Re-thinking PC death and storytelling

[Janx]

Bear in mind, I don't assume you can/should take the the Game of Thrones story concept literally to D&D's party based style.

It was more that if you recognize that "main" characters that you thought the plot was attached to couldn't die, that was a fallacy.

I see lots of good ideas, and caveats to the ideas. Which are also good to know. No single idea is perfect.

Here's a few other new ideas:

the solo session for new replacement PCs
The setup some background for a new PC that is joining the group, run a solo session, that maybe represents something he did a few years back. Or something current that will dovetail him into the party. Either way, this gives the player a chance to bond with his new PC and invest in him before he joins the party.

It also lets you give him some backstory that he earned, and maybe even new campaign information that the party didn't have when he joins.

Split up the party and do scene changes frequently
An old idea from the 2e Campaign Guidebook was to split up the party and jump from character to character. Game of Thrones basically does that, albeit in longer stretches. The main concept though, lets you run a group of players in different places, which makes them more vulnerable (as they are alone), yet cover diverging characters.

Don't overplan or script stuff out
This touches on my own method of planning sessions. I look at my PCs, players and what they want to do next and prepare plot hooks and material that they would be interested in (or are following up on from last session). I don't write up more material than I need for the current session.

In this way, if I do accidentally railroad, it is constrained to the current session, giving me a chance to correct the mistake based on what I now see the players really wanted to do.

It also means, that if the situation changes more than I expected, I'm not going to feel trapped to try to use my remaining material.

 

[Lwaxy]

Don't overplan or script stuff out

Yes, this. Most important in my experience.

 

[GSHamster]

Also a caveat to this idea is that not everyone likes A Song of Fire and Ice. I personally don't really like the series, and stopped reading somewhere in book 3.

The thing is that if you keep killing off the characters that people like, soon you're left with just the characters that people don't like. If you've haven't managed to catch the reader's interest in one of the other characters, then they fall away and stop reading.

Some people read for the plot, and some people read for the characters. Or motivations might change depending on the book. Change the plot too much, or in unexpected/incorrect ways, and you lose those readers. Change the characters too much, and you lose those readers.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

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.

Yes, having "whatever" happen and still be cool and make a good story is a fine goal but the more recent versions of D&D don't do well at accomplishing this. If you drop a lot of the "extraneous" combats then there's too little combat and no buildup to the face-off with the BBEG. If you make changes to keep the PC's safe and alive through any and all little combats all you do is make them nigh invincible for the big combats. If you orient your game around ensuring that the story takes precedence over the inevitable intrusion of random dice events that spoil it then, as you say, you walk the line of either letting the PC's see the railroading or killing a good story - and NEITHER is particularly enjoyable.

This says to me, plot immunity is not required.

Plot immunity is not only not required it is obvious railroading. What is required is player acceptance of the fact that random deaths are inevitable and that their occurrence cannot be controlled by the DM without it becoming immediately and annoyingly obvious.

D&D is not a "storytelling" RPG as such. The intent (IMO) was originally to give the DM PERMISSION to violate the rules on occasion so that some plots and stories can be preserved, PC's and NPC's can be saved or killed by exceeding or arbitrarily restricting the rules. If you build INTO the rules the manifest precedence of story over mechanics then you see the rails.

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.

Going to toot my own horn here and brag that I saw the error of this dynamic VERY soon after 3E was released. It is a key flaw in 3rd Edition rules and it is something that WotC designers themselves seemed to fail to see and appreciate even though they intentionally built it into the system.

By making PC rescources a finite quantity and engineering the math so that PC death becomes very predictable you have simultaneously FORCED upon your game a pattern of play. You only get X number of encounters before you either have to BUILD INTO the adventure the ability to rest and recover at regular intervals or have the ability to make them happen off the cuff as needed. WotC needed to be making shorter adventures, or adventures connected in smaller system-swallowable parts but instead the trend became mega-dungeons which fly in the face of how the mechanics of the system seem to have been designed to function.

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.

This has applied to every version of D&D. Don't hang your campaigns successful conclusion on the life and death of any one given PC because you CANNOT reliably control when and how any given character will die without it eventually becoming obvious what you're doing. You similarly should not hang the conclusion of any adventure upon the life and death of one NPC or monster because you cannot guarantee success by the PC's without the invisible strings of your puppeteering eventually being seen.

If you're going to let the chips fall then they have to fall with the accompanying acceptance of UNDESIRABLE consequences - PC death, storyline interruptions, etc. If you forbid the undesirable consequences then you accept that it will become obvious that you're catching the chips on the way down.

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.

1E DMG may not say specifically to do it this way but the suggestion sure seems to be that PC's will be doing a LOT of independent activity and it may even occasionally become an issue as to how to get the PC's all in one place at one time to begin a new adventure together. Researching spells, gathering information, training time to level up (!), running or participating in a guild or religious hierarchy, personal quests to accomplish personal goals, builing or planning for a shift in activities upon reaching title level (!), investigating plot hooks to see if they pan out rather than just accepting that the DM will PRESENT you with the next obvious plot hook in his planned chain of events.

I really do think the game used to be run rather differently before someone decided that PC's should always be together, doing the same things in the same places and advancing at the same rates.

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.

Before 3E came along (but more in 1E than 2E) it was my experience that players wound up running several different characters and even operating in seperate parties in order to retain direct participation when the game focus shifted here and there. Frequently they would even be "henchmen" of one or more PC's.

We had an unwritten rule that players should try to only run one PC at a time (even if they had to invent excuses to leave another PC out of an adventure), and that two was the limit. But then there were special occasions when every available PC, henchman and hireling was freely brought to bear on some grand and glorious combat or quest and that was fun too. It was NOT just "4's company, more's a crowd" that 3E and later tried to ENGINEER into the system. The game was quite capable of accomodating whatever level of participation that your game group could throw at it.

 

[callinostros]

I think it bears mentioning that the books are all "railroads". The DM, I mean author, has scripted what will happen and when. Because he is a good DM this railroad is hidden and it appears as if all this not really a railroad, but it is. The DM knows when and how a PC, I mean character, will die...and who will pick up the plot thereafter, long before it all happens.

While I think such a campaign is doable, there is difference between the books and a rpg game.

 

[Desdichado]

I think it bears mentioning that the books are all "railroads". The DM, I mean author, has scripted what will happen and when. Because he is a good DM this railroad is hidden and it appears as if all this not really a railroad, but it is. The DM knows when and how a PC, I mean character, will die...and who will pick up the plot thereafter, long before it all happens.

While I think such a campaign is doable, there is difference between the books and a rpg game.

No, that's not true at all. Books aren't railroads, they're the "after the fact" recounting of a campaign. And while some authors do extensive planning before writing and don't really deviate from their plan, many other authors do only superficial outline planning, and let stuff that happens through the writing process evolve the plan significantly from what it was when it started.

And yes, we all know (hopefully) that using the metaphor of a campaign and a book is somewhat limited and you have to be careful of taking that too far, at the same time, it's also a very useful metaphor, and there's a lot of things you can learn from reading books and adapting their techniques to your game that don't mean railroading your PCs.

 

[Yora]

I have the policy to not let PCs be permanently be killed by random chance or accidents. If a cloud giant happens to roll a crit with a greataxe that would move a character instantly from 50 hp down to -40, it is time to fudge the dice so the character ends with only -4 and still survives the encounter. And no rooms with a lever in the center that floods the whole dungeon with lava in one round. Normally, character shields are in place.

However, when players decide, that for the sake of the events of the plot, his character choses a course of action that includes noticably higher risks to his life than normally in the campaign, then I take of the silk gloves.

On one hand, this encourages players to show restraint and not just say "No worry, we can do this, we never die". When the player think the situation is dire and the quest may fail, they may chose to take greater risks.
On the other hand it means that when a character dies, than it is while performing a plot-relevant activity.

 

[jedavis]

In general, I tend to provide PCs with no plot armor (had a plot-critical PC splattered by a merc with an auto-grenade launcher in my last Traveller game... that one was tricky, but I dealt with it, and the game went on and ended spectacularly), and to expect none when I'm on the other side of the screen. However, in light of a couple PC deaths I witnessed and/or inflicted in the last year, I wrote a post on accidental vs. sacrificial death here. GoT doesn't really do sacrificial death; it does purely accidental death, to my ability to recall (read through 4...). Which is OK, but I tend to be a sucker for a good sacrifice.

Also, in terms of multiple PCs, go the Henchmen route from 1e. If the PCs hire henchmen, bring them with them on adventures, and they grow with the PCs (if a bit behind), then an attachment exists if a main PC falls (and if a henchman dies, it's a loss of potential and invested XP).

 

[Janx]

YIf you drop a lot of the "extraneous" combats then there's too little combat and no buildup to the face-off with the BBEG.

Here's an important difference between groups' playstyles. How many encounters before you face the BBEG?

I've been running my games as 4-6 hour sessions. Each session is like a TV episode with a villain-of-the-week. I can get 6 fights and some RP and other non-combat encounters into that time frame.

Most violent TV shows have maybe 3-4 fights, including the episode boss and an opening combat scene.

TV seems to be able to pace story advancement and combat action without needing 13 encounters so the hero can level up and face the BBEG as the next encounter.

 

[jedavis]

Here's an important difference between groups' playstyles. How many encounters before you face the BBEG?

I've been running my games as 4-6 hour sessions. Each session is like a TV episode with a villain-of-the-week. I can get 6 fights and some RP and other non-combat encounters into that time frame.

Most violent TV shows have maybe 3-4 fights, including the episode boss and an opening combat scene.

TV seems to be able to pace story advancement and combat action without needing 13 encounters so the hero can level up and face the BBEG as the next encounter.

Hrm... our benchmark since switching to Traveller has been ~1 combat per 4-6 hour session, due in part to breaking out of the levelgrind cycle. We spend a lot more time exploring and RPing than we used to; it's pretty nice. When you change the incentives, you change the game.