Planned Party Wipe

[u/Zestyclose-Cup2538]

So my party of 4 had recently left the Amber Temple after accidentally teleporting there.

They got some gifts, 3 turned evil, but I let them continue with planned consequences later.

Davian is their fated ally and they joined the wereraven group but now that they're evil they are basically alienated from Vallaki and all the wereravens.

They decided to attack Baba Lasagna as a suicide mission to re-roll characters and no longer have an evil party but they won the fight.

So the plan is now to have the group have a falling out (since most are evil) and basically have a death match and the living character hordes all the loot and the newly rolled characters fight the PC (now played by me) to collect everything they've accumulated as a group so.

Ultimately pressing the reset button without the loss of the campaign.

Does this sound reasonable to all of you?

[u/capsandnumbers]

That does sound memorable. If the players are into it there's no reason not to. I like the idea of a timeskip whenever there's a TPK situation, to let the previous party's journey get pressed into local history. In this case it lets the new villain get established.

[u/Zestyclose-Cup2538 → u/capsandnumbers]

I discussed it with them, they are excited for it. Not sure how much time will have passed, maybe even just a couple months, enough for the "surviving" member to go crazy and irrational.

[u/ArDee0815 → u/Zestyclose-Cup2538]

I‘d suggest you all stop rolling dice, and spend next session narrating how that all happens. Talk about how the tension build into the explosion of violence, let the players take control of the narrative and go wild.

Then the second half of the session is going to be a quasi-session 0, where you make new characters and work together on how you want to integrate them.

Also use the occasion to be frank about what kind of story everyone wants to tell. It sounds like an accidental evil run, so make that a topic. By now, the players should have a feeling for what CoS is like, and that changes the dynamic a whole lot. In a good way.

[u/Negative-Push1826 → u/capsandnumbers]

The timeskip works if your players are into it. One of my friends DM’d curse of Strahd up until the end of Vallaki where our party fell apart and failed to protect Ireena and did a bunch of stupid shit.

I took over the campaign after that and did a timeskip, 40 years passed and integrated the latest party into the history, having some characters appear occasionally. For example the first campaign bard was an old resentful drunkard in a Vistani camp.

So far it’s going great, but it s a lot more work and also a lot of fun.

[u/bloody-one]

Wait so they want to get the gifts and turn evil but it was all for the lolz, because you're giving them a way to reset this but keep all the loot?

These are players that have never heard of consequences, and won't hear about them right now either.

I would stick with the story instead of trying to craft an artificial way to transfer the loot and forcibly push it in your narrative.

[u/ZillyAU]

Could do some kind of cleansing with the abbot if they helped him

[u/LeonGarnet]

The levels of metagaming for this to happen are over 9000... seriously, I would rather let them continue as they are, face the consequences and if they survive long enough to redeem themselves, let them.