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Gamer's Corner => General Discussion => Topic started by: Colin-ICE on May 29, 2018, 02:21:38 AM
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How often do you have your group confront obstacles they cannot possibly overcome (failing an amazing critical)? How do you manage these encounters and what happens when the PCs try to overcome it?
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This happens quite often in my campaigns as I don't level the area based on character level. They have to figure out a way to get past it using tools in the game itself (hire someone high level, get a magic item which requires a quest, Make contacts with the underworld for an item or a skilled NPC, Find a person who knows something about the event). when I say the game is not scaled to the PC's, My average level of major obstacles is around 10-20th level while the players are Neophytes to the world. Common fold average between 3rd and 7th Level and in bigger cities this can range 3rd to 20th level in areas. The encounters and creatures are more to the character level if they stay on path but not fixed for going off the path. They learn to avoid dangers or they roll new characters. I do have things that will help characters along the way but they have to be searched out for to overcome some of these obstacles.
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I very rarely put characters up against insurmountable challenges. I actually very strongly dislike the Kobayashi Maru style of GMing. I'm not trying to say it is bad -- if you like it, all power to you, and you should play the way you want. I just very much dislike it personally, and find that my players do not enjoy it either. I hate the way 5th Edition DnD has very poorly balanced encounters. Both Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Princes of the Apocalypse have broken encounters at early levels that can easily result in a TPK: one was the result of the fact that Wizards changed some of the monster stats before HotDQ was released, and there is no excuse whatsoever for the one in PotA (which is at level 1 to boot!). I consider those sorts of encounters to be terrible game design.
That said, I do occasionally have the Big Bad Evil Guy of the campaign make an appearance before the characters early in the adventure, to provide the characters with a motive/incentive to fight him -- though I don't usually have the characters fight him directly. And of course, if the characters do something stupid, like try to take on the entire town guard after starting a fight in a tavern, or head out to take on a red dragon at first level, then the PCs will suffer the consequences and might be killed. But if they play smart and don't try to bite off more than they can chew, I don't generally put them up against impossible challenges; or at least I give them a reasonable chance (e.g. lore checks to find out that this creature is much more powerful than they thought) of figuring out that this challenge is too great for them, and that they need to figure out how to disengage or solve the problem another way. I might also drop hints like, 'This spider is really enormous; your attacks don't really seem to be hurting it much'.
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I am very much in the Hurin camp on this one. My world contains many creatures, NPC and even places that would kill the party outright but their adventures do not lead there at the moment.
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I never put insurmountable obstacles before my players. I always provide the means to get around them.
My world and campaign has many big bad villain that can easily defeat the characters if they are not ready, and I generally introduce these antagonists to the players when they are not ready. But that villain leaves the fighting to his minions and exits the scene. That serves to introduce the villain and give a reason for the PCs to go after it.
It does happen that an encounter is designed to defeat the characters. That's part of the story either because I want them to be captured and their eventual escape continues the story.
On some rare occasions, players do get themselves in serious binds that my design did not anticipate. Players will boldly go where no game design has gone before, and chaos ensues. They'll suffer whatever consequence their blunder got them into, that's just part of the game.
If there wasn't any risk there wouldn't any fun.
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Yeah this is what I try to go for with the Big Bad not getting involved personally until later in the campaign I will provide them with a vision or whispers or some other mechanisms that will provided a clue. On my grand campaign I had strange visions come into the party as they rested before meeting the big bad. It laid out what each character had to do to be victorious but did not allow others to know of these visions until it came into play. I gave a 7 in 8 chance of success. But they did not all take head to the clues and ended up dooming the world to the Apocalypse scenario. Funny thing is that they survived the encounter but the world as they know it no longer exists.
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When GM’ing, tasks with higher difficulties would either have extra time or research required in order to bypass them.
Skill use was never 100% fail until a house ruled “three strikes” occurred and you’re too exhausted or exasperated to continue and it is finally beyond one’s ken(physically/mentally).
AD&D4e finally picked up on this kinda thing with their extended challenges system needing 2x Successes before so many Failures. E.g. 12 Successes before 6 Failures, 8 Successes before 4 Failures.
So if you want to make something take time, or thwart immediate failure with a single failed skill check, have the PCs use old RM2 Complementary Skills to add a +15/+20 to main skill use(akin to Lore(Lock/Trap) checks adding to Skill(Pick Locks/Disarm Traps) checks. Add rounds, minutes, hours, etc. for every check. This adds suspense if there is a time crunch and is awesome to see fear set in if failed checks are approaching the end of days threshold!
At the same time, don’t be afraid to let those locks go unpicked, or traps disarmed. It makes for a great story of what the PCs must do next to bypass something giving them fits.
For combat, I am quite close to the norm expressed above but have no compunctions about introducing a new PC to the story due to valourous hints being ignored. LOL!
Always-always intro your BBEG early, whether in disguise for a big reveal later, or outright as above so the carrot is targetted!
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I don't go for the Kobayashi Maru style either. I will present them with obstacles they have to figure out. I tailor the baddies to their PC levels, but I will also present them with obstacles they may not be able to handle yet. They may need to level up a couple of times, find help, or simply leave it until they can come up with a solution.
I'm along the same lines as Peter R here. There are areas that are simply too challenging for the party and the adventure I put them on leads them around those areas, but the players have free will and sometimes they wander off the yellow brick road.
... and I also introduce the Big Bad Boss who will have the minions fight the party so the party can extrapolate how challenging the boss may be. The level 1 group I have now is experiencing this exact thing with the Cabin in the Woods adventure.
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One of my friends told me he had a door which could only be opened by despair. The characters literally had to give up for it to open. It took hours. :)
I generally don't put the characters up against certain doom but I also don't try to plan their solution for them. That's their problem. It's possible they might not think of one. Often the opposition has objectives, not merely "kill the PCs", so if the enemy wins, that's ok, the story just goes a different way. Lately I've been having trouble because the PCs having been doing too good a job, stopping things I didn't expect them to, so that kind of makes the enemy less worrisome and takes some urgency out of the plot, but I certainly had room in the story for the enemy to capture the things the enemy was trying to capture.
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There are NPCs in my campaign that the party could seek out, who are insurmountable at their present level. There are places they could go where they couldn't survive, just from natural hazards. But in terms of what I put in front of them, there's always a degree of success they can achieve. It may not be what they consider success when they first look at the situation, but they usually realize that full success, based on first look, isn't really going to happen.
Right now they're in a scenario where they have friends trapped in the middle of a turf war between two gangs. They very quickly realized the complexity, and spent over an hour of table time debating the ethics of various options. Do they intervene? If so, how? What happens to the citizens after they leave, either way? The initial idea of success (take out the gangs, or one of them) led to questions of what would happen next. And then discussions of what steps they can take over the long term, or whether they really had the right to show up and do anything.
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I very rarely design adventures with insurmountable obstacles, but like Spectre and others I also favor a very "sandbox" world design. If players wander too far into the wilderness, they might run into something they simply can't deal with and the best option is to run away. While I don't level my world, I do base their opposition on the amount of fuss the party causes on their adventures. So on occasion they do run into something along the lines of the movie "End of Watch" (in other words their actions might accidentally attract the attention of someone quite powerful with serious consequences). But even then they don't run into the major baddie right away...just a horde of henchmen.
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Isn't overcoming insurmountable challenges the mark of true heroes?
In all of my campaigns, the actual adversaries of the PCs are absolutely insurmountable challenges, beings that cannot be defeated by the PCs, ever, in any possible way. Considering that gods exist and the world at large is nothing more than their playfield with all sentient beings their toys, my players have learnt for a long time that everything, in the end, is nothing more than politics and their personal victories are tied with victory of the divine side they choose. Heck, they after all know that even the lowest level divine servant (the "angels" since an "angel" is just a divine "messenger") are absolutely insurmountable challenges and beings no human being (or group of human beings) may ever defeat in combat.
At least, that's the theory.
Merely being able to surprise the gods is most often considered overcoming an insurmountable challenge. You may not defeat any one of them, but you may surprise them. This is enough and doing so marks you as a true hero.
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I have an open world, the players go where they will. Face what they will, yes there is an underlying campaign, and they ignore it at their peril. Yes, there are things that with a look could give a TPK, but I try to prevent players from facing certain death. Already in my current campaign the characters encountered a situation that was certain death. They were confronted with 20 city watch that were better armed, ready for a fight, and had them almost entirely surrounded.
A few of the players had a look at things, decided it was hopeless, and did a fade into the crowd, two decided to fight anyway, and two tried to get out by wits and talking. Those fighting and talking where subdued and arrested for the trial. Those who faded escaped. They then worked out a jail break for those captured and the party is now on the run. They encountered the BBEG and didn't know he was the enemy, they helped him out of a jam and he left them in the lurch facing another bad situation that they could escape from. Now at least they have seen the enemy and really hate him for playing them the fools.
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i am like Mordrig I have an open world and the players go where they may. I give them a path and clues to others adventures that are within their abilities should they choose to pursue it.
There are also locations where the bad guys rule and it is not always hidden or a secret
I do try to give clues again on how tough it is if they are heading the wrong way, but they have not always listened, and have paid the price
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There's nothing we can't overcome, we just sometimes die before doing it!
It's unusual our gaming groups can't figure something out. We've got a fairly intelligent bunch with broad spectrum of knowledge and skills between us. Also, the various people who GM the groups I play with these days know when to adjust things when they discover it's beyond the group. I used to game with a couple people that didn't have that ability (one guy literally gave us a calculus problem that only one person really even had a chance of solving it), but over the years I just learned I didn't want to play in those games.
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(one guy literally gave us a calculus problem that only one person really even had a chance of solving it), but over the years I just learned I didn't want to play in those games.
That's the beauty of roleplaying. You roll Advanced Math skill. You don't have to actually DO the advanced math. That's not roleplaying, that's high school math homework. I don't expect any of my players to actually hit me with a battle axe to demonstrate the damage they do to my NPCs!! :o You game with a dedicated group of gamers, Corey.
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(one guy literally gave us a calculus problem that only one person really even had a chance of solving it), but over the years I just learned I didn't want to play in those games.
That's the beauty of roleplaying. You roll Advanced Math skill. You don't have to actually DO the advanced math.
This GM was ugly. ;) It was a riddle that you couldn't just roll a skill against (this was also 2nd Ed D&D days).
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(one guy literally gave us a calculus problem that only one person really even had a chance of solving it), but over the years I just learned I didn't want to play in those games.
That's the beauty of roleplaying. You roll Advanced Math skill. You don't have to actually DO the advanced math.
This GM was ugly. ;) It was a riddle that you couldn't just roll a skill against (this was also 2nd Ed D&D days).
That's probably why I never got into D&D early on. I didn't have an advanced math degree yet! :laugh1:
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Like Hurin, I do not like the Kobayashi Maru. I tend to create "open" worlds where the characters can go where they wish. Now if they go somewhere that is overwhelming for them, well, they are the ones who did it. I also usually have players intelligent enough to realize, "Uhm. I don't think we should try this yet." For my new world of Onaviu, I did kind of start their new character in a place where they were completely out-matched, but they were quick enough to realize they needed to escape and get further experience and then come back some time in the future.
I have been a player with a GM who was always TPK in the first or second sessions. That is not for me as a GM. Where is the fun in that?
rmfr
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Like Hurin, I do not like the Kobayashi Maru. I tend to create "open" worlds where the characters can go where they wish. Now if they go somewhere that is overwhelming for them, well, they are the ones who did it. I also usually have players intelligent enough to realize, "Uhm. I don't think we should try this yet." For my new world of Onaviu, I did kind of start their new character in a place where they were completely out-matched, but they were quick enough to realize they needed to escape and get further experience and then come back some time in the future.
I have been a player with a GM who was always TPK in the first or second sessions. That is not for me as a GM. Where is the fun in that?
rmfr
The first time I encountered RM2 it was with a group that did TPK as soon as you hit fifth level. There was no reason for it I could ever determine, but the second a character hit fifth level we'd start running into ancient dragons (not just one, mind, but two or three) and the party would die. Or the one character who was fifth level would run into the dragons alone and die. Didn't matter. It didn't sour me on RM, though...I had enough gaming experience to understand it was a flaw in the group's GMs (there were three guys who took turns running games, and they all had the same TPK obsession) and not the rules.
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The first time I encountered RM2 it was with a group that did TPK as soon as you hit fifth level. There was no reason for it I could ever determine, but the second a character hit fifth level we'd start running into ancient dragons (not just one, mind, but two or three) and the party would die. Or the one character who was fifth level would run into the dragons alone and die. Didn't matter. It didn't sour me on RM, though...I had enough gaming experience to understand it was a flaw in the group's GMs (there were three guys who took turns running games, and they all had the same TPK obsession) and not the rules.
That is horrible. It almost sounds like a tit-for-tat that started when one GM sent a dragon after a party that wasn't ready and the player though "oh yeah? I'll send 4 dragons after you!" Then the next GM said "WTH! I'm sending an Ancient Dragon after all of you."
At 5th level, RM characters are really hitting their stride. There is a plethora of baddies to choose from that are level appropriate to the party. The spell users are accessing a good variety of spells and have some PP to use them. The party has some nice items to use. It seems very vindictive to just wipe a party at 5th level arbitrarily.
The downside to that is all the work and time it takes into making a PC only to have a life expectancy of 5th level. What's the point in playing? Yeesh.
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It's like Logan's Run, just based on levels...
You should never trust anyone over 5th level anyway. :)
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It's like Logan's Run, just based on levels...
You should never trust anyone over 5th level anyway. :)
I don't trust anyone over 8th level. To make it that far in RM requires some really good or very lucky rolls for a very long time. LOL. If they survived the "Great Ancient Dragon Purge of the 5th Level PCs" they're obviously cheating or all have god weapons!
I can see the crit table now.
5th LEVEL PC SLAYING CRITICAL TABLE
01-25: Oops stepped on a dragon. You're dead. Next time watch your step
26-35: Wandering dragon decides he doesn't like that way you comb your hair (or is blinded by the glare off your bald head), decides to eat you. Buy ranks in Grooming.
36-45: Party is instantly overcome by Drunkeness spell, stumbles into a sleeping dragon's lair and continues to 'party hearty.' Dragon is less than thrilled. Eats party, hearty. Don't drink and RP!
46-55: Party decided to celebrate new 5th level status by defecating on sacred dragon burial grounds in the middle of a dragon funeral. Dragons are so overcome with grief and horror, they instantly incinerate the party. No saving roll.
56-65: The jokester of the party fumbles Acting Skill and decides it will be funny to play the "Pull My Finger" gag on the dragon. Dragon is not amused and stomps on every member of the party. Try a spatula.
66: An ancient dragon smiles, the party dies. Respect your elders.
67-75: Party fails General Perception roll and wanders into the mouth of a dragon. Dragon swallows party. Pay attention!!
76-85: Party thinks it will be a good idea to take on a group of 3d10 dragons because they just hit 5th level because that's what 5th level PCs tend to do. Party dies of embarrassment. No RR.
86-99: Due to a singularity in time/space, the party materializes in a world that is inhabited entirely by dragons. Party is immediately killed by the Dragon Army.
100: GM has a wild hair across his butt and decides to get revenge on the previous GM because he sent his PC at a bunch of dragons and was immediately killed by a random Ancient Dragon who mysteriously and inexplicably appeared in the Inn where the party was sleeping.
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It's like Logan's Run, just based on levels..
Lol, nice.
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I really like:
76-85: Party thinks it will be a good idea to take on a group of 3d10 dragons because they just hit 5th level because that's what 5th level PCs tend to do. Party dies of embarrassment. No RR.
;D
Nightblade ->--
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Like I said, I to this day have no idea what created that particular obsession. It was damned annoying, though, and one of the main reasons my friend and I left the group and started running our own.
My standard game tends to run long enough for the party to average 10th level or so (depending on genre mostly).
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So, I just had basically an almost TPK in a DnD game, and I'm still not sure what to make of it. I know this isn't exactly Rolemaster related, but I wonder what other GMs thing of this.
The situation was that I was running a DnD 5e campaign, using the module/adventure Princes of the Apocalypse. I used the Rules As Written and rolled a random encounter. That encounter was 2d6 bad guys with another boss bad guy. This was on the appropriate table for where the party is in its adventure. I rolled a relatively average roll (8 out of 12, on a 2d6 roll) for the number, and the bad guys predictably crushed the PCs. There was really no hope of escape when the chief bad guy has a Fireball with 150' range, that does 8d6 damage, and that he has two of. I avoided a TPK by making the cultists just knock the PCs out, take all their stuff, and tattoo them with a symbol of the cult on their forehead. Had I played the bad guys straight up, they would have exterminated the party easily.
This is one of the things I intensely dislike about 5e. I do kind of feel like I am in Bizarro world or the Twilight Zone, where everyone seems to be fawning over 5e and I am the sole voice in the wildnerness going, 'Did you play Horde of the Dragon Queen and hit the part where the PCs encounter a battle that is a virtually guaranteed TPK? Or did you play Princes of the Apocalypse and encounter the part where the PCs encounter a battle that is a virtually guaranteed TPK? Because that to me seems to be bad adventure design.' I just don't quite understand how people find an unavoidable TPK fun, and the 5e modules are full of them. I feel like I have kind of wrecked this campaign by following the module Rules As Written.
Has anyone else had this experience? How do you handle it?
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"Has anyone else had this experience? How do you handle it?"
-Don't use the Rules as Written
-Don't use random encounters
-Fudge the die results
-Do what you did at the end (knocking out etc)
-Don't play D&D =p
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-Don't use the Rules as Written
-Don't use random encounters
-Fudge the die results
-Do what you did at the end (knocking out etc)
-Don't play D&D =p
Yes, I guess those are my choices. Not playing DnD is not an option, as it is the favorite system of at least 2 of my group members. I don't fudge dice, so that isn't an option either. I don't really like having to figure out a way for the monsters not to kill the players, since there will be times when that is just silly and contrived (e.g. if the monsters had been predators). I do still like random encounters, but I think what I will do is roll randomly for what they encounter, but not roll randomly for how many of the enemy they encounter. In the example last night, the party would probably be fine if they had faced only 4 of the monsters (plus the boss). So in the future, I will just do a quick check to see what an appropriate number of monsters would be before I go ahead with the encounter. It sucks that DnD 5e forces me to do this step, as it is extra work that slows down play, but I guess that is just a 'feature' of 5e that I will have to learn to live with.
By no means am I saying that every encounter should be perfectly balanced. I am fine with the PCs occasionally encountering foes that are too powerful for them. But they should at least have a chance to realize that and/or to escape (possibly after being captured) in those situations without me having to contrive some silly explanation. I am not a fan of the Kobayashi Maru.
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There are an increasing number of games that are adopting the approach of relative encounters where the number encountered is proportional to the number of heroes. An encounter may say 2H meaning twice the number of heroes or H+1 for one more monster than there are heroes.
That takes away the need for rolling the number encountered and means the same encounter is good for any size party.
Adopting that method may work, it is another step for you to do of course and is not RAW for 5e.
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I was worried my post would look snarky, instead of the way it was intended. Phew. hehe
I've been reading a lot of essays on AngryGM. Seems like D&D has this 'weird' mechanic 'requiring' a set number of encounters/random encounters for a given time period. I find that...mmmm...distasteful.
My actual suggestion is to not use random encounters per se. Roll a bunch of random encounters or choose them, plan them out a bit (type of npcs/creatures, number, why they there etc) and shove them in as you please. They'll still look random to the players if that's important, but you'll have more control and knowledge of potential outcomes.
Nothing wrong with obstacles/encounters PCs can't overcome, but I think a lot of players/groups will think they can overcome whatever is thrown at them. This is where a little GM narrative description can help push them into retreating, by describing the situation as extremely perilous ie show or describe the npcs/creatures in a way that conveys that sticking around/engaging may not be the best option.
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In some cases you could also deal with it by giving the party the opportunity to avoid the encounter. A large group will be easier to detect, and that's especially true if they are not expecting the party. Maybe they are just passing through the area themselves, or doing something totally unrelated. (There are a couple of random "what are the monsters doing?" tables here: http://www.apolitical.info/webgame/tables.php?mode=3&backto= (http://www.apolitical.info/webgame/tables.php?mode=3&backto=) ) If the party detects them before they detect the party, the challenge of the encounter could be how to evade or avoid the monsters, rather than how to defeat them in combat. Maybe the monster activities provide other opportunities, e.g. the monsters are fighting amongst themselves and if the party is tricky they could escalate the situation, or at least take advantage of it as a distraction. They could also be coming back from another fight, maybe some of them are already injured. They could be separated, e.g. in our RMSS game, our party has run into the advance scouts of a much tougher orc heavy cavalry unit, made quick work of the scouts and then fled. We would have lost that encounter if all of the foes had been present together.
You can also give the players a situational advantage. For example, I've had my party run into a group of bandits setting up an ambush... intended to hit someone coming from the other direction. The party has surprise and is coming up behind the ambush. Tactical position and surprise make a big difference in the danger level of an encounter.
These are definitely cases where you have to evaluate the strength of the random foe, decide how much of a challenge it is, and come up with something, which means you have to do some extra work, but I think the game benefits overall if not every encounter is just a straight fight. It gets the party thinking more creatively about strategy and tactics. I remember being frustrated at the beginning of our D&D 3.5 campaign because every random encounter started with the foe within 90' of the party and aware of us, we knew we were outclassed but there wasn't anything we could do about it. Eventually that changed but at the time it was dissatisfying.
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Thanks for the suggestions JDale. My beef is not so much that I have much trouble making the encounter level-appropriate: I could use the sorts of devices you suggest above (your suggestions are appreciated though). The thing I dislike is that I have to do this because the designers have been lazy and given an insanely wide range of numbers for the amount of enemies the PCs have to face (in this example, 2d12, which ranges from trivial to a guaranteed TPK, at least in straightforward battle).
I very much prefer the sort of encounter stats that Peter suggested: H + 1 meaning a number equal to the party +1, or 2H for 2 times the number of the party. That allows me to run the adventure without having to manufacture reasons why the party doesn't die.
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When I'm planning out random encounters to spice things up, I'll either choose what I want the encounters to be or roll on the randome encounter table before gameplay starts, then roll each day/night of the in-game cycle to see if that encounter takes place. For example, I like to throw a pysk at the party. He's a prankster and loads sleeping bags with itching powder, sneezing powder, sleeping powder, or steals their shoes. I roll each night they set camp to see if he bugs them that night.
I'll do the same process for a random wildlife encounter. I look for what types of creatures the party would likely encounter and I roll the stats for the creature. I'll roll at random points for travel to see the party stumbles across the creature, if they detect it before it detects them giving them an option to avoid the encounter.
RM gameplay is very different from DnD as we well know. The problem with balancing an encounter to the party levels isn't quite the same in both systems. I've played DnD many times, but I have never DM'd it. I've been GMing RM for decades :-\ I've had relatively weak/innocuous encounters designed to give the party a clue or a bit of intel to help their quest along, only to have the party nearly wipe themselves out from fumbles or really really bad decisions. I've had grand battles planned only to have the Orc captain done in by an E-Slash crit to the thigh on the first dice roll and the goblin party routs. I've had the Pirate Captain stand up from cover to cast his Water Serpent spell, only to have an archer pierce his neck with an arrow. The spell fails, the captain bleeds out, the pirates surrender.
DnD doesn't suffer from Crits so it becomes a war of attrition. Total Hero HP vs. Total Bad-Guy HP. However, tactics can play a deciding part in the encounter. Are the baddies intelligent enough to flank the party? Will a group of four baddies break off to surround and to destroy a single player?
The one thing I've learned from DnD is this: "Get the bodies off the board."
A fresh baddie deals the exact same damage as a baddie with 1 HP remaining. The same holds true for the PCs. A fresh PC is as deadly as a PC knocking on Death's door. Likewise, the party members should be focusing on a single NPC to get flanking and back attack bonuses while a couple of PCs try to delay the larger group. Get the bodies off the board, eliminate or gain flanking and back attack bonuses.
As DM/GM, you can say 6 NPCs are in the group, not 8 NPCs. I don't like fudging the dice either, and I try to avoid it at all costs. However, planning random encounters is better than leaving it to the Fates because we don't like to fudge the dice. I had one random encounter I rolled up and it was a level 9 Wight attacking a party of two brand new-to-RM players, Level 1. I stopped rolling random encounters in-game after that.
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Yes, I will have to roll the random encounters beforehand and do the math to make sure the battle is not far beyond the PCs.
The battle I randomly rolled was far, far beyond the PCs. It was one CR 3 creature and eight CR 2 creatures. Going by DnD rules, a single CR 3 creature would be a good challenge for a party of four PCs, and a single CR 2 creature is a good challenge for to more PCs. So a significant challenge would have been one CR3 and one CR2 creature. The extra seven CR 2 creatures just blew the budget out of the water. The scary part is that I only rolled about average (8 out of 12) for the number of extra CR 2 creatures; it could have been even worse!
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I'm unsure what constitutes an "obstacle they can't overcome."
Early on in our gaming (in 1994), a pair of players tried their hand at GMing for the first time. Their self-written adventure hinged on the party winding up getting robbed by highwaymen alongside some NPCs.
The group was supposed to lose that fight to get the adventure started. This worked so-so; the attackers' stats had to be fudged in mid-combat to make it work (our party really punched above their weight that day) and the end result were ridiculously overpowered NPCs.
More recently, one touchpoint adventure in our ongoing campaign required the party to transport a coffin into an abandoned fief and perform a proper burial, to exorcise the barrow wight attached to the deceased. Rightfully terrified by the dangerous wight who is trying to catch up with them, the group arrives at the ruined castle only to find that a dragon has taken up residence there.
Naturally, I never expected them to openly fight the dragon and win. Instead, the point was that they should find a workaround before they found themselves between a dragon and a wight, with both of them essentially invincible opponents in combat. The players took most of the hints and even had a few good ideas of their own to ultimately distract the dragon long enough to perform the burial and then escape the dragon through an underground tunnel after collapsing a portion of the castle ruin behind them.
In this scenario I used an "unsurmountable opponent" as a plot device to make the players think outside the box, and it worked just fine.