The crazed mage Lacklion knew the heroes would try to stop him. After all, the Unseen Evil has been kept at bay for thousands of years, and today would be the day they could enter the world again. The stars were aligned and the ritual was nearly finished. Only five minutes remained until the force was unleashed. The heroes were fighting to break through his wards, but they would never get here in time. A force of power walks up to Lacklion. “Look, the PCs are later than we expected, and we don’t have the Unseen Evil masks ready for today, so the ritual is going to take an extra hour to complete.” Lacklion glared at the force of power, but accepted it’s fate. In an hour and five minutes, the force will fail to be unleashed, all due to those meddling heroes..
Recently on the Realms facebook group, someone mentioned that having magic items on quests do not matter, because all quests succeed anyway. I have been on several quests which have failed, but I have also walked away from most of them alive. This is because a party wipe is only one kind of failure. In today’s article, I am going to be discussing the different types of failure the Realms can provide, when failure should occur, and the consequences for failure.
Every quest should have a purpose. Even if it is just a silly time-filling quest, there should be a goal for the quest (or even better, a series of goals). When the goal is achieved, the quest is over (although sometimes at this point, the goal is changed to “escape/get out”). The other way the quest can end is when the goal is no longer possible. While a good quest can have no plan for failure or even be unable to be failed, the best quests I have been on have had failure with severe consequences as an option.
The first kind of failure (which is the way most people think of failure) is the dreaded party wipe. Every person on the quest is dead, and nobody is going to be alive again without outside intervention. When this occurs, it is almost exclusively with a small group of PCs on a short quest (think an Adventurer’s Guild or Nexus quest), because someone with embrace death, feign death, intervention, a Magic Item, regionals, or cry of life will save the party if it is a 30+ person quest. One of the other reasons this is rare is if a party wipe occurs early in a quest (lets say after 1 hour in a 6 hour quest), the EH has a tough choice. Either the party will stay dead for the next 5 hours and everyone will be unhappy or some sort of deus ex machina will occur so the players can keep having fun. A demon will start making deals, gods will raise people, or just a cry of life will go off for no reason. With small parties, a group can be rescued and returned to their start point (once again, see the Adventurer’s Guild), but this method only really works in a quest setting where multiple quests are occurring at once. It doesn’t solve anything if all the PCs are on a site-wide quest through the woods.
The second type of failure which can occur is the PC’s run out of time to complete their objective. While a clear example is “Complete the quest before Midnight, when the gate closes,” a more muddied example is to “kill the lich before he completes his ritual.” These quests can easily fail with the PCs still alive. In fact, as time runs out, the PCs usually push harder and spend any tricks they still have in reserve just to try to save a few extra seconds to avoid failing.
The third variety of failure is simply just not achieving the objective. This is most common in situations such as “defend a point or person,” “catch a target before he escapes,” or “find the widget.” Any time a clear objective becomes impossible (or impossible in a reasonable timescale) is a failure for the quest. Sometimes, as the PCs arrive to the the room where the magical Amulet of Andor exists, a demon will be in process of stealing it, and should the demon get away with the amulet, the PC’s lost the quest. Failing this quest should also have consequences (which I’ll be discussing in just a second...I promise).
The final flavor of failure is not exactly what most people would view as failure. This is when PC groups disagree on what a goal is, and a decision is reached which works against someone’s goal. A recent example would be The Shadow King. A group of players (which I was amongst) wanted to redeem him and fix the mistakes that were made. He was eventually defeated and put to death, which is what some people wanted done. The people who wanted the death of the Shadow King succeeded, while people who wanted to redeem Jonas failed. Having both choices and conflicting goals can lead to cases where some PCs succeed while others fail, and this leads to interesting choices.
Now that we have covered some of the different ways a quest can fail, there has to be a consequence for failing. Consequences should make sense based on what actually occurred. If a demon stole an amulet which gives it protection from magic, then magic missile and lightning bolts won’t work against the demon in future encounters. If a lich is doing a ritual to gain power and succeeds, perhaps he is now able to control PCs with Embrace Death. If the quest was to gather the 5 parts of a sword to reforge it to slay the evil horrors and only 4 parts were recovered, then it is going to be a lot harder to slay the evil horror (I will be discussing this case in particular in a future article). The demon shouldn’t suddenly ascend to godhood. The lich shouldn’t join up with the PCs to help them go questing, and the evil horror shouldn’t be easily killed by something else instead.
Besides making a consequence sensible, there is an important rule about designing consequences which needs to be emphasized. If you threaten a consequence, you need to follow through with it. If you fail to follow through, there is no reason for the PCs to believe the consequence next time. The corollary to this is to not threaten anything you are not willing or able to follow through with. This doesn’t mean an NPC can’t bluff or lie, but if the consequence for failing a quest is the Realms will be destroyed then either A) there is no way for them to fail the quest, or B) if they do fail the quest, the Realms isn’t going to end (whether you wanted it to or not). Why should a PC believe the Realms will be destroyed now, after the many times it has not been destroyed already. On the other side though, if you follow through on the threats you made, the PCs are more likely to take you seriously when you give them an ultimatum in the future. They are more likely to believe you when you say they have exactly 5 minutes before the bad guy succeeds at turning a city to a smouldering ruin. They will not think you are bluffing when you threaten a characters life.
To sum up, when designing events in the future, don’t underestimate the value of planning for failure. Tying together PCs goals, actions, and resulting consequences in a logical way will add to the depth of your world and the players’ immersion.
Do you agree? Disagree? Did I miss something? What are consequences for failure you have encountered? Feel free to leave a note in the comments.