Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 5809889" data-attributes="member: 8835">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[/spoiler]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.[/spoiler]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 joinI'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 levelsWhat 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.</blockquote>

Verification