D&D General Doing Tragedy in D&D

[Theory of Games]

So, let's talk genre in D&D.

One of the harder genres to splice into the heroic fantasy of standard D&D is tragedy. To evoke the pathos of someone doing their best to do good and utterly, completely failing.

How do you evoke this? What in D&D seems to get the most in the way of it? Can you cause the players to feel pathos like that in your games? Do you ever inflict tragedy...on the PC's? Or is it NPC-only? How can the players see a tragedy about to play out and NOT intervene to fix it?

For the sake of this discussion, assume that there was a good session zero and everyone's on board with a bit of a gut-punch, but also that fundamentally PC's are assumed to survive (assume basically a 1-15-or-so game where the party remains consistent).

You need flawed PCs who bring about their own downfall. Better to use GURPS or another ttrpg that gets into the personality traits of the PCs and their flaws can be exploited by the GM. Actually, no other ttrpg would do this better than GURPS since its Disadvantages are perfect for creating flawed characters.

D&D lacks the depth.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

You need flawed PCs who bring about their own downfall. Better to use GURPS or another ttrpg that gets into the personality traits of the PCs and their flaws can be exploited by the GM. Actually, no other ttrpg would do this better than GURPS since its Disadvantages are perfect for creating flawed characters.

D&D lacks the depth.

I’m not sure you need game mechanics to work in tragedy. It’s an RPG. The story is the story. I think there’s been several D&D examples already in this thread

 

[MGibster]

Yeah see that’s the thing. A bad thing happens is maybe tragic but not a tragedy. A tragedy as in genre tragedy means that there is no good ending for anyone. And that the bad ending is pretty much 100% self inflicted.

Yeah. What makes it a tragedy is the character's actions are what leads to it. Let's take our pal Oedipus. The very reasonable actions he took to avoid his fate instead led him to fulfill his fate. And even then, during the play, several characters tell him to drop his investigation into the death of the previous king because he's not going to like it. Oedipus says he will punish whomever murdered King Laius and he fulfills his promise.

 

[I'm A Banana]

A tragedy is any adventure where the protagonist(s) make bad choices.

Thus, you cannot "do" tragedy in D&D without restricting player choice, but tragedy can happen organically as a result of player choices.

A potential nuance to this convo:

If tragedy isn't something we can really inflict on a PC, how might we do a campaign with the theme of "tragedy" that maybe treats the PC's as a sort of chorus - the observers and audience to the great tragedies of others?

The PC's should be pretty central to the story, but maybe the unfolding tragedy has the force of like a weather event: they just can't stop it. They're not the ones doing it, though maybe they're the ones dealing with the fallout...?

 

[I'm A Banana]

So, this is where I like Gothic Horror as a genre, particularly Ravenloft. Ravenloft allows a player to get their thrills from the horror, but the stories of many of the NPCs are tragic in nature. If a player wants to lean into that aspect and interact with the NPCs in that way, then it’s perfectly set up by design within the setting. The key for me is that there have to be tragic elements that cannot be changed, and then the game elements that can be changed by the players. For instance, Strahd is irredeemable. The cycle of Strahd and Tatyana is inevitable. It will continue no matter what the PCs do. But everything else is mutable and on the table.

I keep thinking about the similarity in horror and tragedy. Like, even from a mechanical perspective (like with Sanity or Dread's jenga tower or...) - the idea is that to achieve a near-term goal, you sacrifice long-term stability. Walter White is willing to sacrifice his relationships to feel power, for instance.

Also in the sense that the tragedy in D&D may be most possible as part of the setting rather than as part of the PC's. Like, every fallen ruin the party explores could have a tragic history attached to it.

Though I wonder how the party might interact with a tragedy unfolding in front of them. Like, the party has a quest to bring in a wanted and dangerous criminal, but they learn that criminal and his pregnant wife are just trying for one last "big heist" before they retreat to a wealthy enclave and live a quiet life. So, of course, the tragedy is that they die in the last heist, victims of law enforcement or a "brave" resistance to their last heist. But...does that still complete the PC's goals? And what if the party intervenes to prevent that tragedy, to convince the NPC's to make better decisions...? And does it feel a lot like railroading to have this sort of predetermined thematic outcome that serves the tone that everyone agreed to?

 

[TiQuinn]

And what if the party intervenes to prevent that tragedy, to convince the NPC's to make better decisions...?

So going back to literary definition of tragedy, if the PCs can change the outcome, wouldn’t it cease to be a tragedy?

If I could intervene in Romeo and Juliet and convince Romeo to not take the poison, or for the Capulets and Monatgues to come to the table to air their grievances, etc, I can bring about a happy ending, and now it’s something else entirely.

A tragedy in a certain sense is a railroad. (Uh oh, now I did it, I used that word.)

 

[Distracted DM]

It's rare, but pointing to my own earlier post.. tragedy is more likely (IMO) to occur by way of the PCs making in-character choices. It does require them to lean into roleplaying, acting as they think their character would, and it probably (not necessarily) means going against the common "must always make optimal choices to win game" mindset.
Heck, bad stuff can still happen even if they're trying to make optimal choices; they can happen BECAUSE they're making optimal choices.. but that does require a little more engineering hoping towards reaching a certain outcome.

Like I said, I think tragedy is going to require buy-in from the players on some level; even if they're not buying into "ok we'll have tragedy," they're buying into the world as a real place, at least that it's real to their characters. I think that sort of stuff comes with greater verisimilitude?

It's also definitely a skill tot develop as a GM- that is, to present situations that could possibly result in tragedy, often enough, that even if most of the threads don't end in tragedy, one of them does

 

[Bedrockgames]

I agree tragedy is hard to do in a typical campaign. I think one way it can be encouraged is presenting players with difficult choices where both options lead to undesirable ends but that can feel a bit heavy handed. Something I do twenty year backstories for all the NPCs in my campaigns and those can provide a tragic backdrop to a campaign without the players feeling like they are being forced into a tragedy themselves

 

[I'm A Banana]

So going back to literary definition of tragedy, if the PCs can change the outcome, wouldn’t it cease to be a tragedy?

This makes me think of horror genre again.

If the PC's just choose not to spend the night in the haunted house, we wouldn't be telling a story about a haunted house.

So what makes the PC's go into the haunted house? To do the obviously bad thing?

 

[TiQuinn]

This makes me think of horror genre again.

If the PC's just choose not to spend the night in the haunted house, we wouldn't be telling a story about a haunted house.

So what makes the PC's go into the haunted house? To do the obviously bad thing?

I think there’s a difference. Putting a location in front of the PCs to explore is an expected requirement, I.E. there’s no adventure if you don’t go into the dungeon, and I, the DM, have nothing else prepared for tonight so why don’t you just go into the dungeon, please?

But enacting a tragedy requires certain things to happen a precise way so that the outcome is locked. No matter what, Romeo and Juliet have to die - there’s no prevention by the PCs possible, otherwise it’s not a tragedy.

I think one is an acceptable “railroad” and the other is likely an unacceptable “railroad” from the stance of a TTRPG.