Disaster Recovery (Saving a game gone wrong)

[Brandy]

Ever had one of those games where the players took a wrong turn, made a bad decision, or otherwise did something unexpected and it had a serious impact on your game? What creative ways did you find to get the story back on track?

Here's mine; I hope others will add their own experiences.

This tale comes from a Champions (super heroes, for the uninitiated) campaign that I ran for several years.

In the campaign, all superheroes had a common origin and were called Transhumans. A year or so into the campaign, I was introducing the beginnings of the big story arc -- the appearance of a new kind of superpowered person, the Subhumans, who were on the scene to declare war with the Transhumans for the fate of humanity. As the Subhumans were coming onto the scene, I had really emphasized the idea that the player characters and their actions were vitally important to the fate of the world. There were other superhero groups, but theirs was one of the most powerful, best organized, etc. They mattered.

The characters were based in Atlanta and had gone to New Orleans to investigate several disappearences. Their investigations lead them to a Subhuman with vampiric powers called (predictably enough) Vlad.

That's when it all went wrong. Vlad and his minions were tough, but well within the capabilities of the group. Vlad was possessed of all the usual vampire weaknesses, which I thought that the players would avail themselves of.

The players, against my wildest expectations, made the decision to raid his mansion at night. Furthermore, they decided (for reasons which still elude me) to split up, and invade the upper and lower stories at the same time.

The fight, needless to say, did not go well, and I (as the GM) was really in a bind. If I manufactured a victory for them, I neuter the subhumans as a threatening storyline. Heck, if I kill them all off, and leave the world unchanged by allowing them to blithely create new characters that would kill the idea that the players' actions matter.

So, I took the battle to its natural conclusion (i.e. the defeat of the heroes) without any real plan in mind. The player character brick, Tank, boldly ran away (and so lived). The final scene that we played was Vlad siezing control of Chill, a Transhuman NPC with cold powers, and commanding him to blast the last remaining PC, Influence. Queue up the sad music, fade to black.

As the GM, I tell the players give me a few weeks to see where we go from here. I was determined to make the death of the PCs mean something, but I wasn't really sure how to do it and keep the continuity of the original storyline.

The idea that I came up with was to advance the story about 60 years in the future and ask them all to create new characters (except for Tank's player -- Transhumans do not age, so he continued with his old character, though advanced in skills). In this future, the war with the Subhumans was still going on but not going well -- the total defeat of the Southern Knights back in 1987 was a huge blow from which humanity and transhumanity never recovered. America's government had fallen, and subhumans were in control of large areas of the United States.

I had an idea at this point for getting the original story back on track but needed to let the future setting play itself out for a while.

We played in this bleak future for a few months, and during those months the PC heroes had had some success against one band of subhumans or another but it was clear that they were losing the war. They felt cornered -- the future setting forced them to be reactive to the Subhumans' plans, and they knew they had to do something. They decided to strike out against the enemy in an attempt to score a major victory that could possibly turn the tide...or die trying.

They made a plan to strike deep into the heart of the Vlad's territory, which in the future covered much of the southern US. I couldn't have been more pleased -- this was exactly what I had been waiting for.

They knew that Vlad had many minions and that the journey, crossing his territory to get to him, would be extremely dangerous -- to say nothing of facing Vlad himself. One of the characters was a teleporter with the ability to teleport others -- a power they had used to their advantage in several other encounters -- and they spent a lot of time trying to figure out a way to get an image of Vlad's mansion that would allow the teleporter, Gateway, to take them there directly.

A Transhuman villian from their past, Morpheus, now an ally against the Subhumans, provided the means to do this. Morpheus could synthesize nearly any drug that he could imagine (he had set himself up as the great drug lord of the west coast, and the PC's in the original campaign had had many unpleasant encounters with his minions). Morpheus provided Gateway (the teleporter) with a drug that would allow limited telepathy, to steal an image from a person's mind.

With that in hand, they set out to attempt to capture one of Vlad's chief lieutenants Wraith, who was known to patrol the northernmost part of Vlad's territory so that they could steal an image of the mansion from his mind. They found him and had a quick fight -- Wraith by himself was no match for them. They gathered 'round Wraith, removed his cowl, and lo and behold Tank recognizes "Wraith" as Chill(!), who had been under Vlad's control for the last 60 years.

Chill comes to, sees and recognizes Tank and says, "Tank, what happened? The last thing I remember was Vlad trying to control me..."

Thankfully, Gateway's player was on the ball. He took Morpheus' drug immediately, and told me he was taking the image from Chill's mind of Vlad's mansion at the time of the PC's original raid, 60 years ago.

I told him that he felt like he could reach it -- that he could travel through time as he wished to -- but that the image was fading, and fast. (I certainly didn't want them trying to take back any future tech or useful knowledge, after all!). So, he immediately opened a portal to the past, and the new PC's rush through right at the moment of their previous defeat and dispatch the already weakened Vlad and his minions.

The campaign was able to now continue as I imagined it half a year earlier, and the stakes had been raised for the players. Perhaps a little over-the-top, but definately (IMHO) true to the four-color comic genre. Plus, the players never saw it coming until it was right on top of them. Very satisfying.

[mcv]

Wow. Brilliant job. I wish I'd ever done anything like that.


mcv.

[Joe]

I second that "wow". Nice work.

There's nothing better than the plot accidentally becoming circular - that way you can pretend you planned the whole thing!

[Saint]

Good story!

It amazes me that players will sometimes ignore sage advice garnered from years of bad Hollywood films (Not throwing stones here - I've been guilty of this myself).

Case in point:

Originally Posted by Bookman

The players, against my wildest expectations, made the decision to raid his mansion at night. Furthermore, they decided (for reasons which still elude me) to split up, and invade the upper and lower stories at the same time.

Isn't this pretty much the beginning of the end in most horror films?

ATHLETIC JOCK LEADER: "Let's split up. Me and SEXY CHEERLEADER will go check out the basement. SLIDERULE and LEATHER JACKET, you guys go have a look at that dark room down at the end of the hall!"

;)

[FACM]

i successfully fixed an IOU game that became horribly overpowered.

The universe destablized and everyone died. (this ending was the only equivalent of "rocks fall, everyone dies" that could actually hurt the damn powergamers.)

"No, your DR does not cover suddenly not existing. No, you cant roll vs. HT to stop from bursting into subatomic particles. No, there isn't anything you can do. No, we're never playing 2000 pt charcters again."

[Archangel Beth]

I would imagine the ArchDean was very annoyed.

[Brandy]

Originally Posted by Saint

Isn't this pretty much the beginning of the end in most horror films?

ATHLETIC JOCK LEADER: "Let's split up. Me and SEXY CHEERLEADER will go check out the basement. SLIDERULE and LEATHER JACKET, you guys go have a look at that dark room down at the end of the hall!"

;)

I'm not a GM who attempts to force the players down a certain path; despite that, I'm pretty sure that on this occasion I said "You want to do what?!?"

They were undaunted, however.

B

[Hecatomb]

Originally Posted by FACM

No, we're never playing 2000 pt charcters again."

2000pt characters?! I think the outcome was inevitable from the start.

But while I'm here, let me throw in my own story of a game gone wrong:
I was playing in a 3rd-edition TL9 space campaign with four others. One player, who had spent a third of his character points to start out with a ship, got a bit possessive of it and locked us all out of the controls. So we mutineed and threw him in a stasis pod. After an hour of real time had passed, I decided to let this player back in the game and took him out of stasis--and was rewarded with a barely-dodged blaster bolt. I drew my own blaster and shot him in the vitals, killing him instantly. For some unfathomable reason, this prompted another player to open the cargo bay doors. I managed to pull myself into a stasis pod and thus survive the vacuum, but another wasn't so lucky. He found himself flying out the cargo bay into space, failed his IQ roll, and took a deep breath. The results were quite messy. At this point, the pilot character put the ship in a barrel roll into the atmosphere of the planet we were orbiting, and deactivated the containment field for the fusion reactor. This left a single stasis pod hurtling toward the surface of an uncharted planet in a remote region of the galaxy. So despite being the only survivor, I was trapped in a stasis pod which was eventually buried beneath a glacier due to the planet's ice age. The GM declared this campaign unsalvagable.

[Skullcrusher]

The player character brick, Tank, boldly ran away (and so lived). The final scene that we played was Vlad siezing control of Chill, a Transhuman NPC with cold powers, and commanding him to blast the last remaining PC, Influence. Queue up the sad music, fade to black.

I would have given tank some sort of disadvantage for abandoning his friends...like alcoholism, flashbacks or nightmares...and make him play it that way....

[SonnyMaou]

Bookman, wow! Great job.
Saint, funny stuff.
FACM, hilarious and good.

Originally Posted by Hecatomb

But while I'm here, let me throw in my own story of a game gone wrong:

...I was trapped in a stasis pod which was eventually buried beneath a glacier due to the planet's ice age. The GM declared this campaign unsalvagable.

Hecatomb, great story! I must say, however, in light of the other stories here, that it shows your GM's lack of imagination. In a few million years, who knows? The local sun might've become a bit larger and heated the planet such that the ice would've melted and a life-sustainable atmosphere would have been created. The statis-pod's systems notice the viability-of-life type atmosphere and wakes you up... to more adventures! heheh.