Re-thinking PC death and storytelling

[Janx]

I've been reading the Song of Ice & Fire series (aka Game of Thrones). I'm partway through, so no spoilers. Except for this one here that is generic and forms the basis of my rethinking

Spoiler

lots of people die, including people who had chapters

As a story-telling GM, I want what happens to form a decent story. Not a railroad. Just whatever happens, it should be cool and make a good story.

PCs wandering around, doing stupid stuff and getting killed randomly is the antithesis of what I seek.

However, folks like me run a dangerous path. It could lead to railroading, and it could lead to us avoiding letting a precious PC die to save a storyline.

The book series has a lot of people die. I don't want to name names or give out more details.

Spoiler

But its fair to say, if each character who got a chapter named after them in the book was a PC, then a a lot of PCs died.

Yet the story kept going. For like 5 books. I'm only on book 4.

This says to me, plot immunity is not required. There may be a way of doing things that keeps the story going, but does not depend on specific PCs, nor cheesy introductions to new PCs who happen to pick up the plotline for PC #1 left off.

So, I'd like to discuss ideas on how to enable storytelling in an RPG, yet remain decoupled from trying to keep PCs alive so the precious plot can be maintained.

Here's one idea to get the ball started:

Avoid meaningless deaths by not wasting time on filler combats.
This isn't about not talking to gate guards. You can talk to them if you want.
One of the patterns I used to follow was to make a bad guy, invent a reason the PCs would want to kill him, and park him at the back of a randomly generated dungeon.

This meant the PCs would crawl through umpteen monster encounters before they got to the bad guy. D&D 3e math says it takes 5 level appropriate encounters to kill a PC. So, you can see the problem. Too many room encounters, just to face the bad guy means I'm probably going to lose a few PCs before they even get to the important scene with the bad guy.

Skip all that crap. Plan a couple of guard encounters or complications, whatever to soften the party up as befits the story arc. Since there's so few combats, don't worry if a PC dies. It's his bad luck and part of the story.

Make the party's reason for being together and fighting the bad guy be broad enough to entice others to join
I'm just working this idea out, but don't make a story quest for the party so specific that only the PCs who bit the original hook would ever have an interest in finishing it. That makes it harder for replacement PCs to join the party without some lame backstory excuse of being related to Sir Deadalot.

Song of Ice & Fire tends to be about solo PCs with maybe a few tagalongs, so this is a tricky concept to adapt. Try to make it so the party isn't stuck pursuing one lone PCs personal quest item the whole campaign, that nobody else cares about.

Use More PCs, in diverging directions and levels
What better way to soften the plot damage of a dead PC than to have another PC ready with a different story going on. Every couple of levels, start another PC, in different area, dealing with a different aspect of the main campaign's problem. Don't be stingy with the XP either, so it feels like these characters are getting somewhere.

Be prepared, if a PC dies, to be able to bring in one of the other PCs if it makes sense that his path crosses the party and he would join.

You could even split game session time between PCs. Since I already told you to shorten up your adventures and skip the stupid encounters, you have more game time to devote to multiple Parties.

Note, I'm not giving a lot of advice on how to run a storytelling campaign. And saying "run a sandbox instead" isn't going to sell you any subscribers. Getting storytellers to adopt some sandbox traits, including not being tightly coupled to PC survival is a useful concept, however.

 

[[OMENRPG]Ben]

In any fantasy genre, the party should be above average at the last, and heroic as the norm. Perhaps not in grittier systems in which a player can easily die in any given combat, but the way I handled 4e was that small petty encounters never even hit the party.

They were heroes, from day one. Some people don't like this, and I never let the party know that this was the case. But from the very first session, the things that interacted with them had a purpose and tied back in to the whole concept behind the campaign.

Here are the things that I do that make a very "story oriented" type of game:

1. Know/create a very rich setting. This is incredibly essential as the more in-depth the setting is, the easier the stories are created, even from unforeseen events such as a PC death.

2. Create a metaplot. This somewhat ties in to the setting, and doesn't always have to be the cliche of the end of the world, but something large enough and wide-spread enough to be well known throughout the entire setting. Wars fit the bill nicely, or as in the case of Game of Thrones, there is a constantly shifting power struggle for the Iron Throne. I try to create metaplots that would be widely appealing to just about anybody who isn't a psychopath, but it is very easy to make this a cliche. Be subtle and simple with it, no need to go overboard.

3. Create interesting people. People are what really define a world. A place is neat and all, especially in a fantasy setting where things that aren't possible in reality are common, but any place is empty without culture and society and personality. You need to develop personally interesting and story-wise compelling individuals and cultures to fill your world. This will automatically create desire and story-arcs in the campaign. If the king has seven younger brotherse who all want the throne, and he is secretly endorsed by the publicy-denounced Arcanum, that has built-in interesting things waiting to happen. Parties should get caught up in and then influence interesting events, not just live in hoity toity land and wait for Ol' Man Bailey's prized goat to go missing.

4. Don't waste any time. This doesn't mean skip the conversation with the gate guard, but make everything tie back in to the meta-plot or any sub-plots (which should also tie in with the meta-plot.) Maybe the gate guard seems obviously aggressive or petulant, the party is scurious and looks into it. They find out with some prying that recently his younger brother died in the Seven Brothers Civil War, and he has to sit here and guard some stupid gate and can't even attend his funeral. This adds a lot of opportunity for the party to get involved in something small but meaningful, and it serves as a subtle backdrop of the continuing meta-plot.

5. Involve the players' emotions. This one often goes overlooked in both stories and RPGs, as a lot of people just simply want to play a game and relax. This story-driven game isn't designed for those kinds of players, and should always be reminding them of difficult decisions or difficult obstacles in the way of simple decisions. Let's say the current king is the "rightful heir" but is an obstinate tyrant who oppresses his people. He asks for the party to serve beneath him as special-duty units engaged in the war against his brothers. The party can either openly defy the king's orders, hoping that the rebellion will assist in the future of their homeland, or work for the king as it is the lawful thing to do, and possibly go to war with their kin or see atrocities. When people are put into positions in which they can't necessarily think rationally or always see what is best, real characterization and emotion comes out. That's story-telling gold.

6. Don't cheapen death. This touches on not having little stupid encounters, but even that is alright as long as it is relatively unreasonable for the party to die by said encounters. More importantly this relates to making the loss significant to both the players and the characters in story. Rites of passage for the dead should be observed, relatives should visit or mourn, wives should wear black, monuments should be erected in the deceased's honor, etc. If Joe the Farmer Who Decided to be an Adventurer dies and nobody cares because Joe the Farmer WDtobaA is also an orphan in which his entire village was also burned down, then we can take the angle of how somber it is for that noble and selfless individual to die to no avail. Of course, it is always easier to avoid these kind of circumstances if the party is well-devoted to one another and each member has made some form of fame or contribution to the society.

7. Kill off people the party likes. This one sounds a little mean, and can definitely be overdone, but in all of the times that I've ever made significant people in the party's lives either die or get in some serious trouble, the game took on an entirely new flavor. For example, as I've mentioned in several other threads, one of my greatest NPCs was Balasar who helped the party from level 1 to 26 in 4e. He died once at level 9, sacrificing himself to save the party. Did I need to do that? No, I could have had a TPK. Could it have been handled poorly and felt like deux ex machina? Surely. But, just the right amount of emotion had been put into that character, the had been with him for months both in game and in real life, and had grown to love him. Not a single player, a group of relatively masculine men who enjoy football and martial arts and guns, didn't cry that night (including myself.)

If you do those things above, and make it seem real, and make it seem that things have consequences and that the party's decisions matter, your game's story will unfold entirely on its own and it will be far more beautiful than anything you could have made staring at a laptop.

 

[kitsune9]

Janx, good post!

 

[Janx]

More ideas, loose and untested, just like you like 'em:

Take the long view, let time go by between events
I'm also plowing through the show 24. 1 season = 1 day and about 18 months go by between seasons. There's a lesson there. You can keep your PCs alive by not packing in day after day of action packed adventure. That sounds ironic to the main thread of killing off your PCs. But the point is, if 1 event is a gaming session or two with however many encounters it takes to solve that, then making a year or two pass before the next big event comes along will age your characters nicely, and enable them to rise to positions of power before they finally get ganked.

By pacing things out, the lethality level can be a little higher (no pansy encounters to waste time, EVERY encounter matters). Yet people will feel like they're character lived a full life. Rather than playing 5 sessions which was 5 days in the dungeon before he got splatted by a ceiling drop trap.

Organizations keep your PCs busy
If your PCs are inclined, getting them to join, and eventually run an organization, like the Black Watch, CTU or some such means they have a common source of information, missions to go on (until they get to the rank of being a mission creator). It also means that if a PC dies, make a new one who was always there, etc.

You'll have role play opportunities to do missions, argue about missions, get into office politics, and even rebel against the chain of command.

Make a big deal about dying and recognition of bravery
If you want to impress the players, make a big deal about honors and recognition to both NPCs and PCs. Start with a NPC to introduce the concept, then do it to a PC when they earn it.

When they die, make a big deal of the funeral and rites. Have important NPCs the PCs know speak at the funeral. Make them see that death doesn't suck, except a little bit. That way, you can kill some PCs because it's part of the plot.

 

[GSHamster]

Interesting post.

One idea might be to put more of the responsibility for continuation back onto the players. Have them create a "secondary" character that could step into the spotlight if their primary character dies. The DM could use this secondary character as an NPC in the setting as appropriate. That way a lot of the motivation and explanation of the replacement character is put on the player's shoulders.

 

[Desdichado]

These are probably pretty obvious, but here they are nonetheless:

1) There are ways of making the game feel very dangerous without actually killing PC's willy-nilly. You need to wrap your mind around when a combat needs to end, even if it means foes die at the "appropriately dramatic" time, even if the notes you have behind your screen that the PCs will never see or know about says that he still has more hit points. To some people, that's "cheating." To me, it's just running the game, and any GM who doesn't have that knack is unlikely to be as good as one who does. A good GM, even one who assiduously avoids any hint of railroading and "my precious plot" should still master skills learned from TV, movies and novels like pacing, the ability to control tension and suspense in a session, and stuff like that. In fact, I'd say that goes a lot longer than a bunch of encounters towards engendering a feeling of danger.

2) Some players get this, and some don't, but as a GM you need to encourage this attitude: bad things happening to your character does not equal bad things happening to you! In fact, I'd venture to say that any book, movie or TV show in which nothing bad happened to the main characters would be boring as dirt. There's another knack of presenting challenges, failures and other "bad" results as an opportunity to make the game more fun rather than a punishment for "losing" the game. For example, in one game I ran, barsoomcore's womanizing Don Juan character was killed after mouthing off to a powerful demon-queen. Who then felt bad about killing her favorite mortal plaything and reincarnated him in the body of a recently killed Fast Times era Phoebe Cates character. In fact, it was such a fun opportunity to do something challenging and different with the character that another player manipulated the game so that he could die and be reincarnated too--into the body of a gorilla, in his case.

Granted, that was a little bit more silly and wahoo than is always my style, but it worked brilliantly in this campaign for these players.

3) Let the PCs face non-lethal challenges. Think of things that you might see in an action or thriller type movie or book, and adapt them. A footchase through the city streets. A challenge that is for some physical pursuit other than mortal combat (I dunno, cabre tossing, or something. Skeet shooting with a crossbow. A long distance cross-country style race. A Ben-Hur style chariot race.) The players will get much of the same sense of tension and gamesmanship that makes this more fun than just sitting around telling each other stories, yet without the risk of PC death. Heck, one of my favorite encounters was a pie fight, of all things. Nobody was at any risk there, unless it was the risk of gaining a few pounds.

4) It works for comic books, soap operas and long-running TV shows with a defined villain--PCs that are assumed to be dead can come back after a time. Ta-da! I was only mostly dead! You never found the body, did you? Etc. Takes a little behind the scenes work for the GM with the player, and him probably playing a "temp" PC of some kind in the meantime, but how many players wouldn't leap at the chance to pull something like this off? In fact, the PCs can come back having done something on his own while "gone" that brings new clues and a fresh take on old plot lines that aren't getting anywhere as fast as they should.

5) Be very careful about utilizing a PC and/or his back story as the lynch pin for a major campaign element. It's important to create the illusion--even in a game where PC death is rare--that the PC's could die, and sometimes, of course, that means that they will. The best way to handle this, IME, is to make sure that the campaign doesn't miss a beat with the PC dead. Gamers who (like me, and it seems, you) approach the game with a kind of "collaborative screenwriter or novelist" approach to the game don't want disposable PCs, but by the same token, you can't make a character so crucial to the game that without him it falls apart.

6) I like the idea you mention above--and have used it many times myself--that the PCs are a forward team of a larger organization, so that if someone dies, well, there's recruits already waiting in the wings to take their place, potentially without stretching credulity or verisimilitude.

7) Read books, watch TV shows and movies, and even play games that are in a different genre, and don't presuppose magical healing, relentless dungeoncrawling, or resurrection magic or stuff like that. See how they're handled in those games/books/movies/TV shows, and borrow shamelessly the stuff that works. I'm always amazed when D&D players tell me things like, "you can't possibly run a game without a cleric in the party. The game just isn't balanced otherwise." The fact that most other RPG's don't suppose magical healing and yet work just fine makes that an obviously untrue statement. It does mean that you may want to mess just a bit with "the story of D&D" though. If the story of D&D is "go into a hole in the ground that's full of monsters and don't come back up until you've killed everything there and taken all its stuff", then tweak that to one that works better. Frankly, if you're a GM who appreciates a more story-focused game anyway, then the story of D&D is probably not very compelling to you anyway. I know it certainly isn't to me.

 

[Nytmare]

It's waaaaay outside the norm, but you can also put the onus of deciding if the character dies on the players. It's easier to lump into some systems than others, but it's the way I've been operating on and off since just before 4th came out.

 

[Griego]

The sort of no-holds-barred character killing that goes on in A Song of Ice and Fire may be a risky thing to emulate in your campaign; I know I was pretty cheesed off when GRRM killed off so many of my favorite characters (and so many that were obvious protagonists). But good luck, may your players enjoy that sort of thing in the campaign. It will certainly pass the "realism/verisimilitude" test with flying colors!

 

[Nagol]

One thing to consider is when bringing in a replacement character: give that character a fresh viewpoint on one or more of the situations the group is facing.

The character knows a facet of information the others haven't managed to identify or knows A is linked to B when the group is convinced it links to C. It helps place the PC inside the struggle and gives them a starting role and a point to interact with the rest of the PCs. Or the antagonists know about the PC and something the PC thinks is innocent is a linch pin for action.

It gives a point for fresh injection of data and helps keep the campaign fresh and evolving.

 

[Niccodaemus]

One of the things that always takes me so long in designing an adventure is seeing through the prism of an array of characters. Nearly every "module" I purchased went through extensive revision by me to make the motivation for going in make sense to each of the PCs fairly equally.

The interesting thing about doing this is from the get go, PCs may have very different goals and motivations for going on the adventure, which they may or may not share with one another. The thief in the group may have a side contract, and he might be waiting for the opportune moment to claim (or wrest!) a particular piece of treasure.

"You guys can keep the swords and scrolls and stuff. I just want some gems, as I like to travel light. Like say, that ruby over there."

It works best if the PCs do not have to screw each other over to attain their goals, even if the other PCs might not be too happy if they knew exactly what was going on.

A great example of this type of riff raff team with differing goals is the TV series Firefly. The Doctor just wanted a cure for his sister. Jayne is out for himself. The Captain has his ship to worry about.

"Seed the field" with hooks for different characters. Have a thief hook, a ranger hook, a paladin hood, a cleric hook, a magic hook.

When a PC dies, a new character can step into the void an follow the breadcrumb trail.