Pyrrhic victories
I know that party wipes are a thing — that people are playing a role-playing game and their characters are on an adventure, and then all the PCs die. I always kind of wonder what happens to the story after that, to be honest. My only actual experience with it is watching Dorkness Rising.
From that — and plenty of posts on this blog — I’m sure that you can tell I do not routinely, or even occasionally, kill the entire party in my role-playing games. It’s pretty rare for even one player character to die unless someone’s retiring their creation — and we only do that if someone is having a problem with their character or has to drop out of the game. We only kill them off after every other recourse has been tried and failed.
But lest you think that my games are all flowers and sunshine, with an invincible party striding through dangers and battles without fear or loss, my last session proved that’s not the case. For one thing, even at my softest touch, I can’t save my players from one critical failure after another on their dice.
Last session of my current campaign, a combat scene started off with truly terrible initiative rolls on my players’ side. So the enemy got to move first. In this case, the enemy was a spirit-possessed wrecking ball which proceeded to… well, wreck them. You see, one of the player characters uses a lot of explosives and big guns, so I tend to pile up big heaps of antagonists or giant things so that he has something fun to blow up. But this time, he got smacked down hard before he even made it to his turn, then frenzied. In this game setting, frenzy is when pain, humiliation, or anger sends a character into a berserker rage. People in berserker rages tend to use guns as clumsy bludgeons, and do not carefully set explosives.
The rest of the player group tried valiantly to pull their friend out of frenzy, but their attempts just made things more dangerous. It would only have been worse if he had actually attacked the other characters in his blind rage — but they were lucky enough that he just spent the battle gnawing on a solid steel construction machine. I then proceeded to smack the group around like a bunch of piñatas.
However, I don’t generally throw combats at my players that they can’t win. The rest of the party pulled themselves together enough to eke out some hits on the possessed wrecking ball and slowly nickel-and-dimed down its health levels. And thanks to a truly terrible roll on my part, the wrecking ball managed to accidentally squash most of the rest of the enemies. Together, the PCs finally finished the literally cursed thing off.
Then the bomb they set in the building this evil equipment was guarding exploded, putting an end to the nefarious plans inside. So the characters scurried away with their lives, but I could see my players were kind of shaken. It had been a close call. The party leader, instead of leading them into battle and directing the tactics, had fallen into mindless rage. He had been badly hurt in his frenzy, but the healer had no way to protect him during the fight.
What could I do now? I leaned into it. The youngest party member, an NPC, looked up with sad eyes and asked if they had won.
Well… did they?
So, the player characters achieved their objective: blowing up the building. And they won the battle: every enemy on the board was defeated and no one else died. But the party was shaken. I’ve got a veteran player group and they work well together. Those battle tactics they use are normally quite effective. They’ve had to be creative and they’ve taken their lumps… But they had never stared failure in the face so closely in this campaign.
They had to answer the young NPC. They had to remind themselves and each other that they did win. They reminded the party leader that his stumble wasn’t the end of his journey. They had to remind the healer that she did as well as anyone could have. And they reminded the tank that he had kept everyone alive.
After the battle, they limped away, each of them dealing with their mistakes and failures — feeling the pain, but also finding the hope.
I’ve got to say, it was a hell of a lot cooler than just wiping everyone out in one battle and then making my players roll up new characters. A simple combat scene took on some heavy emotional weight and fueled the next hour of role-playing!
Now, this isn’t something that I could have planned. It was just the result of some bad dice rolls. Which is exactly what the dice are there to do — add a random element! But I did let the characters into the building without a fight, then ambushed them outside as they left, when they weren’t expecting it. I did put them on their heels. Which set the tone for those failed rolls, and I used my NPCs to reflect the unexpected difficulty they had in the battle and play off of their doubts.
So what is the advice here? What I can suggest, and what a Storyteller can plan for, is aiming for emotional wounds instead of total party wipes.
Have you heard the improv mantra “Yes And”? It means that if someone is doing something in a scene, don’t shut it down. Add to it, change the direction, subvert expectations, but don’t just bring it to a halt. And that’s what a party wipe does. It just stops the game, the story. Everything.
Some players and Storytellers enjoy that character death provides consequences and gives a role-playing game some more real-world stakes. That’s fine, though I’ve found that emotional stakes are just as real, but they don’t bring my story to a halt. In fact, emotional stakes feed the story, give the players something new to react to and role-play with.
So what works as emotional stakes? Well, maybe instead of the party all dying if they fail, a non-player character suffers instead. Let me tell you, if an NPC takes a hit for a character, saving their lives at the cost of their own, that’s going to hit hard. That character and their player is going to have to ask if they should have done something differently. If they had fought better, harder, or made different choices, would the NPC have had to do that? Especially if the NPC is well-liked by the players, it can be one hell of a punch.
Failing to achieve a goal with consequences can be another cost of failure. Maybe a village in jeopardy isn’t saved, leaving them to protect refugees whose every glance at the party says you saved my life, but you let my home burn. Are the characters going to drink the pain away? Redouble their commitment to doing better next time? Swear revenge on the foe that put them in this situation? All awesome options!
Players can’t role-play those emotions with a dead character. So the situation I create any time I put my players’ characters into battle is not a victory or loss scenario, but a victory versus pyrrhic victory scenario.
For non history nerds, Pyrrhus of Epirus technically won the Battle of Asculum, but the battle sapped his forces so badly that it was pretty much the end of his campaign. And to rub salt in the wound, his name is now synonymous with victories that cost far more than they won.
In an RPG, a Pyrrhic victory isn’t the end of the campaign, but a way to keep it moving forward when the party stumbles. Out of character, it’s a win-win, really. My players either triumph in-game and enjoy the victory, or they suffer emotional wounds that are fun to role-play through! So instead of killing off characters or wiping out the whole party, look for a way to let them succeed — but remember that their success doesn’t always have to taste sweet. The stumble isn’t the end of their journey.
