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From The Archives:
Why The Christmas Shopping Season is Worse Every Year
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
The Best of 2016
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
Silent Hill Turbo HD II
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
Honestly, this is the point where as a player, I’d start looking for a new DM.
Roleplaying should be about telling a shared story. When the DM tells you “Oh, by the way, none of your efforts matter, here’s a cutscene of a more important character doing super cool stuff while you watch”, you start to wonder what you’re even doing here.
I quit a White Wolf Vampire game once because the GM (replacing a GM who’d been doing a pretty great job for someone inexperienced) started having hunters going after us with RPGs and such. I’m all for having a fairly tough road to walk, but not for getting our butts consistently handed to us by overpowered antagonists. I’m not even sure whether it was ever clear how they were even -finding- us, but my character decided he was better off going far, far away from the other PCs and taking his chances on his own.
It is *possible* to do a live tabletop RPG where the players are not who the story is about. I mean, most campaigns are technically about what you’re doing FOR someone else, but it’s still all about the players…their experiences and growth. An underlying current of DM of the Rings is that it plays out like an alternate universe Boy Tolkien who has notebooks and notebooks of what we wouild perceive as The Silmarillion, then tried to adapt that into an adventure story when no one would publish his fantasy bible, and then re-wrote it as an RPG to try to push his story out when he couldn’t even get that version published.
To be fair this kind of scene is probably among the hardest things for a GM to try to pull off. On the one hand you want the PCs up against a wall with no way out, fighting until they expend all or most of their resources and understanding that they are doomed right before the miraculous rescue happens. On the other hand you still want them to feel their actions have worth, that they haven’t wasted their one time item on something that was a “supposed to loose fight” anyway, that their efforts, crazy plans and the risks they took contributed to their cause. Then you want to pull this insane balancing act probably without actually killing the characters* but leaving the impression that they could have easily died. And on top of that you want to avoid something like the situation here. I genuinely cannot see this done without some serious cheating on the GM part if you absolutely have to achieve this dramatic feel.
*I am personally of the belief that in most tabletop games the GM should strive NOT to kill the PCs. There are some games where this works better than others and situations where death is appropriate but most of the time, especially deep into a story focused campaign, it just means leaving a lot of loose threads and possibly disinvesting the player of the game.
It’d probably make a huge difference if the players *liked* Gandalf. Lots of parties end up attached to specific NPCs traveling with them, and if one of those beloved NPCs came to their rescue in a seemingly-hopeless fight it’d probably be a happy occasion (it’d help if the other NPCs acknowledged their contributions, of course). But this party resents Gandalf, which is probably because he’s more of a DMPC who continually overshadows them than an NPC. It’s a delicate balancing act indeed.
I believe GM would need to set things up way in advance so that players have already worked hard to have The Cavalry arrive at all – organise alliances, or rounding up survivors from previously routed armies, or simply make a Last Stand in the hope others will see it and join up – this way the unexpected, but hoped for rescue is still at least somewhat a direct result of players action and agenda.
Having (at least some) NPCs recognise players efford will also go a long way to mitigate the “huzzah for Gandalf!” effect, even if the party truly despises the campaign gandalf and would gladly replace him with their own Porkins the White.
A little “if not for the bravery and long hard fighting by the party I would have arrived to a pile of corpses “ speech by Gandalf would help with the party’s spirits
I still cringe at this scene. Just one of those horses stumble and your whole army ends up a mess of broken legs.