Newbie question - Losing an Adventure

[quartzlight]

Hi this is my first post and I've just bought the game and starting to prep for my first session which I'll be GM'ing, with only a tiny bit of previous RPG experience. My question is about losing an adventure. In the Doctor Who universe it is pretty standard that the Doctor always wins, even if it's with dreadful consequences. In my game, I would like the players to know that they could literally lose an adventure. So my question is, how do you deal with losing an adventure? For example if it was an Earth invasion story and the PC's lost then Earth would be destroyed. How do you deal with massive consequences like this? Of course you could start a campaign of dealing with this loss and trying to fix it, but apart from this, any ideas would be very much appreciated.

[Stormcrow]

I would start a campaign of dealing with this loss and trying to fix it. Oh, wait...

[misterharry]

The Sound of Drums is a very good example from the TV series of the Doctor losing and adventure, with the consequence that the Master rules the Earth and the Toclafane literally decimate the population. How this is dealt with is for the next episode, The Last of the Time Lords, to show him and his friends turning the tables - and in true RTD fashion putting everything right with a bit of timey-wimey magic. So you could similarly use the players' defeat to set up the next adventure and allow them the chance to return things to how they used to be.

Alternatively, you could go with the Earth being destroyed (or whatever the consequences are) and use it as a launching pad for a whole new series of adventures based on that premise - the whole of future history has been rewritten without mankind, the Earth Empire and so on. What would the consequences of this be?

[quartzlight]

Jun 16, 2014 20:16:42 GMT misterharry said:

The Sound of Drums is a very good example from the TV series of the Doctor losing and adventure, with the consequence that the Master rules the Earth and the Toclafane literally decimate the population. How this is dealt with is for the next episode, The Last of the Time Lords, to show him and his friends turning the tables - and in true RTD fashion putting everything right with a bit of timey-wimey magic. So you could similarly use the players' defeat to set up the next adventure and allow them the chance to return things to how they used to be.

Alternatively, you could go with the Earth being destroyed (or whatever the consequences are) and use it as a launching pad for a whole new series of adventures based on that premise - the whole of future history has been rewritten without mankind, the Earth Empire and so on. What would the consequences of this be?

Thanks for the help. I especially like your second response, it had never occurred to me that the consequence didn't necessarily have to be corrected but could also be explored, with the future being taken into account. The more I think about it, the more interesting I think the stories could be. Thanks a lot!

[Corone]

I keep wanting to write an adventure where the players succeed and discover doing so is actually a really bad idea.
So they have to hop back in time and stop themselves, discovering in the process all the problems they had originally were their future selves trying to stop them!