crimes in my campaigns. For me it is a matter of the plausibility
of the setting. If the setting has the death penalty for a specific
crime and the player characters get caught after committing that
crime and have no extraordinarily good plan to escape the punish-
ment, they die.
...Priceless!tneva82 said:
(Blank character sheets - don't leave home without them. :lol: )
PC's dying from sheer random chance, through no fault of their player's choices, is generally meaningless. When players choose to do things that could get their PC's killed, that is another story. PC death has meaning and that makes a good story.
To encourage players to roleplay, I often have them play several PCs each that are limited to a few terms, with the expectation that one or all of their young adventurers will die. In D&D days, when we grew bored of making kingdoms with our umpteenth level clerics and such, we started doing this with dragon-fodder adventures (lots of level-1 PCs in adventures designed for much higher ones). It was loads of fun - nobody was attached to their characters, XP, or gold - it brought out the roleplay.
To really encourage this same thing in CT, I created a home grown supplement called 'Expendable Crewmen' with skills and chargen dedicated to supporting red-shirts. These PCs were destined to die. Usually, ridiculously, but in a way that benefited the party. (Gotta update that for Mongoose one day!).
Getting off track a bit, but:
I'm not so sure the original CT wasn't designed for players to die in droves. It only took a few minutes to create a new character after all.
But players don't seem to like that sort of thing for some reason.
It does sound like fun to run an adventure where players expect that they will be killed sooner or later. I suppose you could have each player have two characters in the setting, one for "red shirt duty" and one more serious character. In fact, that would be a fun way to run the new Drinax campaign. Just parcel out the rest of the crew, and have NONE of them be NPCs. When one dies, the player who lost the character gets the right to roll up the new one, though the Ref might put some limitations (like term limits or career choices) based on the job being filled.
I'm not so sure the original CT wasn't designed for players to die in droves. It only took a few minutes to create a new character after all.
But players don't seem to like that sort of thing for some reason.
It does sound like fun to run an adventure where players expect that they will be killed sooner or later. I suppose you could have each player have two characters in the setting, one for "red shirt duty" and one more serious character. In fact, that would be a fun way to run the new Drinax campaign. Just parcel out the rest of the crew, and have NONE of them be NPCs. When one dies, the player who lost the character gets the right to roll up the new one, though the Ref might put some limitations (like term limits or career choices) based on the job being filled.
Players that are willing to take risks in character with the personalities (ego, righteousness, blissfulness, etc.) they impart on their PCs, make good roleplayers.
Having a PC as a stunt double (the 'for real' one vs. the red shirt in the above) is fun, especially in campaigns. Not playing a 'serious' character really helps address 'character attachment syndrome' many players are afflicted with. That is where the military trained 'adventurer' that the rules facilitated creating becomes the cautious investment banker that is completely out of character because the player doesn't want to lose their 'investment' in the PC or just can't 'lose' at anything.
This certainly isn't for every adventure and wouldn't work well for most campaigns. I use it as a tool for encouraging risk taking play and for fun, quick, one-off adventures. We could sometime do several entertaining and exciting adventures in one session this way.
Having a PC as a stunt double (the 'for real' one vs. the red shirt in the above) is fun, especially in campaigns. Not playing a 'serious' character really helps address 'character attachment syndrome' many players are afflicted with. That is where the military trained 'adventurer' that the rules facilitated creating becomes the cautious investment banker that is completely out of character because the player doesn't want to lose their 'investment' in the PC or just can't 'lose' at anything.
This certainly isn't for every adventure and wouldn't work well for most campaigns. I use it as a tool for encouraging risk taking play and for fun, quick, one-off adventures. We could sometime do several entertaining and exciting adventures in one session this way.
Depending on the referee, this can lead to what we call "bungee jumpingBP said:
adventures", adventures designed to give the impression of danger, but
without any real risk to the player characters.
The problem is that many players want the best of two worlds, on the one
hand they are well aware that an adventurer, especially a heroic adventu-
rer, is someone who is willing to take serious risks to do what he considers
right or necessary, on the other hand they are unwilling to accept that such
risks can be real enough to kill their heroic adventurer character - after all,
the characters in the movies have that script immunity ...
