Drama!
My illustrator is weird. She tells this epic gaming story where the characters fight all campaign long against the very avatars of death and destruction. They struggle, they triumph, and finally they get to place their chosen king upon the sacred throne. And when at last they get royal butt in royal chair, said king reveals himself as the BBEG.
“You have labored long to bring me here,” says the now-omnipotent villain. “I am not ungrateful. What is your desire?”
And the campaign ends with the words, “I want to forget. I don’t want to remember any of this.” There’s a dark laugh, a flash of light, and then oblivion.
“It was amazing!” she insists. “That character had 5 ranks in Dark Fate, so we knew something terrible would happen. Two of the players actually started crying. I’ve never had a better moment in an RPG.”
Freaking masochist, right? But I’ve got to admit, the way she tells the story and the light that comes into her eyes at the memory, it does sound like a pretty special day around the gaming table. There’s a certain appeal to the tragic moment, that melodramatic twist that brings an emotional arc to its climax. Here’s the problem though. As cool as the moment can be, not everybody wants it.
Case in point, Laurel tried to give a player in one of her games a tragic moment all his own. She’d kidnapped the PC’s sister, then had the corresponding BBEG visit him in his dreams.
“Serve me,” says the villain, “Or your beloved sister dies.”
Now this particular PC had escaped from that particular villain in his back story, so it was certainly a poignant moment. And since this was a dream sequence, the character could only speak. Fighting wouldn’t work. And because, in the player’s mind, this was a game of epic heroism, he defied the villain.
“Never!” he says. “I will find a way to save her! And I will see you dead.”
That’s when Laurel killed the sister. She’d adapted her experiences in the “accidental King BBEG” session to her own GMing style, and believed that giving the player his own tragic moment was akin to giving him the spotlight. The player, on the other hand, wanted to be a big damn hero. He didn’t want drama. He wanted to win. And that means the dude was pissed. The GM had killed his pet NPC in a freaking dream sequence, and he couldn’t even do anything about it. What the hell!?
We wound up resorting to time travel to fix the plot point, but it remains for me the epitome of different playstyles butting heads. Lesson learned. Not everybody is a drama queen…or a drama wizard for that matter. So if any of you GMs out there want to give a player their moment in the spotlight, make sure you know what kind of spotlight they’re after.
So here’s the question of the day. Have you ever experienced a big tragic moment in an RPG? Was everyone happy with the outcome?
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Oh, I’ve had a few.
In one of them, it was Changeling: The Lost. In this game the player characters were kidnapped by Fae, taken to the realm of Arcadia, and basically tortured for the Fae’s fun and games until the stress transforms you into a Changeling. By the time you escape you realize that the Fae created an artificial being out of random items and a fragment of your soul, called a Fetch, to take your place so no one would come looking for or even miss you.
Dealing with your Fetch is a key element for every character. Do you kill them? Do you give up on your past life and try to move on? What if the Fetch is coming to kill you? Can you trust it? Is it even sane?
Turns out my character, an aspiring musician, eventually got captured when the PC’s Fetches worked together out of misguided self defense. My character got to meet his fetch, and saw him as a version of himself that was just another unwilling pawn in the Fae’s games. Neither of them actually wanted to kill their counterpart, so they spent the time talking to one another. In the years since my character’s disappearance, the Fetch couldn’t cut it as a musician, failed as a writer, and had suffered from depression. And the worst part? When my character broke free, that was when the Fetch became fully aware of what he was. Until then, he believed he was the real person. Now, he was a fake. A failure.
It was devastating. My character tried to console him. Tell him that they could live in harmony, Fae games be damned. But the Fetch wasn’t having it. In an effort to try and understand him, my character used a special power that lets you read emotions, to find out someone’s greatest desire.
And then the GM tells me that his greatest desire is to die.
My character cries. I cry. In a touching twist, the fetch tries to console my character. I needed to head to the bathroom so I could gather my composure. It was pretty intense for me, but on some level it was deeply satisfying and I’m glad I did it.
You cry…your character cries…the Handbook of Heroes guy cries…at work…pretends it was an eyelash…no one’s buying it….
I never got to play Changeling. We had one in a mixed game though. First scene of the campaign, my werewolf goes to rent a room in the Changeling’s Victorian bed and breakfast.
Werewolf: “I’ll take it! Just one questions though” *sniff sniff* “What are you?”
Changeling, affronted: “You can’t just ask someone what they are.”
I now think of changelings as mean girls.
To be fair (ha), that Changeling in question was one of the Fairest. If anyone from White Wolf are going to be mean girls it would be them.
I also learned to carefully choose who I bring the dramatic moments to, but with a different type of player: the beer-and-pretzels guy. I had a paladin in my last campaign that wrote a really detailed backstory involving searching out the warlord that killed his father. He put a lot of thought into this character, but wasn’t the strongest role-player. He mostly asked if stuff was evil and smacked it with his greatsword. We had plenty of talky players this was fine.
Anyway, I designed a session around the paladin’s story. Brought him face to face with the retired warlord, an old, repentant, and beaten man. The choice before him was obvious – hold him accountable for his sins, or show mercy? It could have been epic, if the player remembered his own story. He had no idea it was the warlord he had been searching for, even when it was spelled out plain as day. Other players were rolling knowledge history and reminding him that this was THE guy.
So, the lesson is this – match the level of customization and involvement you bring to what the players want.
One of the biggest paradigm shifts of my gaming career came with the discovery of this page:
https://sites.google.com/site/amagigames/the-what-i-like-glossary
I’d known intellectually that other people play games for different reasons than me, but it never really hit home until I saw all these funky ludology terms. Give the people what they want, not what you want. Seems simple when you spell it out, but in practice it’s surprisingly difficult to get around your own ideas of fun.
Yup! We had a whole campaign, in Glorantha, with RQ III rules, in which we fought Chaos, and went on several quests to be able to build a new temple for the Seven Mothers (basically the patron gods of our empire). As part of the last quest we had to pass a test, in which you had to give up something very valuable to and for your character, and me, being a bardic type, gave up my singing voice (meaning I could still talk, but my voice would now grate on ones nerves, and singing would be impossible). The other players gave similar stuff, so we all had heavy emotional commitments to this project, both as characters and as players. So the day of the Ceremonial opening arrives, all the dignitaries of the whole imperial province, both military, secular and theological, are there, and the new high priests steps up to the altar. Then and there the healer of our party casts some spell, and the whole temple erupts with Chaos creatures (Krasht Kids, I believe) who attack and eat the flower of that province, and the whole party too…. Turns out he was turned by Chaos in session two or three of the campaign, and was secretly plotting this the whole time… It was a grand finale, just not the way we imagined it, but fitting for the setting, and whole group thought it one of the best endings ever.
The Curse of Gottfried: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkLqAlIETkA
I love my Heroic Sacrifices, personally. I got a fantastic one with my curmudgeonly old Dwarf Sorcerer, who had taken up adventuring as a sort of bucket-list thing. He wanted to die gloriously, and since his children and their children and their children were all grown up, his wife was dead, and he’d already achieved everything else, he went out and fought monsters.
And that’s where the Immovable Rod and the significantly higher-CR-than-the-party Glass Worm came in.
Kilgal got swallowed, but his silly high (for an old geezer) Con let him stay alive and aware for that one. more. turn. Shove the Immovable Rod into the worm’s fleshy-bits and activate it as his last action before dissolving away, and the worm’s left thrashing around in pain as the rest of the party escapes.
I think that Immovable Rods kill more dragons than swords. That mess just invites gullet-diving.
GJ on the aged PC as well. It’s always nice when you’ve got more than plucky young action heroes in the group to round out the personalities.
Last year, my group’s favourite NPC (Who I believe I’ve mentioned before), a tiefling named Blade, got sacrificed as part of a ritual by the BBEG. He fell into a well and got taken over by a daemon, before walking home, hardly remembering anything. It was quite tragic, but made even worse when we got to a new town and the DM introduced an aasimar who was nicknamed Sir Reginald Schnozz. He was Blade’s polar opposite. Everyone hated him. It was quite the interesting story actually
I have the opposite problem: my DM never even glances at our backstories, and there are no spotlights. I would prefer the wrong spotlight to non.e
Well that’s lame. Has your GM explained why they don’t want to incorporate backstories? What did they say when you brought up the issue?
I think the issue you raise in your example is a really important one, and the cause of so much DM/player conflict. GMs assume that players are creating orphan or vaguely-defined PCs because they are “roll-players” who aren’t interested in story or roleplaying, when the actual reason is that they’re tired of seeing friends and family killed and the only way they have to stop that dross is to not let their characters care about anything in the first place.
And then conversely, a player may be offering the GM knives and then assume that the GM not stabbing the player with them means the GM isn’t interested in story, when the actual reason is that the GM is trying to give the player a chance to win and be a big damn hero.
Makes me wonder how many GMs are frustrating their players due to misreading the Golden Rule: In your example, Laurel “did unto another as she would have another do unto her”, gave her player the same sort of experience she had enjoyed as a player, but failed to take into account that the other didn’t want the same things she did.
A further thought (sorry about the double post): One of the things that comes up a few times in the White Wolf rulebooks is the importance of being able to draw lines: Because Chronicles of Darkness stories can touch on some very dark and traumatizing things, and because every person has different tolerances and buttons, it is important that players have the option to say in advance “these are the things I feel comfortable exploring, and these are the places I don’t want to go”, and have the GM listen. Similarly, if players are allowed (and explicitly told they are allowed) to declare certain parts of their backstory off-limits, to say “My character’s parents and siblings are not to be harmed”, or possibly “My character’s parents are not to be harmed without giving me a chance to save them“, it would do a lot to make certain players more comfortable with giving their characters parents and siblings and connections.