When we talk about "failure" or "defeat" in games we often mean "death" or "moving a character closer to death." When we talk about "success" in games, we often mean "killed every member of the opposing side," or "acquired an improved ability to kill or keep from being killed." Many games are deliberately about something else, but when they're not they're often about dying or not dying.

There are many reasons for this, but there are also many problems with this. I'd like to discuss those problems, and addressing them not by changing attitudes toward character death, but by discussing ways to make games about failure other than death (and other than things that are in many ways equivalent to death, like capturing and depowering).

So, if you have a problem in your games that seems tied to the fact that the players don't lose unless they die, and don't win unless they kill the other side, please raise it here. If you have advice that focuses on not just on the players playing better, or changing their attitudes about losing their characters, and not just on GMs getting better at threatening but never actually delivering character death, please offer it here. I could write for pages on this, but I'd rather focus on thoughts others have.

I think this is a fantastic thing that every dm needs to consider often. Off the top of my head I can think of three main areas to focus on that expand on your points:

1) Losing doesn't mean death.
If players lose a fight that doesn't mean they're dead. Maybe they're captured. Maybe the enemy leaves them battered, beaten and humiliated and walk off with their stuff. But on the flip side you also can't overuse this or the players will feel like there's no threat. If they know you'll never kill them then it won't feel as dangerous or threatening when they get into a fight so sometimes you might have to suck it up and kill someone (what I'm saying is just don't overdo it and always give them a safety net every time).

2)Losing doesn't mean a dead end.
This one is more the skills side of the losing part. If your players are trying to accomplish a goal that involves skill checks then it's not very interesting if they fail and you just tell them they don't succeed and to move on to the next skill or idea, that's not interesting. Find something to do with that failure to make things interesting. Maybe they're trying to chase someone and one of them fails a skill check, they could crash through a window or into a bystander but it gives them something new to interact with, that bystander might be an important npc or at least give them a tip on how to get back into the chase.

The biggest one that comes up is investigations. You're tracking someone, great roll perception. 2. Well you didn't find anything gg. At the very least have success but at a cost. You fail the check so it takes you a few hours to find the tracks and your quarry gets a head start. Maybe they don't find what they're looking for but they get a clue that leads them somewhere else.

3) Alternate win conditions.
This is the biggest one for me. Winning should rarely if ever be to kill all the enemies. Even if it's as small a twist as chasing off the enemy or making them surrender. There's so much more you can do with this though.

Escape by breaking through a bunch of enemies. Or to turn that on its head, break through a bunch of enemies to reach the boss.

Stop a ritual while trying to fight past the defenders.

Incorporate skill challenges into fights and make those the objectives, there is a lot you can do other than 'kill the bad guys'

wow that part was shorter than I expected.

What you enumerated are exactly the issues I see with this. On top of that, it's generally hard to believe that the enemy will just leave the characters alive, and I generally find that capture or disarmament (when it's even plausible, which it often isn't) is just as aggravating to players as character death. At least when their character is dead, they can create a new one that isn't captured or neutered.

So, I generally reject those kinds of approaches.


It was 4th Edition D&D that really turned me on to the idea of failure not needing to mean a dead-end. They gave that advice for their (widely disparaged) skill challenge rules, but I decided that it made sense for combat too.

It's all to do with set up, with deciding up-front what success and failure mean. Improvisation can come into play as well, but if the PCs are enaged in an activity and only success or only defeat would be interesting, then it probably doesn't need to be played out: only the interest outcome occurs.

One caveat to that is when something is about time or resources. If it matters how long or how efficiently something happens, then even if failure isn't really on the table it might be worth playing out. But what that really comes down to is what the loss of time or resources means. What do the players fail at if they run out of time or resources?

Actually my default when considering skill situations is that failure is just success with a twist, like arriving late, or missing an opportunity, or being put in some kind of spot. Not just losing an advantage, but gaining a disadvantage. Life is harder, but the game doesn't end.


Right. I find that boardgames and video games (and movies and TV shows, where we all know that death for the main characters is off the table, but the show still needs tension) do a pretty good job about alternate win conditions.

Take XCOM. There are some missions where all one has to do is kill all the aliens before they kill you, but most of them have alternate conditions: collect specimens, collect technology, collect Meld, hack a computer, escort/save civilians/agents. It's not quite what I'm going for, because death is very much on the table, but the agents can survive without a scratch and still "lose" because they didn't make enough progress along their goals, and the game's hidden timer is still running down. The point is that there's no reason why the goals for the PCs or the enemies can't be something other than "kill 'em all." Even if the PCs' goal is still "kill 'em all," unless they do it in time or by using/eschewing certain tactics, the enemies still effectively "win."

It requires some planning, or a lot of flexibility. Deciding not to kill the PCs only when it's apparent that they might lose is likely to seem contrived. That's not the end of the world, but why not go in with a plan for how the PCs can lose and some alternate ways for them to win?

I disagree that capture is as bad as death. There is a fundamental difference - if you're captured, you have the opportunity to escape or be rescued, and that's a whole new adventure just waiting to be played out.

Figuring why an enemy would bother to capture you rather than just killing you, is the problem, and yes, advance planning can be useful there.

Also, unless the game has just started, or its a game where players know in advance that they will be going through characters like a revolving door, players tend to have a lot invested in a their character, and some players will walk if you kill their character. That's not to say you should never kill a character, but there are lots of alternatives to play with.

I think GMs should always try to avoid dead ends. Failure can be interpreted in many ways and can have a range of consequences apart from death and disaster. Even if you're climbing a rope up a cliff, failure doesn't necessarily mean falling to your death. You could fall a few feet and find yourself stranded on a precarious ledge with the rope out of reach...

Much more fun for everyone. Now they have an urgent rescue operation to figure out.

I think a variety of win conditions should be built into every game. Kill or be killed gets boring after a while.

It is more likely that an enemy would either leave you behind, or capture you.  It is proven that most people do not want to kill another person.  Accidents are one thing, and combat situations another, but to straight up murder someone is generally out for most people.

So it seems reasonable to me that unless the "bad guy" is someone who would outright murder someone, if a combatant surrenders, they are likely captured, or stripped of weapons/gear and told to get lost.

Being captured is reasonable for a few reasons.  The biggest one is information: Why were you there?  Who sent you?  Are there others?  Captured people are also useful bargaining chips too.  Happened all the time way back when nobility ruled the world.  Sure, you could kill that knight you just knocked off his horse.  But he's got a coat of arms on his shield, his family have wealth, and they may take revenge on those who kill their family members.  Much better to trade their knight for one of yours.  Or at least get a ransom.

It IS a good thing to keep in mind though, a useful tool in the GM's toolbox, how to deal with death and failure.  A good subject!

An alternative to the failure means death theme, is that the enemy uses the fact that everyone's down to flee. Especially if there are others coming. Case in point:

Villain has an army after him. Gets away but the PC's catch up. Big fight. Villain drops the party, but has to flee before killing the PC's due to the fight attracting the notice of the army the villain is fleeing.

This allows the PC's to live, and gives a reasonable reason why the villain let them live, but still allows the PC's to feel the loss. As with anything, don't over use this, but it is great to have in the tool box.

Another thing is to allow retreat options. If the players know that retreat is an option,  they should take it if the battle goes the wrong direction. If they don't and die, let it happen. They had the option but chose to stay.

I want to be careful about assuming that just because the characters are alive, that the players will be interested in engaging in what is before them, especially if their range of choices and options are as closely constrained as one might expect from an imprisonment scenario.

Let me be clear: being captured and escaping from that can be fun for the people at the table. So can having one's character die. I just don't want to assume that it definitely will. By the same token, anything can be unpleasant, even if it avoids what one might consider to be obviously unpleasant. That's a bit of a different topic. But PC death and capture have, in my experience, never gone over well.


You lay out the exact issue. But I'm not sure I understand: knowing that some players will walk, why would a DM kill any of the characters? Certainly some people will walk if character death is off the table, but that's sort of what this is about: taking away the threat of death but replacing it with something else.


Yes, and I think that a big part of what leads to that boredom is that GMs don't see a good way to do anything other than lob softball encounters, or fudge things so that the players always win. Kill-or-be-killed in which you can only kill, is even more boring.

Having a way for the characters to lose that won't cause the players to walk means that GMs don't have to go easy or fudge, because if the PCs lose the players are still engaged.


More than a few games are predicated on exactly that kind of enemy, ones who are equipped with lethal weapons and would gladly kill the characters.

One can avoid those kinds of games, but if they're interested in them, it's still possible for them to have plausible reasons to leave characters alive and equipped. Primarily this involves the monsters having a job that doesn't require the PCs to be dead, dead, dead. If they're knocked down a hole they can't immediately get out of, that might be enough for the monster to accomplish its goal and move along. But unless it has some other goal and somewhere else to be, it's not likely to do that.


While it's reasonable, that doesn't mean it's going to be enjoyable. That's part of what I'm questioning.


Thanks!


I've generally understood this to be not well liked by players. Plenty of players would rather have their character die than be saved by an NPC. If the game is about heroic characters, this immediately makes them feel much less heroic. Arguably that's a fitting consequence of their failure, but I think there are approaches one can use that don't deprotagonize the PCs.

And it's rather contrived. When combat in one's system takes place on a scale of seconds, it's rather amazing that the help would arrive in the window between the PCs clearly heading toward a loss and the enemy delivering the death blow.


Okay, but if the PCs are killed and the players don't like that, the GM still bears plenty of responsibility. They set the conditions of the fight, they chose the enemy tactics, and it's entirely possible that they didn't telegraph the escape option or the nearness of death adequately. The bottom line is that I wouldn't expect most players to graciously accept death in that event. I'd expect the usualy reactions as described above.

We could discuss how immature and entitled players feel, but I doubt we'll ever solve that. But we (by which I mean people who have problems with death-as-failure in their games, which might not include any of you, my worthy interlocutors) can find and prepare for other ways for them to fail.

Thanks for the responses. If anyone is looking for advice, I welcome questions.

   Thankfully, I've never had my players fail so badly in the past - perhaps I'm lucky, or they just were - but I came across something from authour Creighton Broadhurst that deals with the consequences of failure in some detail. I wish I'd read some of his articles a lot earlier in my GM career; he's been a fountain of good ideas for a number of things in my game, as well as stoked an interested in my actually DMing a game of AD&D.

   Here's a link to the article:

http://www.creightonbroadhurst...price-of-failure-is/

I doubt it was just luck, unless you were randomly generating the encounters and running the monsters procedurally. GMs usually have a lot of leeway in how they craft and run encounters and if you haven't ever had an encounter get to where the PCs were going to lose badly unless you intervened then I think we could benefit from understanding your approach.



A good article. Here's a line I thought was important:



I think that goes for any kind of outcome, even victory. Victory tends to be easier to make fun, but even too much victory (or victory gained certain ways) can start to drag for some players.

It raises the question of how to know players are on-board or bought in. We can tell them up front that their characters might die and they might be okay with that in the abstract, but when it actually happens their position might change. Or if they still claim to be all for character death, they might exhibit a closer scrutiny of the rules than usual. I think when that happens (or, really, before that happens) a GM has to be ready to bring about a non-lethal failure that's acceptable to the player and the group.