D&D 5E Tear-jerker moments in campaigns

[WhosAChaoticGoodBoy]

SHORT VERSION
Were there any instances you had real, gut-wrenching emotions while playing D&D? What happened? What were some contributing factors to why you felt as strongly as you did?

LONG VERSION
One of the things I like about D&D (and similar games) is how much agency we the players get. Part of this agency includes our freedom to create characters out of thin air who have believable and complex flaws, desires, hopes, and dreams.

I was watching Episode 25 of Critical Role (SPOILER WARNING, skip this paragraph) where Vax is knocked out and I was heavily moved by his ‘pre-death’ monologue. Liam’s portrayal of Vax was already so human (technically half-elvish I suppose) that when he described his last visions of Keyleth and especially Vex I had no separation at all between the fake world of the game and my real world experiences as a human being. Even though I consider myself a completely different kind of person than Vax, immediately could sympathize (empathize?) with what he was feeling. The simulated world successfully suspended my disbelief and I became absorbed in the tragedy of losing a friend.

When we create characters, I do necessarily feel as if we’re also commenting on the human condition. This isn’t a unique idea, especially to the cine-, biblio-, and other mediaphiles reading this.

However even though books and movies likewise provide opportunities for the full spectrum of human emotion, D&D and other tabletop RPGs are a unique medium in that it’s performative, improvised, and collaborative (imo improv comedy and live jazz are closer mediums to D&D than, say, fantasy video games or fantasy novels).

So you have a medium where you create a character, become accountable and connected to their motivations/dreams/flaws, and then you release them into the world to interact with other creatures who are similarly fleshed out. This, in addition to commonplace reference to our characters in 1st person (e.g, “I walk into the tavern and” instead of “My character walks into the tavern and”) creates a lot of opportunities for the contrived world of the game to cut into real, human emotions.

So all that being said, I’m really curious to hear about some of your emotional experiences while playing D&D. This includes feelings you had /as/ your character in addition to feelings you had as a consequence of things that /happened to/ your character.

As a disclaimer, I get the sense through my experience in and out of game that I’m more “emotional” than most men. More specifically, I’m comfortable exploring emotional spaces and easily give myself permission to be moved at particularly poignent moments in music, movies, etc. That being said, because my disposition necessarily impacts the degree of my emotional experience, it’s an entirely valid answer to say, “It’s just a game that I play with my friends to have fun. I’m not emotionally moved by what happens in D&D”.

If you’re that kind of player, this is still your thread and I’m still interested in your perspective (perhaps specifically, I’m curious what relationship you have with your characters that imposes that kind of distance between their emotions and your emotions). As it’s said, “the content is where you take it,” and your fun isn’t wrong. I genuinely welcome all opinions.

 

[WhosAChaoticGoodBoy]

I'll start things off by sharing a moment I had in a campaign I'm currently part of. My character, Olim Tabassum (inspired from the Uzbek translation for 'Death Smile' hehe), is a lvl 5 warlock. As a consequence of his pact with Baalzebul, necrotic scarring forms on Olim's chest, arms, and abdomen as he gains levels. The scarring looks like what you might expect from krokodil/desomorphine, very nasty stuff. He wears clothing to deliberately cover it up. As early as 3rd level, Olim began coughing up black, bilious sludge. At first it only happened when he would incur damage, but as he gained more power, the scarring spread and the coughing became more frequent/severe.

He eventually confided, privately, with the party cleric that he had this scarring. This was a secret he'd hidden from nearly everyone. The cleric asked to see the scars, and in a literal 'opening up' Olim removed his tunic and showed the cleric the full degree of Baazlebul's influence on his body. In good faith, the cleric attempted to heal Olim's wounds using some high-level healing spells, but given the nature of the scarring, nothing happened.

In the moment I as the player became so absorbed in the anger and frustration that Olim felt, I lost the separation between player and character and I roleplayed Olim scornfully lashing out at the cleric and his god. My voice wavered as I expressed contempt for his deity, and I felt did feel my eyes begin to well up as the disappointing reality of the scarring dawned on Olim. As the conversation continued, Olim became convinced he couldn't go on sacrificing his body for power, agreed he would have to find power elsewhere or face steeper consequences. Metagame wise, at lvl 6 Olim will begin his journey in the Bard skill tree. I don't know yet what our DM has in store if Baazlebul finds out about me distancing myself from him.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

In a Pathfinder game, I was playing my elven paladin, Andaris Indaril. Andaris is the must unrelentingly upbeat, cheerful LG paladin. During the PFS adventure, Murder on the Throaty Mermaid, he found himself surrounded by a bunch of ne’er-do-wells, nasty NPCs, including an elf-hating lookout. And the GM managed to get under my skin. I found myself feeling angry – not at the GM, certainly, or the game, or anything immature like that. I guess the only way I can explain it was that I was feeling the anger of my character, of kindness rebuffed at every opportunity.

I give the fellow running the game full credit for playing up the RP aspects of the situation, for bringing the NPCs to life in such a way. But for a moment, until another PC, also playing wonderfully in-character, managed to talk me down, I was just about ready to invoke Iomedae’s justice on the lot of them.

I think there’s every bit of room for emotional resonance in D&D. The joy of the game is that it can encompass so many styles of play. For my part, I dig deep RP along with the thrill of intense combat. Having a character that I’m invested in makes it all the more exciting.

 

[Chethrok]

This thread basically encapsulates the core experience I'm trying to create with my players every time I DM. I like all the cool/fun parts of D&D (power gaming, storytelling, interaction, humor, etc.), but the times when D&D has felt the most meaningful to me have been those times when the players and DM have become emotionally invested and feel that shared sense of purpose. For me, the ultimate goal of D&D is to explore the human condition, in a way that is similar to but distinct from the way that various forms of media explore aspects of being human.

There have only been a few times when I've really managed to pull off something truly moving. The one I look back at the most was the end of the first act of a 4e campaign I ran in college, where the group was put in a no-win situation and used a destructive magical artifact against the dwarf army trying to take the artifact from them. The dwarves weren't evil, just on the opposite side of a war, and the survivors took the players back to their city to stand trial for war crimes. The players lost their trial, and one player voluntarily took all the blame so the rest of the party would not be hung. His only condition for sacrificing himself was that the party promise to go back and save his home village afterwards, a situation the party had put on hold while pursuing the main story. The party, of course, agreed, and the character was hung for his crimes. Once the party left the dwarf city, they discovered that they had another choice to make - their fallen party member's home was about to be overrun, but the artifact they had tried to secure was simultaneously headed for the front lines and would surely spell defeat for their side. And so, after promising their dead friend to save his home village, they chose to try and save the kingdom instead in a weighty vote. They intervened in the battle just in time to save the day, but the artifact was used to destroy troops from both sides, and the party was left feeling the hollowness of their victory, including what they gave up to achieve it, as well as the cost of the lives they took. A few players teared up, and everyone in the room felt the sense of gravity, regret and bittersweet victory.

From this and other moments, I've noticed that there are a few things that have worked to create such emotional moments in games I've played/DMed:

- Buildup and Stakes. Players need time to get invested in their characters and the story. It's necessary, but isn't guaranteed to happen simply as a function of time spent playing. The players need to begin to care and invest in their characters and the game world.

- Adversity and Consequences. Most of the strongest emotions I've seen at the table have happened in response to situations where a clear solution/victory is not possible, and/or success has an unavoidable cost. This is unfortunate, because my default setting as a DM is to tell stories that are more optimistic and hopeful. However, even on the flip side, a true "win" is only as meaningful as the struggle beforehand, which means there will always be a point where you need to need to put the screws in. Doing so is much easier at lower levels, but still possible at higher levels if the dice take a back seat.

- Moral Ambiguity. D&D has a tendency to put players in clear categories: good vs. evil, humans vs. monsters, etc. For true immersion, players need to see the game world as more complicated than right and wrong, and NPCs as more than just obstacles, particularly the ones they are in conflict with. In the above situation, having to roleplay defending themselves against a war crime tribunal and an angry mob of dwarves with lost loved ones created empathy for the enemy. I find that the empathy/degree to which players "inhabit" their characters is less important for emotional involvement than the degree to which they feel for the antagonists and other NPCs.

- Player Agency. In the above situation, the player choosing to sacrifice himself did more to up the emotional stakes of the game than anything I could have possibly done. Something like that can't happen unless the players have true agency and the world reacts accordingly.

- Dice Take a Back Seat. Tying in with the other points, for consequences, moral ambiguity and player agency to be at the forefront, that means the situations faced by players need to be the kind that can't be resolved with dice rolling or clever application of character abilities. Situations that can be "won" by rolling well create a gamey, success vs. failure mentality that is perfectly normal and awesome, but detrimental to the development of deeper emotional investment. The dice can be involved, just not as the deciding factor in resolving moral ambiguity.

- Music helps. I'm not sure how much it helps my players, but I find that playing a musical track (usually instrumental) that evokes the mood of the moment really helps me to turn things up a notch and track with the emotional oomph in a scene. For big scenes, such as beginnings or endings of a campaign, I'll usually find some music that really works for that scene, and script out a narration in time to the music.

These are just my observations, and may be more or less helpful coming from the perspective of someone who DMs much more often than he plays. I do think that the whole concept of emotional investment in a D&D game requires both players and a DM capable of having that emotional connection. Not every group I've played with has been right for that, which is okay - everybody has fun differently and all that. As a therapist, I'm probably an outlier in terms of the amount of emotional content I look for in my D&D games.

 

[SheWantstheD&D]

I want everyone in this game to feel invested in their characters. I've been through a lot of campaigns as a player where a backstory was pointless, and it made me not only a little frustrated but ended up trivializing the whole game for me. So I took these guys out of the pre written adventure we picked up (Manor of Astabar, lots of fun) and extended that into an aokigahara like forest. Every person got their own tailored dream sequence, some prophetic, some memories. One of my players wrote a pretty thorough backstory where his life-long companions were betrayed during an adventure by one of their own. The betrayer got away and after several months his leads dried up. The current party is sort of a surrogate for his friends who died horribly in a dungeon. This was his dream (please excuse, I wrote as I would read it to him so it's not a literary masterpiece):

You're sitting at a table in a tavern. You've got your hands around a metal tankard; it's cool to the touch and full of ale -- not very good ale but it's cold and that's good enough. There's a din of laughter and poorly made music but you feel happy and warm.

Sitting at the table all around you are your old friends; John Ledger to your left, Handsome Rob in front of you, Left Ear and Lyle to your right. You know this is a memory of a time before the Last Job. You know you're dreaming but you let yourself go with it and take a sip of ale (which is a bit of a balancing act since the tankard and the table are human size and so a little unwieldy).

Handsome Rob is telling a story that you must have heard two dozen times. You know every detail by heart even though each re-telling gets a little further and further away from resembling reality. But that's OK because you know the point isn't to chronicle history so much as to entertain. You take another gulp of ale from the tankard, trying to balance it against the table while you listen -- but the next line of the story is off.

You start to correct him, "No, no, that's not how it goes," but when you look up you see it's not your old friend telling the story -- it's Edward. He's gesturing with his hands and smiling to your other companions.

"That's not how I heard it" says the person to your left. It's Goldwin. Lyle and Left Ear grin, one elbowing the each other, knowing they've caught Edward in a lie. You open your mouth to speak but they talk over you, not noticing you.

"Horsehit! You couldn't have --" it should have been Left Ear but when you turn your head to look at him his chair is empty. So is Lyle's. Somewhere along the line the laughter and the music stopped. You feel the sweat from the side of the tankard slowly roll down your fingers -- and you wake.

 

[CydKnight]

If you've ever felt emotion reading a novel or short story, it's not hard to understand why you might become emotionally invested in your PC since you are essentially contributing to the story yourself in the way you play that PC. This is likely the type of investment that most strive for when playing because it also provides for the most reward.

 

[Deviation]

I haven't been playing long so my stories aren't many but, as a first time GM with a bunch of first time Players I wanted to ensure my players felts as tho the NPCs lives mattered- that their choices truly mattered and that fighting, and killing, aren't always the answer.

So I start off with a standard encounter- the PCs are escorting a trade caravan that's beset by bandits. A perception check reveals right off the bat that things aren't right, however- they look desperate. After striking down one of the Bandits the others immediately stop and rush to their fallen friend's side, ending combat immediately. The "bandits" are soon to be revealed simple poor folk who all have family members suffering the same mysterious illness, and the only cure is something very expensive- and so the bandits banded together to try and steal from rich folks and cure their ailed friends.

Seeing combat was over, one of my PCs was so overcome by guilt that they used one of their spell slots to restore the bandits health and they obviously felt real anger when the "cure" that they discovered later was actually a fake- so the bandits attempting to cure their sick family members had all been for nothing as greedy people took advantage of the desperate (a common theme in this campaign)

I think, from my limited experience, there are two ways to quickly get PCs invested in NPCs, the first: give them names. People in general are more fond of named things- it's easier to associate a personality or person with a name, instead of letting them go nameless. Subtly punish them for just demanding answers to their question from the High Priestess when they don't introduce themselves- don't just give them the answers, have them RP for it.

The second, is to think about WHY an encounter is happening, from fights to diplomacy, why is that encounter happening and what would happen if the PCs never interfered? A pair of Basilisks in a dungeon obviously fight harder and harder the closer to death they become...and afterward it's revealed that the PCs had stumbled upon their nest. Have the basilisk's last moments to be crawling towards it's nest and curling around it's young. Why is the steward so desperate to foil the PCs at every turn? well, a little care to investigate and it's revealed that the Steward is being blackmailed by the thieves guild.

Obviously, just because you give it a reason doesn't mean it shouldn't be destroyed. A green hag that screeches in sorrow when you kill her sister is still, literally, eating children and needs to be killed. And random encounters can still be utilized and be fun. Not every encounter needs to have a greater reason behind it- but have enough that your PCs leave the fight wondering "who's child did I kill? Who's parent? why did they attack me?"

Of course, I've not perfected this yet. I've only GMed a few games. But what I have implemented this, it's been successful

 

[MostlyHarmless42]

I do try and invest myself into any games I run or play in, and encourage the rest of the party to do the same, as they will. As a player, I tend to method act, slipping into a character and staying in their shoes for the entire session, or at least trying to. This desire goes so far as to being part of why I dislike electronic devices in my games, as I feel they are a distracting influence that breaks immersion. ...more on topic though, I have had in the past more than a few moments of players being devoted or invested in their characters, my party just had a severe moment of frustration a few sessions back where they were forced to hand over the woman they were sworn to protect to a vampire (we're playing Curse of Strahd), in order to be able to survive through the night and thus buy them time to find a way to save her/stop the vampire. While we weren't necessarily all yelling at each other in character much, the emotions round the room were palpable, and it was not a decision they took lightly.

That said my party has been very hit or miss with how much roleplaying they do vs saying what they do (i.e. shouting and raving vs saying "my character is livid and not happy about this".), but this tends to be for a couple reasons: first we live in an apartment, and a bunch of us screaming bloody murder (literally in some cases) would not go well with the neighbors. Second, one of my players suffers from anxiety and panic attacks, so can be a bit sensitive to people being emotional around her. It has caused us to reign in angry or negative moments a bit, as it doesn't help us much if we end up triggering the poor girl. This doesn't make our games any less entertaining or emotional mind you, just something we consider.

 

[Riley37]

Yes, lots of times. Relatively recently: my PC was talking with the leader of an NPC tribe, who was giving us the runaround. My PC threatened violence unless he cut the BS. Another PC then confronted my PC, saying that the threat was wrong, unjustified, and if that's how my PC rolled then maybe they shouldn't be teammates. He was right. My character realized that he'd erred, and then committed to making sure the tribe *didn't* get hurt in the course of the party's mission, as an act of apology - to the tribe, to the teammate, and to the character's favored deities (Ogma and Silvanus). I felt my character's anger at the tribal leader, then my character's remorse afterwards.

 

[corwyn77]

Back in 2e in a game I was playing in, we went into the land of the dead to rescue a princess that was trapped there. The trick was that exactly the same number of people had to leave as entered. The GM had a contingency plan and an NPC to sacrifice if need be but had also arranged for it to be appropriate for one PC to do. The PC came through and offered to stay behind and had a touching speech for the princess.