D&D General Doing Tragedy in D&D

[I'm A Banana]

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).

 

[Distracted DM]

Can you help define tragedy in this context? Perhaps provide an example or two?

 

[BookTenTiger]

The closest I got was in a "flashback" game I ran for a group I was normally a player in. Every once in a while the players would take a turn as DM to run a one-shot adventure which fleshed out the backstory of another character. I was asked to run the backstory adventure of the dwarf cleric.

His backstory was that his wife, a traveling merchant, had died. He was going out into the world to find both the material components and knowledge in order to resurrect her.

I ran a short, low-level dungeon in which the characters (the cleric at 1st-level, and his family and friends) were trying to locate his wife, who had been missing for some time. They found her in an underground tunnel which had collapsed in an earthquake, which had also exposed the little dungeon they explored along the way.

At the end, despite all the challenges they overcame, they found the cleric's wife's corpse. She had been dead for some time. The player of the cleric read aloud the last letter she'd written him. After reading he wiped the tears from his eyes.

It was one of the best adventures I'd ever run. It was also one of the only adventures I'd categorize as a tragedy!

 

[Sorinth]

Presenting a moral dilemmas is one way to go about it. For example the villain is siphoning power from an imprisoned demon and as a result is overpowered and probably wins a fight against the PCs. If the players get the opportunity to free the demon they severely weaken the villain and can end the villains plot, but down the line the demon is going to do something bad like kill an NPC the PCs cares about.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Can you help define tragedy in this context? Perhaps provide an example or two?

I'm OK drawing with a fairly broad brush, so I'd say anything from classic Greek tragedy to Shakespearean tragedy to modern tragedies like Breaking Bad, Scarface, Brokeback Mountain, No Country for Old Men, etc. (even arguably things like Dark Souls)

 

[MGibster]

I think it might be best to define tragedy to start with. Within the context of genre, a tragedy is a story that revolves around someone, usually the protagonist, suffering. Oedipus Rex is a classic tragedy by Sophocles about someone trying to escape their fate only wind up fulfilling it in the most awful way. That Oedipus was a bad mother- (Shut yo mouth!) I'm just talkin' 'bout Rex. (And we can dig it!)

 

[Distracted DM]

I guess I've had a bunch. Some were incredibly well-done thanks to player buy-in (that's pretty important in general).

Off the top of my head, the birth of Lareth the Beautiful was a tragedy of a PC's own making.

tldr: "Lareth the Beautiful" (cleric to an evil deity with half his face scarred to fk) was so despised my one of my parties that he gained a muuuch bigger role. It turns out, after I decided he needed a bigger role due to player reception, that he was the phylactery for an evil demigod, when that demigod was going to be destroyed (way in the past)... the demigod made a bunch of Lareth clones, each with a bit of its "soul."

Aaanyway, PCs go back in time to when these evil demigods were being banished/destroyed, they take part in the final assault.. and are teamed up with Good Lareth. One of the PCs backstories was that Lareth killed his druid master, so even though this was good, pre-phylactery Lareth, the PC hated him. I run my games very improv-heavy, so I really had no idea where this was going at this point, and figured we'd hit something satisfactory. It ended up being so much more!
The party confronts the demigod in his full power, and it's obvious that they need to gtfo- Lareth is going to sacrifice himself to buy them time to get away. And then, the druid PC decided they were going to stop Lareth from ever becoming a problem- while Lareth turned to face the demigod, the druid grabbed the back of Lareth's neck and upcast Blight.

Well, ladies and gents, now we learned how Lareth got half of his face fk'd up- I described how the Blight ruined half of his face, and the betrayal broke his will/faith, letting the demigod in.
Now we learned how an act of vengeance stymied an act of sacrifice, and ended up fulfilling the PC's own background tragedy. He was the cause of his own sorrow, and was responsible for the face (literally and figuratively) of the BBEG.

All done on the fly. Pretty good stuff- it makes sense that this one came to the fore in my mind.

 

[Clint_L]

I'm gonna be like a broken record here, but tragedy in particular has to be driven by the character's story, so for it to work, the players have to put in the effort. In particular, their character needs to have something they want that is in conflict with what they need. Then you put them in a crisis situation where they have to choose, and there is no way for them to have both.

Maybe they get neither, because they are unable to make the necessary sacrifice or change. Cautionary tale.

Maybe they get what they need, but only by giving up what they wanted. Bittersweet.

And maybe they get what they want, but at the cost of what they need. Bleak.

Incidentally, although you can think of tragedy in terms of being its own genre, particularly in drama, I think it works better to think of it as a narrative approach to any genre (so tragic thriller, romance, etc.). It's kind of like mystery in that regard.

 

[MGibster]

I'm gonna be like a broken record here, but tragedy in particular has to be driven by the character's story, so for it to work, the players have to put in the effort. In particular, their character needs to have something they want that is in conflict with what they need. Then you put them in a crisis situation where they have to choose, and there is no way for them to have both.

What you really need is a player willing to make in character decisions knowing as a player it's going to end poorly. i.e. You need someone willing to role play. Not every player is keen to embrace that badness happening to their character, but it's always nice when it happens.

 

[Older Beholder]

The biggest tragedy in DnD is a cancelled game session.

Also, any TPK is probably going to be considered a tragedy.