As I posted in this thread here, my party dove head first into a TPK situation last night.

As a quick recap, the party of 5 7th-level PCs & 1 7th-level NPC was pretty heavily wounded, casters down to a few slots left only, and this party decided to engage possible the major military force in this adventure - consisting of seven Erinyes - when they were haranguing and intimidating ( not attacking ) the local village of Human slaves. The party had successfully killed a single Erinyes earlier, taking heavy damage in the process, and got a real feel for how nasty  and tough even a single one of these are.

Fortunately, the party is not actually dead - as the motivations/plans of their opponents steered them into wanting to capture the party ( or at least the Sorcerer that the party was accompanying / escorting ), so I can shift the focus from "you need to help the monastic order retrieve the artifact" ( pretty sure that mission is now blown ), and it's become "you need to escape alive". That will be interesting as the temporary inter-planar gate they came through closes in another 5 days. They may need to find alternate transportation home.

In doing a mental post-mortem (pardon the pun) of the events of last night, I made/reinforced a few observations:

• I have a player that makes tortured, dark, doomed fighters who are destined for a heroic death, going down swinging.  It is this player's character that started the fight.
• This same player seems to derive a lot of enjoyment from creating characters, so they have 2-3 backup characters in their back pocket at any given time. I'm concerned this reduces their motivation to keep the current character alive.
• This player current has a Warforged character whose personality and backstory have them dedicated to "protecting Humans" as their motivation.

• The party in general seems to have very little interest in understanding the world or the situations that they're in. They were being sheltered by one of the leaders of the local Human underground railroad. Amount of time talking to this NPC and understanding the local situation was minimal.
• As a result of not understanding the world around them, they don't identify possibilities for actions, thus they get frustrated at their apparent lack of options, and lash out combat-wise.

In reflecting what would be the likely reaction of the Devilish forces that now have the party captives, I realized that things could could get really dark and nasty for the party.

I'm pretty sure that the Human Sorcerer they are assisting will be executed out-of-hand; the BBEG forces were actively searching for him, for that purpose; now they have him captured.

Beyond that, things get sticky.

These are malevolent and evil creatures - if they realize that the Warforged character's motive is to keep the human villagers safe ( and they probably will figure this out; the Warforged is unlikely to be able to keep his mouth shut ), they are likely to take out the Party's actions out on the village.

And here's the part where I start to worry about my own motives, and whether that I'm trying to "correct" the player behaviors - and whether or not that's a bad thing.  I'm aware that the world will never be objective reality. It's being run by me, so the world's reactions are colored by my own ideas of how reality works. Still, I think there are ( and should be ) consequences in game for foolish behavior. Conversely, there's "the game you want to run", and then there's "the game the players want to play in" - and they don't always match.

And always, I have to question whether or not there's something in my presentation of the material which makes the party feel like they're being channeled into these decisions.

So - questions:

1. What would you do with this mess?
2. Should I accept the situation, let the world react as objectively ( as I can ), and if the Players want to stick their characters' heads in a wood-chipper, that's on them?
3. Should I spin the logical results of this mess in a way so-as to perhaps hint to the Players that "running around and acting without understanding in the world has consequences"? Or should I just stay the hell out of Player behavior and motivations?
4. Should I accept that this is a group that pretty much wants to be led by the nose through the maze, and that ideally for them one should scale back the complexity and detail? This also raises the issue of whether or not that's a game I even want to run.

So ... ideas?

Thanks,

Lots of stuff to take in with this post.

Regarding the guy who likes to make characters, there are a couple ways to consider it:

Having a party "red shirt" that dies repeatedly can be entertaining for the group.  If the person playing it doesn't care, why should you?  If it's recklessly endangering the group, the group has the tools to deal with it.  If he runs in to pick a fight, they can run the other way.  They can club him on the head.  There are options.  If you absolutely must put a stop to it, telling him his new character starts at level 1 each time would probably do it.

Regarding the adversarial relationship between you and your group:

You are the person running the game.  You're not the boss of your playing group.  If you don't want to run a game they want to play then you may just be incompatible.  It doesn't mean you or they are right or wrong, but if you have kept trying to guide them to play a certain way and it keeps not happening then it's probably worth examining what everyone is thinking.  Take some time out-of-game to say something.  If you say, "hey, I expected you to be more interested in X, but you keep doing Y" and the response is "X is boring; we like Y" then you have to make X more interesting, remove X from the game, or find other players.  I think you understand this from your post.

For your specific story:

If the bad guys massacre the town or whatever, so be it.  Actions have consequences.  It's the DM's job to be able to adjust the story to include these kinds of things, either by finding a way to fit it into the existing narrative or by writing a new story.  Railroading the players in order to make sure they stay on script isn't fun for anyone.

Good luck.  Keep us posted. 

I am a big fan of consequences and the world being a living thing. I usually offer my players several options to progress the "global story". If they take "quest 1" instead of "quest 2", there will be a consequence for not picking "quest 2" (this can be minor, like they will not be paid as much if they return to the quest giver later or major, like no dealing with the serial killer in their city quarter themselves, an allied important NPC will die).

Not sure how Warforged work, but can you "reset" their mind/personality? This might be a way to kill the "red shirt", but keep the body for a new character.
I would definitely strip the party of most of their possessions when being taken prisoner and making it very hard to reclaim even a fraction of it.  As a player in your group, knowing I have messed up, I should be OK with a Smaug situation (taking revenge on Laketwon, because he thinks the invaders to his lair came from there)

I don't believe my party and I have an adversarial relationship - but I could be wrong.

I also don't have a pre-planned narrative structure. I plan a lot of details into situations, NPCs, and organizations - and then it's just a case of constantly figuring out "given the conflict, and this entity's goals, knowledge, beliefs, resources, and personality, what will they try and do next; where will that collide with someone else, and how will that resolve". So it's not a case of me trying to railroad the players down a narrative path that I thought of ahead of time; there is no pre-planned path.

Where I do find frustrating is the apparent knee-jerk "here's an potential action, let's charge", without any effort to understand the overall situation. I agree that I can't/shouldn't force a play style - which causes me to be concerned that I'm writing scenarios for a different audience than I have - which leads me to the question of which I would alter, the writing style, or the audience. 

I am big on the world behaving consistently and logically - so the town being massacred isn't an issue, if it makes sense in the logical flow of the world.

I'm really only concerned with the "red shirt" aspect insofar as the behavior of one player may impact the fun of others by getting their characters killed - but I think I'm hearing "let the Players handle that" - which makes sense.

I just had a situation last weekend that might have a relevance to this thread: how-would-you-have-done-it

There's a line, as DM, we have to draw that tells us when we're putting too much into controlling what's going on in the world that we (the table) are playing in. You profess to keep your game fairly loose in terms of predicted and prescribed narrative, tending toward the reactive instead. I believe you should keep down that path and not look back. You've given them the tools, you've given them the opportunity to pick up and use those tools, and the players have chosen to walk by the tools and use what they have in their pockets. It's their game as much as it's yours. So you give them the cynical, sardonic, and flat NPC who looks at them, when they awake from their latest mishap, and says "I would have warned ya, but ye just walked in with your nose as a target....".

As to your "red shirt", yea your players are going to deal with them as they see fit but that doesn't take the onus off of you completely. I rather dislike that style of player myself, I prefer players who get into their characters, create the group dynamic, and try to fit in somewhere in the world. One of the biggest things I do, whether it's a "red shirt" player or just a bad day and a character dies, is that I'll remove a level from them. With so many things available to bring a person back from the dead it's not as scary anymore, so giving them a stronger penalty can really help them stay motivated. The off set to this is that they'll generally catch up to the rest of the party, whether you're a milestone type or an XP at the end of the night type. If your player has a penchant for seeking out death, those negative levels add up, and may incentivise them to try harder to stay alive. There is a risk of upsetting players with this approach, I'm aware, but I've never had anyone lose more than 2 levels, and it was due to poor choices. If it's simply a night of bad rolls I'm much more forgiving and will, almost guaranteed, find a way to save the character or not impose the level loss.

Hope the thought process I gave helps, and good luck.

Yep - that helps :)

I guess what you're saying is "absolutely provide them a door, but if they want to try and escape by diving into a running wood chipper, and they know that wood chippers are deadly, then that's on them".

I've been concerned that me trying to make the consequences fit the situation could be influenced by me really wanting the Players to play smarter. But if I make the world react logically and consistently, and that honestly is my motive, then I'm not the one punishing the Players for being foolish, it's just the logical consequences of the world ( or as Matt Colville would say "I'm not trying to kill you. This Mind Flayer is trying to kill you"). I'm never going to be able to perfectly divorce my attitudes and the worlds' ( I'm human ), but as long as I'm trying to do that and succeeding most of the time, I'm probably OK.

The evil minions in this case are Devils - so yeah, while they're under orders to capture and retrieve the party, they're cruel enough and adhere to the rule of Order ( their order, but order - so defy the Law and piss them off ) to rub the Party's nose in the consequences of their actions. I suspect that the Warforged character who is attempting to "protect humans" would think twice next time if the village of humans ends up paying the price for his "defiance".

As for the "red shirt" syndrome - I like the idea of starting new characters a level behind the old character, whether that's a result of death, or "I want to swap my character out". I might even work out a mechanism where they could "catch up" through exemplary heroism or role play.