Good Lord, my weekly game/playtest has melted down into some misshapen slag heap that pretty nearly demands a complete new beginning. The summary:
The game has been on a break for about 8 months; one of my players ran a d20 Modern campaign so I can recharge and actually play a character again. We restart my campaign, and it was my understanding that the PCs will continue on the main thread. Instead, PCs storm what is clearly the final encounter of a good-sized side trek which they were going to leave unfinished. I had warned them repeatedly for months that this encounter was a potential party-wipe situation. Fools rush in and all that. What transpired wasn't a party-wipe. It was much worse.
Immediately prior to the encounter, the cleric/fighter (the PC, not the player) gets pissed and quits the party, leaving with campaign-critical items and information. "Screw it! We're going in," is the response. Big fight ensues with little buffing on the part of the PCs.
Bard/druid (replacing the departed cleric/fighter) is killed within 2 rounds. Fighter's soul is destroyed utterly and taken over by free-floating evil spirit. Wizard, cleric cohort and thief fight on. Then wizard touches the wrong thing; his soul is destroyed utterly and replaced with a different evil spirit. Cleric cohort is killed. Enemies are finished off. Now-evil fighter faces off against now-evil wizard, while thief wonders exactly what the hell is going on. Thief decides to side with wizard. Fighter is killed. Wizard loots main bad guy and teleports out, leaving the thief to fend for himself. Thief loots remaining bodies and uses a scroll to teleport out.
End result: campaign-specific and -important items with cleric/fighter who wants nothing to do with the party. Evil wizard is off on his own and also has campaign-specific and -important items on him; player doesn't want to play a chaotic evil PC (understandably). Fighter, the party leader and the only one with political clout, is utterly destroyed and cannot return. His cohort, the cleric is dead. Thief (another replacement PC, by the way, with only tenuous ties to the party) is also on his own with a couple of dead bodies and no campaign-important items.
A total catastrophe. Everything drafted to continue the campaign-arc assumes high levels, but the 2 remaining PCs are not speaking to one another. The other solution is to start all over with newbie toons, necessitating a total redraft of the adventures. What do I do?
Wow! That's one spectacular screwfest!
It sounds like the problems are on the real life side of the table, from your description. Instead of PEBCAK (problem exists between chair and keyboard), you got some rampant PEBCAD (problem exists between chain and dice) :)
First, find out what possessed them to basically perform a self-sacrifice. They ran into a potential party-wipe without buffs. This says to me that they either weren't interested in completing the campaign (for whatever reason), OR they succumbed to something that plagues my party from time to time ...
Every so often, my players "overplan" something. Something like taking over 30 minutes to discuss how they're going to open a door. Painful. On the heels of this, however, usually comes 1-2 encounters where nobody thinks things through. At all. Dunno if this is what happened to your group.
If they really want to continue the campaign, you have some choices to make. First off, at least one of them (soul destroyed) is irrecoverable. Several of the others are in various states of screwed, with the chances of them being brought back slim.
You can:
Rewind and pretend the entire night never happened, and only re-design that one encounter (make it a dream sequence or some other cheesy mechanism).
Roll new tunes. Reture the adventure arcs.
Recover as many folks as you can and make the really-dead ones reroll an appropriately-leveled character.
Good luck, sounds awful :(
D
Posted by: Doccus | August 17, 2004 at 10:54 AM