Those Who Tarry: Fights

[Beleg]

First off, spoilers here.

Hi guys,
I began Those Who Tarry with my group on Monday, and we got as far as them getting taken to Dol Guldur as prisoners. They seemed to enjoy themselves, but there were a few issues. The main one was that there are two unwinnable fights in this quest, not very far apart. On top of that, the eagles arriving in the first fight seemed to annoy my players a bit, and they felt they should be able to defend the town and kill the evil leader. I'm still quite new to GMing, so I had difficulty rationalising or 'fixing' these problems. Also, one player with a hobbit character managed to use his Elusive trait and a particularly good stealth roll to avoid getting captured.

Does anybody have some advice for me as to how I can utilise this player's situation, as well as how to deal with the slightly obnoxiousness of unwinnable fights?

Thanks, Beleg

[pgholland]

Speaking as someone who's run games for 10 years I have 2 things I'd say:


1) Never use an 'unwinnable fight'- players will hate it and it often won't go that way. Shame on C7 for planning one for you if they have!

2) Always have a contingency- sometimes an easy fight turns into a death-trap, that's a time for the villains to have to be elsewhere, grow overconfident or some such other event; and an 'unwinnable' for purposes of the scenario might need tweaking- maybe they beat the first lot, but reinforcements arrive soon after, or an ambush (or just patrol) stumbles over them at the last minute.

It can be scary, printed adventures are often worse for this, when players go 'off adventure'. It takes practice and experience to deal with it, but often you simply need to reframe what you have planned and set it wherever they go. Or give them a reason to get back on-track.

[Corvo]

(...)
1) Never use an 'unwinnable fight'- players will hate it and it often won't go that way.
(...)

Amen, brother.

You can give the players impossible odds. But not an "unwinnable fight".
To me it's a matter of honesty. Whatever you decide to do, congratulate your Hobbit player and tell him "I did my best, yet you escaped my grasp". You are a lucky master when your player can surprise you.

[BobusX]

Yep, same problem with the orc fight/eagle rescue. I ran it raw, since I had not run a game for a few years, and did not realize just how pissed my players would get. They do have a bad habit of trying to fight overwhelming odds (they attacked the bandit camp in "Kinstrife and Dark Tidings"), and they are pretty brutal combat monsters so they can end up killing piles of foes in these battles, making it seem like they could actually win some of these fights.

Lesson learned though. Starting a new game with new players soon, (I am moving, I didn't drive off my current group, they still want to play), and I will try to replace that encounter with something else, especially if my players seem to be prone to fight like my current group.

[Angelalex242]

Unwinnable fights have their place, if you have 'video game mentality'. However, don't 'roll out' unwinnable fights. Instead, run them 'FMV' mode. "You try valiantly to get away from the orcish horde, but they capture you!"

Player:Wait, can't I roll anything?
GM:Nope, cutscene FMV.

However, unwinnable cutscene FMVs should reward the players with a point of hope back each, for the privilege of dragging them around in a FMV.

[pgholland]

No- cutscenes that deprive characters of the chance to act are a certain way to make them angry.

Present a fight with extreme difficulty/ low odds but never railroad them into something. If they find a way out, then you find another way to get them into it.

Cut-scenes can be used for exposition and time-passing, nothing else unless you want at least 1 ticked-off group member.

[Halbarad]

I've been GMing for close to thirty years now and I agree that, most of the time, depriving the players of their free will is going to upset them. However, in Tolkien, staring death in the face and surviving, not necessarily because of your own choices, but because of the arrival of 'Help unlooked for' is thematically bang on target.
TOR,in it's rules system and in the way it's published adventures unfold, is attempting to recreate a Tolkienesque feel in the game. The appearance of the Eagles as a Deus Ex Machina happens at least four or five times between the Hobbit and LotR. The Eotheod/Riders of Rohan have three such events as well, that I can recall.
It may not suit the style of certain Players, but it is very much in keeping with the way things unfold in Tolkien's writings. Sometimes the foe is simply too powerful or too numerous to be faced with any chance of success without the intervention of a third party. The Eagles intervention is just about as Tolkienesque as you can get. My own players were actually, visibly, relieved when their characters were rescued by the Eagles from their perceived demise. My group probably experienced the events in the way that the author hoped they would be experienced, though in the side panel, he makes a few suggestions for players who might see things and react differently.

[windsurfjunkie]

I have to agree with Halbarad. This certain adventure is very Tolkienesque. The fight was brutal, with it looking like they have run into unbelievably bad luck. This happens in story lines and characters may die. But in this instance, I presented Irime as a blessed Elf-Lord: her ring (which I wrote about in a session summary story) was made by Celebrimbor in Ost-in-Edhil, in the Second Age, and thus was a minor ring of power that glowed with the light of Elbereth when a certain elf song was sung and its power was called upon. This song "hung in the air for miles", attracting the Eagles, their Lord Gwaihir, had long ago heard the elven song of defiance against the Shadow, and her ring also led the eagles to their position with its shining "like a Star".
The characters were thankful for the rescue, and realized that things can go awry very quickly in Middle Earth; sometimes they may be helped by powerful NPC's, sometimes not. This is the anxiousness I leave them with.
cheers

[Woodclaw]

Personally I use unwinnable fights all the time, but always providing a few escape routes for the group.
See, for a long time I've been plagued by players with a videogame mentality, thinking that everything they met should be killed for the sake of XPs. As a result I started to put them against impossible odds just to see how they would handle them (I skidded very closely to TPK there). Since then it remained kind of a habit, but I tend to award creative solutions to this kind of situations quite generously - probably too much.
One of the key problems is when this situations are solved through a Deus Ex Machina, because this makes the less of the players and GM fanservice. I know that this is coherent with the source material but, at the same time, makes the scene less interesting to the players because they lost the chance to make a difference in the story. Calibrating this third party interventions is the trick, it should be clear that they changed the tide, but they shouldn't rob the players of their control over the situation.

[Mytholder]

In retrospect, the huge issue with the adventure isn't the unwinnable fight - it's having two of them in close succession. I could have got away with having either the "you can't beat the orcs fight, but the eagles rescue you" encounter OR the "town is besieged, you're captured" one, but both is bad design. I fell into the trap of having a scene in my head that I wanted to evoke ("the eagles! the eagles!"), and didn't set things up as well as I should.

You do need almost overwhelming numbers of orcs for the story to work - if the PCs could reasonably defeat Irime's pursuers, it makes her and Legolas look fearful and weak, which is absolute poison to the setting. Still, there should have been a few alternate endings for the fight - maybe the PCs defeat the first wave of orcs and manage to break the siege and ride out. That still leads up to the High Pass and the rest of the adventure.

The second unwinnable fight - the battle in the dream version of the town - is unwinnable because the PCs are going to end up in prison. There, it's a dream, an evil spell cast by the Gibbet King, and being compelled and railroaded is part of the horror. I've no problem with that battle being unfair and unwinnable, because it's not a 'real' encounter. If you really, really wanted to give the players maximum freedom, you could have an ending where they win the fight and escape the town - then they wake up for a moment, see Irime battling the spirit, and then find themselves in chains being marched south by the same raiders they just killed, making it clear that all this is an illusion or nightmare.

There's a vast difference between "unwinnable fights" and "taking away the players' freedom of choice". Unwinnable fights are perfectly "fair". (Ultimately, the whole of the war against the Enemy is unwinnable!) There are vast armies of orcs and other monsters, and sometimes the PCs will run into them and be unable to triumph through force of arms. What's up to the players - and what Those Who Tarry handles badly in places - is what they do when combat will not avail then.