A while back our group ran Band of Blades. It was a great game overall, but it became notorious in our group because of the ending. It's a long story that I'll cover if I ever write about the game, but the important bit is that the final outcome of the defense of Skydagger Keep is determined by standard Forged in the Dark style roll. For my PCs, after going through all the various relevant stuff, their pool consisted of a single d6.

This lead to cries of "we did all that and the outcome is decided by rolling a single die!?!??!". They still regularly take the opportunity to jab me over this. Whether it's a fair characterization or not, I understand the perception and was thinking about it after the last bit harassment.

I would assert that most RPG campaigns have an implicit win condition - a big final battle of some sort at the end. It is usually an unspoken assumption that if losing the overall campaign is a possibility, it ties directly to losing that final battle. In many games it is assumed (but often carefully unspoken) that losing is not a real possibility, and the real questions are "what did it cost us?" or "how did we win?".

My hypothesis is that part of the reason the Band of Blades ending stands out so much, years later, is that it was an explicit win/lose check that was detached from the "final battle in front of the gates" outcome. Players reasonably assume that victory in that battle equates to victory in the campaign, so when there is a separate "everything is determined by one die" step it comes across as jarring, even if that is an oversimplification of what is happening.

What Can We Learn?

This has several implications that are worth keeping in mind:

• Be explicit if "losing the campaign" is a real thing. Much better to tell your players up front than surprise them with a loss after months or years of gaming.
• If losing is a real possibility, be explicit about whether that outcome is tied to the final battle or has separate mechanics. Many games, such as the Lancer campaigns, fall into this category - for both parts of the game I was explicit about the stakes of each battle, so it felt very natural for everyone at the end that everything was riding on the objectives I had layed out for that fight.

If there are separate mechanics:

• Make that clear, early and repeatedly. Avoid finale surprises.
• Consider carefully how and when to share those mechanics. If the outcome of the whole campaign will be riding on some procedure, the PCs should have some visibility & influence on that procedure during the whole game. Conversely, too much emphasis or detail can lead to them min/maxing on the final outcome along the way - though your mechanics should drive the behavior you want, so maybe this is not a bad thing? Or at least its a reminder that System Matters and your players will tend to do the things that the mechanics push them toward or incentivize. It is also fair to leave space for surprises or ad-hoc adjustments in response to what happens in the fiction. In the end, being able to react to unexpected developments is one of the key advantages of a human GM over a computer game.

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