To close out this extremely difficult month, I’m popping open the ole Angry Mailbag and answering a handful of your questions.
Want to submit a question for a future Ask Angry column? Send it to ask.angry@angry.games.
Want me to actually answer your question? Then keep it short and get to the frigging point. And for crap’s sake, tell me clearly and explicitly what to call you.
Allan asks…
Is there any way to get the players to accept their characters being captured?
In my experience, they will always fight to the death in a losing battle and TPK before surrendering, no matter how mild the consequences might be.
If I introduce a scenario where the players start already captive, such as a slave revolt, jailbreak, rescue, or mission in exchange for their freedom, players will simply walk away and refuse to play.
Thanks, Allan, for the clear, concise question and the explicit permission to call you Allan. Thanks, also, for the nice, normal easy-to-type name. You’re lucky this ain’t a perfect world. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have to slather you with gratitude for following such simple instructions. I don’t get how there are so many roleplaying gamers with such piss-poor reading comprehension skills.
Oh, right, none of you read the frigging rulebooks either. I guess I’m not special.
Anyway…
This is where my barely-earned friendly politeness ends and the crapping on your parade starts because, the answer to your question is a big, fat no. As in, “No, there isn’t any way to get your pissbaby brats to accept being captured.”
And I ain’t saying that because they fight every fight to the death. Most player-characters live and die by the Captain Taggart Rule: “Never give up; never surrender!” But you can get around that.
What you can’t get around is a group of players who will literally quit the game rather than play the scenario you’re presenting. See, I’m taking what you said at face value here. I know you wouldn’t make an ass of yourself by assuming that to be the case. Or overstating it. So if what you said is true, there’s nothing you can do. You’re running a game for a bunch of spoiled brats who didn’t get the spankings they desperately needed as kids and they’re beyond your help.
My advice is, “Get out!”
This isn’t hyperbole. I mean what I’m saying. I would absolutely never, ever run any sort of game for players who’d walk away from the table rather than giving my scenario a chance no matter how skeptical they were. Within reason, obviously. If I were doing something gory or sexual or heavy and a player said to me, with respect and politeness, “Hey, I’m not comfortable with this; I can’t participate,” that’s a different story. But a classic “captured by slavers; break out, then break them” scenario? “Sorry, that’s the game bucko. Don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.”
I’m addressing this because I hear this shit a lot from Game Masters these days. Everyone’s terrified their players will up and walk if they don’t like the game. I love running games, but I don’t need it so bad that a bunch of spoiled players can bully me by threatening to withhold their participation. That isn’t a healthy gaming dynamic. And the moment you give in, you stop being a Game Master and start being a puppet made to dance by a committee of self-serving brats. A word which I’m repeating, deliberately, by the way. Because brat is the right word for it. These are toddlers throwing tantrums to get their way. And every time you give in, you teach the babies that their tantrums work.
And before you ask: this advice holds across all possible gaming situations. And lest you think I don’t put my money where my mouth is, let me tell you something about how I run this patron-supported site and community. There have been times when people have objected to things I’ve said, jokes I’ve made, and opinions I’ve espoused. I know that’s shocking to consider given how lovable and even-tempered and non-controversial I am, but it’s true. And I’ve received e-mails from supporters that go something like this:
Angry, I like your work and I’ve been supporting you with my money for a long time, but you said this thing that got my panties in my bind, and if you say things like that again, I’m going to consider withdrawing my support.
And I have responded — every single time — by sending the dumbass a full refund of one month’s worth of support and blocking their ass on my support platforms.
So that should answer all those, “what if I’m a paid GM and my players threaten to stop paying me…” questions.
It’s weird to think of Game Mastering as a relationship, but it is. And this sort of, “run the game I demand or I’m going home” bullshit represents a toxic, abusive relationship. My advice, therefore, is to run the scenario you want to run and let your players walk. If they walk. If all they do is grumble and whine and moan and resist, that’s okay. Don’t let up. Say, “This is the game; play it or don’t.” They’ll spend the first session fighting it, but players can’t resist a good game for long. Just run the game and have a good time and they’ll soften.
This is actually a technique called Getting the Garden to Weed Itself, by the way. It’s a very useful way to get the undesirable, toxic elements in any community to remove themselves so you’re left with a happy, healthy, thriving garden everyone can enjoy. I recommend it highly.
Of course, you might discover that you were wrong all along and by calling your players’ bluffs, you’ll end up with a much healthier gaming relationship that makes all of you — players included — much happier.
Or you’ll have a lot more free time to pursue some other hobby. I call that a win-win.
Alex asks…
Music is a super valuable part of video games, but I have trouble getting it to feel right at the table. Is there a best practice? Or do you think it’s just not worth it?
Holy crap on a cream cracker, another person who can follow basic instructions! If this keeps up, y’all might restore my faith in humanity and drag me from the depths of my crippling depression. Not that I’m getting hopes up.
Anyway…
Music is a very important part of the video game experience. And also the TV and movie experiences. Music is a very powerful tool. It allows you to set a mood or tone without uttering a single word. As such, it’s very attractive to Game Masters.
Now, lots of you think I’m staunchly against using music at the table. And that’s because, in the past, I’ve made some critical remarks about it and the Game Masters who use it. Remarks like, “If you use music at your table, you should be dragged from behind your screen and bludgeoned to death with your Bluetooth speakerbar.” I get how some of you might misinterpret that as my being totally against music at the game table. I’m not. I’m just against Game Masters using it badly. Which they inevitably do. Because they refuse to accept the limitations of their medium.
First, Game Masters need to remember that movies have a thing called sound mixing, and video games have separate volume sliders for voice, sound effects, ambiance, and background music. Do you know why? Because music makes it harder to hear everything else. And that’s especially true when you’re doing anything via voice chat online.
Lots of people have trouble pulling voices from background noise in real life. Electronic communication drastically reduces audio quality and fidelity. And the quality of Internet communication can vary wildly from moment to moment. All it takes is a bee farting next to a fiber-optic cable in Dubuque and whole sentences are lost to the ether. Video quality is similarly iffy — and similarly prone to bee-fart-related pixel-dropping and desynchronization — which means people can’t reliably fall back on reading lips to supplement their listening skills. Which is something every human being does, even the ones who can’t read lips. That’s one of the major reasons why you can understand speech better if you can see the speaker’s face.
The point is, if you’re not prepared to invest in a seriously good autoducking setup — that’s where the software you’re using automatically reduces or mutes one audio channel to give another priority — or use a setup where everyone can adjust the voice-to-music volumes on their own ends, you are not allowed to use music in your online games. You just can’t. Don’t.
As a Game Master, clear and effective communication is your highest priority. Anything that affects that even a tiny little bit is doing more harm than good.
As a Game Master, pacing is also a very high priority. Nothing affects the quality of your game as much as how you pace it, which, remember, isn’t about keeping it moving fast. Anything that hurts the pace of the game is of dubious benefit, to say the least. Pacing trumps mood.
Orchestras don’t have to play movie soundtracks as the movie’s being filmed. And the movie director doesn’t have to conduct the orchestra at the same time. And video games with dynamic soundtracks can manage that feat because a computer can do thousands of different things every nanosecond. But if you — a Game Master — want to switch the music to a different track every time a combat starts, you’ve got to fiddle with your music thingy. Even if you plan your session super-accurately and build an ordered playlist such that all you have to do is play tracks on a loop and hit one, single button to advance the track when the players get to the dungeon, that’s still a pace-breaker unless you can literally reach over and hit the button on your music thingy without pausing your narration or breaking eye contact.
So unless you’re willing to set things up well in advance and practice your mad DJ skillz to the point where you can do just that effortlessly, you might want to give up on the idea of dynamic music.
None of that’s to say you can’t use music.
See, music’s a nice tool for ambient mood setting not just because of its effectiveness, but also because of how easily it’s ignored or overridden by the action at the table. And because it’s okay to let the tone of an entire work bleed into every scene.
What does that mean? Consider how every movie has lighter moments and darker moments. Even horror and suspense movies have low-tension or even comedic scenes. In those scenes, the musical score doesn’t suddenly become a cartoon soundtrack. It just lightens up or backs off or takes on a slightly less dark vibe. The scores to Jaws and Saw and The Conjuring always sound like the scores to Jaws and Saw and The Conjuring.
The point is, that you can pick a tone for an entire session, find a few hours of music that fit that tone, and just let it go in the background to underscore the game. And that’s the ideal way to use music. Fire-and-forget. Or playlist-and-forget. Or loop-and-forget. And if Game Masters would just do that and leave it there, that’d be fine.
Hell, if you have two or three major scenes in a session — town, wilderness, and dungeon, say — it’s cool to have a playlist or score for each and switch the score during the transitions. The key is to do it quickly and subtly and without drawing attention to it. Switching major scenes in a TTRPG often involves some note shuffling and map changing anyway and lots of GMs necessarily have to pause the action at those transitions — which makes a good place for potty breaks — so you can just add score-switching to those unavoidable loading screens.
Hell, that whole loading screen issue’s just another strength of my scene-as-structure approach to scenario design that so many of you dumbasses keep fighting me on.
Background music is like makeup. It works best when no one notices that it’s there.
This brings me to one last important issue: that of music choice. There’s some shit you must consider when picking music for your game.
First, people’s brains get sucked into recall and identify mode very easily. If you use a track from a well-known movie or game, you run the risk that someone’s brain will suddenly notice the music and say, “Hey, wait… is that… okay, it’s a Sonic game… uh… not Sonic Three… uh… oh, wait… this part… bah nah na nah na nah na nah nah naah na nah nah! MYSTIC CAVE ZONE! That’s it! Crap… did I just yell that out loud? Uh, whose turn is it guys?”
The same is true of any music with lyrics. Humans can’t hear language without trying to comprehend it.
Second, music can jar people right out of the game. Certain styles of music will always throw some people off. Lots of people can’t take electronic music — AKA chiptunes — which lots of Game Masters love to throw into their games. And anachronistic or inappropriate-for-the-genre music can break people’s suspension of disbelief. That’s why so many movies and games go for orchestral-type music. Most audiences find it pretty timeless, it’s very versatile, and it rarely jars people out of the action.
Anyway… that’s probably way more than you expected me to say about music in games. Which, frankly, is the problem. Because using music well is deceptively tricky. There’s a lot to be aware of. And therefore, there’s a lot of work involved in doing well. This means you also have to consider the question of whether there’s a better way to spend your prep time. And that’s why, even though I do get using music right at the table, I seldom do.
Edit: Angry here after the fact because I realized I totally missed an opportunity to plug a site frienemy’s absolutely amazing musical creations. I can be a real dumbass sometimes.
Rattercrash volunteers his sound-mixing expertise to digitally clean up all of my audio recordings — Live Chats, Proofreadalouds, and any other thing I record and share these days — and he also composes and arranges original music scores for use in your fantasy games. He even did a track inspired by my module, The Fall of Silverpine Watch, called The Cursed Valley. His stuff is precisely the sort of mood-setting ambience that you want if you mean to incorporate music into your game sessions, so check out Pandora Symphony Orchestra or listen to some of his tracks at his YouTube channel and give him a like.
Tyler asks…
What is a Beer and Pretzels game and how does it differ from regular play?
First, I confess that all three of today’s questioners followed the rules because I was specifically trolling the mailbag for questions that were easy to parse. Second, I also confess I was looking for some lighter, easier questions to tackle given my current mindset. That’s why I started with that nice, light look into toxic relationships with spoiled brats.
In short, I was up for some Beer and Pretzels content and this question fits that bill perfectly.
In tabletop gaming — boardgamers, wargamers, and roleplaying gamers alike use the term — in tabletop gaming, a Beer and Pretzels game is a casual play experience. You’re not meant to take it too seriously and it ain’t meant to tax you. You invite some buddies over for an afternoon, put some beers in the fridge, throw a bag of pretzels on the table, and have some casual, snacky, gamey, buddy fun. It’s as simple as that.
As I always do, I tried to pin down the origin of the term — just so I’d have something interesting to share — but I didn’t turn up anything I didn’t already know. And that’s that the term came into usage decades ago in the midwestern wargaming community from which sprung the roleplaying game hobby. Given that I now live in the heartland from whence sprung that community I’ve come to understand the vital importance of beer and pretzels as a part of all social events, so that tracks.
I also discovered that the Three Stooges made a short film in 1933 called Beer and Pretzels, but it’s got no connection to the modern gaming term so that was a dead end, though I always enjoy an excuse to spend twenty minutes watching old slapstick comedies.
In the roleplaying gaming community, the term Beer and Pretzels refers less to any specific game system and more to the attitude of the participants. And while it’s often associated with silly random jokiness — and while that does often find its way into such games — irreverence isn’t actually a requisite. Hell, a Beer and Pretzels game can describe nothing more than a kick-in-the-door-kick-monster-ass-and-grab-the-loot-with-nary-a-concern-for-playing-in-character style of hack-and-slashy dungeon crawling fun. The key is the players’ levels of emotional investment and cognitive load.
If you want to put it in more game-designy terms, a Beer and Pretzels game is high in Abengation or Submission. It does not need you to turn your brain burner up too high.
In the board- and war-gaming communites, there’s games specifically classed as Beer and Pretzels games. They tend to be light on rules and complex strategic play and they’re usually quick to set up and breakdown. And because those communities are full of gamers, there are countless arguments about what, exactly, counts as a Beer and Pretzels game and how to draw clear, distinct, bright lines around them. Because, whatever the community, gamers can’t help but have objective fights over subjective qualities.
In short, gamers are idiots.
Really, that’s the whole answer. Beer and Pretzels games are casual gaming experiences you can fully enjoy even after you’ve put a few beers in you. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a personal favorite tabletop roleplaying game that not only specifically calls itself a Beer and Pretzels game but even calls its core system the BEER Engine. Its four stats are Brawn, Ego, Extraneous, and Reflexes, you see. The game’s called Kobolds Ate My Baby and it’s a fucking delight. Remember how I said irreverent silliness ain’t a requisite for Beer and Pretzels play? Well, forget that shit. KAMB leans hard on wackiness. In fact, I recommend reading it even if you never run it because the rulebook is entertaining as hell from cover to orange-colored cover. If you need a good laugh, pick it up.
And who doesn’t need a good laugh these days?
I’ve some specific advice for Allan to consider for getting PCs to be willing to surrender.
Have NPCs willing to surrender. Have a setting where surrendering makes sense. Run that for a few months prior to expecting any PCs to consider it.
If every time the PCs fight anyone and win, they masacre everyone on the other side without a second thought, then surrendering is kind of a wierd thing to expect them to do, experience tells the players that surrender is NOT SURVIVABLE, at all. So why do it?!
If dying means you start over one level down, but with full gear; while surrender means you start over on gear but keep the level, and if gear is a much bigger element of power than any one level; then why surrender? You are BETTER OFF to die and make a new character.
I’ve found that in settings with ransoms and/or with oath’s parole taken seriously, and where NPCs often surrender, and where gear matters less than the character, that PCs will surrender. Why not? They know how this works, the other side confiscates their high value gear and asks them what their ransom and parole arrangements and preferences are, and if they have enough money to buy back their gear.
In many cases gear is retained as part of the ransom arangement. And since ransoms mean that PCs get a bit of extra income and need to have a home base (for other people to deliver payments) they are likely to have the money to make a payment and survive the lose.
If The Magnificent Sara and her pirates catch their ship at sea (it’s happened 3 times now), they don’t even try fighting, they allow her to board, and state something like: “X, Y, and Z in the cargo are royal gifts from King Gregory to Queen Selena, touch that at your own risk, you know where the cargo hold is.” Sara politely leaves the ship’s stores, their personal gear, and of course the royal gifts (since she’s not suicidal), and takes anything else of value that her servants find. If the PCs ever beat Sara, I feel quite sure that they’ll take it all back with interest, but I’d be rather surprised if they killed her, because in the setting, “surrender and you get to live through this” is the expected response to being badly outmatched.
Death starting you back at level one, unlike surrender, could also help encourage not dying.
I’m not sure that if the players have been trained to think “Surrender is so bad that it’s better to just not play the game than to surrender” that the correct solution to getting people to surrender is to also say, “And death is worse than surrender!” If both options are unacceptably bad, you may as well fight to the end and hope that the GM will pull a “miracle” out of his ass or find a different game.
Angry has said some things that are favorable to “everyone starts every character at level 1”, and I have no objection to that as an approach, so it can also be the right thing to do, but it doesn’t really help all that much with getting PCs to be willing to surrender.
My own experience is that in a setting where everyone acts like surrender is a reasonable alternative, PCs will at least consider it. They still won’t surrender all that often, but that’s expected, PCs are supposed to win most of the time, but it’s on the table.
Typically, its not just losing a level. Its starting over from scratch.
The players still prefer death to surrender though, for some reason their pride won’t let them play a character who is “tainted” by the humiliation of capture.
I once played in a game where the GM would let us bring in new characters at the same level as the rest of the party and full WBL. The powergaming move was to let anyone who was growing bored of their character die, loot their body and split the treasure, and then bring in the new character. It was way more lucrative than actually winning fights!
I think the main clue is to make a persistent world that doesn’t revolve around the PCs. What happens if the PCs die? How does that affect the world.
In my game yester day the players picked up a hook about a murder in the town they are passing through. It’s not “their fight” but can they affect it in a good way? Is it worth dying for it?
Let’s say they say “yes, we will die for these strangers.” What happens then? What then when the new party enters the same town? Why not make their life miserable too?
Maybe being captured is going to give the PCs the chance they need to topple the evil entity, making their lives, and other’s lives better.
This can only happen if the world is persistent.
I sort of blame videogames here. People are so used to “Win or game over,” that we aren’t used to accepting “semi optimal solutions”
My players tend to massacre anyone who flees or surrenders to them. They do this in part because they are afraid of missing out on loot, and in part because they are afraid that it is part of a hit and run tactic. (My next submission to Ask Angry is about how to properly do hit and run, because I have had so many bad experiences with it!).
Generally, when a predator is attacking the players for a meal, I have it retreat once it realizes they are too tough. The players always want to then finish it off, and one time I had a PC die because they cornered a wounded predator in its den and forced it to fight on, and another time when I asked why they were being so sadistic and hurt a players feelings bad enough that he holds it against me years later.
Actually giving players monetary rewards for returning captured foes is actually a great idea! I think I will implement it, although I have to be careful and not overdo it, lest the PCs metamorphose from adventuring swordsmen to what are effectively slave traders.
On the flip side, yeah, the world and the game are kind of built with the default assumption that if the players surrender, they will be ransomed back to their masters, and will typically even get to keep their gear. But the hit to the player’s pride and wallets is still too much for them, and they would rather die fighting.
I really like your take on using music during session. And yes, I was one of those fool enough to take your “fleeting remark” on “beating music-playing GMs” at the face value. So I expected a cold “don’t” for an answer to Alex’s question. But you instead provided a nice, in-depth and consistent analysis of pros and cons for using music at the table. Though I came to similar conclusions as you write here, it was much longer and game-disrupting process costing me also a lot of stress during sessions. But I wanted to add my 2¢ about it.
So, having a play-and-forget playlist matching some broad scene types is my perfect solution for quite some time. But I found that a right app for playing music really is a key here. So I spent an hour or so once, checking out like a dozens desktop apps and another hour for phone apps to find those that actually make my game-musicality easier. E.g. I can play music from a given folder without going into it. So I can switch between music for various scenes with just 1 or 2 clicks/taps. So I recommend everyone who wants to have music at their table without hardships described by Angry to do that bit of a legwork and search for something that doesn’t require being fluent in Java or Python to run a shuffled playlist/directory of several track in a loop.
I had a DM that liked to put music on a bluetooth speaker. Unfortunately, it was louder than any of the DMs or the players, and always seemed to end up being placed next to me. I would immediately start missing about 1 word out of every 10 that was spoken.
I do like to continue experimenting with it though, and my bards usually have song clips queued up.
I tried using music maybe once or twice but I just forget during the session, so I gave up. Games run fine.
This is the author of the first question.
First, thank you for responding! I really appreciate the time you took, especially right now with everything going on in your life.
Second, while I am not “assuming or overstating” it as you put it, there is a lot of nuance and a lot of examples that got left out to keep the question as concise as possible as per your instructions.
Although its been an ongoing problem for me for literal decades, the incident that prompted this was (in brief) that the players got trapped by some kobolds, and negotiated a deal where the kobolds would let them go and give them safe passage through their lair, in exchange for an even split of all treasure they found in the parts of the dungeon that the kobold’s considered to be their territory.
I was impressed that my players actually negotiated a deal with the monsters, and hoped they would leverage the situation into a full blown alliance for mutual benefit. But instead, they spent the next two sessions moping and bitching about the hit to their pride and their wallets, refused to deal with the “evil” creatures, and telling me that they would have been happier just letting the kobolds kill them.
Then, when they ran into a monster that was too tough to them, they decided to just fight to the death and let it eat them because the game was no longer fun for them anyway.
Third, so I showed my players this article, and they are not happy. They feel like their tantrums and threats are the only leverage they have, and that they do not want to be “held hostage by a tyranical game master”. They have also requested that you write a follow-up article from the other side about what players should be when they feel that the GM is wrong about something.
ask.angry@angry.games
Have one of your players e-mail me. Ask them to clearly identify themselves as your player. And I’ll even be super nice and let them have three paragraphs and up to 1000 words to state their “question.” Roughly. I am not going to count the words, but I’m not going to read 3000 words of ranting about what they don’t like.
If they can get the e-mail to me in the next two weeks, I’ll answer it in an October mailbag. Cool?
When I read things like this, I feel like I need people to identify their ages like they do on Reddit… like (M24)… or in this case.. are these 14 year-old kids? I personally am not a fan of any contrived ‘capture the party’ scenario, but if the players are more concerned about their egos and “winning”, and not treating the game like their characters matter and would want to survive, they aren’t really roleplaying, and maybe they should be playing a game of Heroquest instead. Players need to be invested, and they need to trust you as the gamemaster; fleeing and surrender should be viable solutions to a situation, unless they truly believe that they will be murdered anyway. Which they might if their modus operandi is to just murder everyone they come across. Some clear and open communication about how the world works would be my next step with them.
“When I read things like this, I feel like I need people to identify their ages like they do on Reddit… like (M24)… or in this case.. are these 14 year-old kids?”
I had a similar thought…lurking around RPG discourse online, you find people talking about all kinds of bizarre player behavior/attitudes. Like “I refuse to play in this campaign unless I can play a gnome chronurgist!” (DM: “uh, neither gnomes nor chronurgists exist in this campaign world…”) Not something I’ve ever seen happen in real life, myself. (Sounds like a surefire way of crippling your own fun.)
I don’t see why someone’s winning condition is better or worse than someone else’s. “Winning” the game means something different to different people and by itself the winning condition is not bad or good. It still can be incompatible with other “winning” conditions within the gaming group and this is where you have trouble happening.
If Allan doesn’t want to hear people bitch and moan about his efforts to entertain them he is completely justified to stop this game. However, if he chooses to give them another chance he should be upfront and specific on the conditions of failure (what death means and what are the consequences) if they agree and keep bitching and moaning this should be the final deal-breaker. He could try and teach them what to expect from the game but the more ‘experienced’ people are the more difficult is for them to change (or maybe they have found what they want from this game and they want just that)
Having being on both sides (getting bitched and moaned at and being an insufferable little bitch myself) the best solution that I have found is to just quit. Plain and simple you don’t like the game you are playing save yourself time and grief and move on. Again personal experience (n=1) you can still be friends IRL if you drop out of a game. It is a game about pretend elves in the end.
lastly as a GM it is pretty easy to find a game these days and even people that wouldn’t touch ttrpgs with a ten foot pole, want to see what all the fuss is about.
Allan wrote that they’ve had this problem for literal decades, so unless they’ve switched groups and had the same problem, everyone is sadly in their 30s or up.
Bingo.
I have had this problem when I was fourteen, and I have it now at forty.
Firstly, obviously there is something very wrong with your players attitudes because it fundamentally lacks the trust that is necessary for these games.
However, I wonder if part of it might be linked to a larger issue I’ve increasingly seen in TTRPGs which is players wanting an easy fight today and an epic fight yesterday. They want the power fantasy of an easy win but they also want to be able to be proud of defeating overwhelming odds… and they can’t have both at the same time. The second gratification needs to be deferred so they aren’t interested.
I wonder if they’d have fun fighting encounters of a single kobold who carries a million gold pieces and awards 10000 XP, over and over, forever. It would certainly be easy.
But honestly, even with that in mind, it sounds like they (for whatever reason) aren’t prepared to offer you the benefit of the doubt. They won’t accept that that this thing they don’t like now might be something you are planning to actually be in the best interests of their enjoyment later. And they have to to play a TTRPG. That’s an issue that needs open communication, not extortion… because that is not an appropriate response to a friend in a game.
I think we all have a headache from reading this. How is it that you keep running games with this group? If the Knights of the Round Table could be beaten, captured, and ransomed out, rescued, or manage an escape from prison, then your players should be able to handle it too. (Heck, it’s actually huge fun to be defeated and then return later to best your rival – extremely memorable adventures).
The best music, for all games and genres, remains John Cage’s 4’33”, on endless loop.
You can even play the 3-minute death metal remix for your cyberpunk or Mork Borg games.
I think one problem with the players being captured is often due to them feeling railroaded. If they feel that they were getting captured no matter what they did or try, they will complain. (I once was a player where it was impossible for us to shoot the people standing right in front of us because the Gama Master wanted us to get captured.)
So if it is a “failure state” they can recognize as such, it may be better.
The second problem is them losing theoir gear – so make sure that (as in a video game) there always is an easy way for them to get their gear back.
One additional idea/alternative: To “teach” players that being captured might happen and is not the end of the world, have them being captured by stunning/narcotizing/… them during a fight or confrontation or trap.
Yeah. If the players were reasonable, I would suggest diversifying the goals that NPCs may have during fights beyond killing the PCs (including capturing the PCs, but also maybe trying to steal something, gain access to a particular area, or capture an NPC). But since these players will apparently leave the game if this particular setback happens to their characters, we’ve got bigger problems here…
I feel for you, Allan. I’ve had players refuse to surrender or be captured, too. Or retreat. Or basically deviate from their initial plan (“let’s barge in and kill all the Quaggoths in the room”) at all.
In other words, they’re “railroading” themselves.
By contrast, the DM giving players an option to surrender, or flee, isn’t railroading. It’s attempting to give the group a final chance to avoid a TPK.
If loot from is the issue so every enemy must die how about you try a pallet cleanser game with a system that is not loot based mutants and masterminds and the fantasy flight Warhammer 40k games come to mind. That way the players will end up in an environment that looting is not end all be all and it might change their perspective.
Re: music
I just use it during setup to set the right mood. I might keep it on during recap (at lower volume) if it seems to be working, but once the game is on, I don’t bother. Being me, with my one track, semi a.d.d. mind, I’d need a co dm to manage it for me. Sooo not worth it…
Re: Brats
I must be getting old, because #@*^ that $#!* and #@*^ them! Get the #@*^ out of my game and don’t come back! Who needs that kind of stress in a GAME? I run persistent, open world games, and actions have consequences. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes…. Maybe i should just fold my screen, I don’t have the patience and tolerance I once did, and that behavior seems to be becoming more common, and I’m just not going to put up with it.