Maintaining the Horror Campaign – Player Death and You

A Total Player Kill, or TPK for short, is when something terrible happens in a roleplaying game, and everyone in the adventuring party dies.  Everyone.  Even the torchbearer, the pack mule and a peasant merchant passing by on a road outside the cave.  Tear up your character sheets and dump them in the trash.  This party’s over.

The more you roleplay, the more likely you are to bear witness to this devastating phenomenon.  It could be the result of a tragic accident.  For example, the players chose to insult the king of the kobolds, before discovering  the kobolds pay fealty to an elder black dragon.  It could be the result of a cosmic joke: the players are leaving a dungeon at the end of a campaign with arms overflowing with treasure, when they trigger a trap they avoided on the way in, dropping the ceiling and killing everyone.  It could be the result of a crazy string of unlucky die rolls, or the hammer dropped by a spiteful game master.  Whatever the reason, it’s rarely fun.  The best one can hope for is that no one’s insulted, and everyone is eager to create new characters.  The worst that can happen?  I’ve seen TPK turn to TFK: Total Friendship Kill.

Players invest time and energy in their characters.  Game Masters egg their players to craft diverse personalities with intriguing back stories to spin plots from.  The typical player will spend a couple morning commutes thinking about what kind of character they want to play, a couple hours reading potential abilities, an hour rolling up stats, and two months worth of adventures on Sunday afternoon, finding that character’s voice.  How would that player feel if their elf badger-ranger, Artibleu, took a wrong step, slid down a trap door and dumped onto a mindless acidic slime, dissolving into elf pudding.  Now let’s pretend that after the other players got a good laugh,  the entire corridor tipped, dumping the rest of the party into the pudding pit of PC/Player parting.

“It’s cool,” you say, “We’re adults.  And adults don’t take it personal when bad things happen to them.  They pick up the pieces and move on to the next thing.”  Fine.  It’s true.  Not everybody will be damaged by a TPK.  Roleplaying games are still games, after all.

The problem with this mindset is that it assumes maturity is preferable to childishness, which is true when you’re deciding whether you need to take out a second mortgage on your home, but isn’t always true when enjoying a game among friends.  It also asks players to be the exact type of person who would be least affected by a horror campaign.  It assumes an unwillingness to cede control of one’s emotions and a lack of investment between players and their characters.  If players aren’t worked up about their characters when they die, how can we expect them to be afraid when their character’s life is threatened?

Death is intrinsic to horror.  It’s a common primal motivation that most of the genre hinges on.  Certainly, a horror game can center on a terrible curse, or the loss of innocence.  But if the game master refuses to kill characters, then the players stop worrying for the life of their characters and you lose your opportunity to scare.  How do we resolve this dilemma?

Option One – Hinder Them

Death isn’t the only the penalty for poor decisions.  Instead of terminating the character, you could break them.  A lost fight might result in a broken sword arm.  A zombie’s bite could result in a wracking fever, matched with an unquenchable and unpredictable blood lust.  The manipulative master villain could choose to save a member of the party, sowing distrust among the players.  With time, the players will recognize these hindrances and fight hard to avoid them.  After all, death results in a new character.  Hindrances represent an unraveling of the player’s hard work.  This way, the players can maintain a connection to their characters, without sacrificing the fear of losing something important when encounters turn deadly.

Be careful when hindering players.  When used with moderation, knocking a player back a step or two can shake that player’s otherwise stable foundation.  If used excessively, though, hindrances can become a joke.  A soldier who can’t stop his hands from shaking can be a compelling character.  But a musician with one quarter her original legs and two thirds of her fingers, who suffers from debilitating bronchitis, and who’s been cursed to think that anyone that comes within 25 feet of her is a vampire, is a mess.  It might be fun to hobble around like this for a little while.  But after an hour or so, you’ll be happy to go back to playing a boring old forest mercenary.

When painted with a light brush, set backs can do great things to a game.  You may find your players look forward to the occasional hindrance you parcel out.  That’s because hindrances are challenges for players to overcome, and invite roleplaying opportunities.  After all, aren’t eye-patches supposed to be cool?  Sure it removes your depth perception, and puts a blind spot on one side of your face, but maybe you can use it to intimidate a guard.  And if that doesn’t work, maybe you can use the eye patch to seduce the guard, if he’s into that.

Option Two – Kill Your Darlings

You can’t hinder your players for every mistake they make, or the game will devolve into humor over horror.  And you can’t (often) kill the players’ characters and expect them to be committed to your game.  So how do you keep a sense of horror running from game to game?  You kill your darlings.  You don’t destroy your player’s playthings, you destroy your own playthings and wave the bloody remains in the players’ faces.  You kill the non-player characters.

To be an effective monster, you need a large stable of characters.  Characters with panache and flaws.  Populate your players’ world with people they  identify with in their own lives.  Spend whole adventures where the players are introduced to a diverse array of three-dimensional townsfolk.  Then perform unspeakable acts of cruelty.

Let’s create an example.  Gilda is a teenage girl who dresses in rags, and sells wildflowers in the town square.  The flowers come from a nearby field; the players could walk the road out of town and pick them themselves, if they wanted.  Buying the flowers from Gilda is clearly charity.  But, Gilda doesn’t waste her money.  In fact, she saves a pence of profit from each transaction so that some day she can buy an old mule and ride to a valley full of beautiful flowers.  Tulips, mostly, but there’s all kinds of pretty things out there.  Maybe, if she works real hard, she can put herself through wizard school.  She knows she’s being a little silly about it, but all she ever wanted since she was a little girl was to be a real wizard.

Got that image of a sweet harmless little girl with big dreams?  Good.  Now let’s slaughter her.

Later, in the same night the players meet her, Gilda hears snarling behind the barn she sleeps in.  Spooked by the noise, Gilda walks to the inn the adventurers are staying at, and throws a few pebbles at the window.  When an adventurer appears, she apologizes, and asks if she can sleep on the floor of the party’s room.  As she speaks, a pack of werewolves sprint through the street and tear down on Gilda.  Gilda runs away, shrieking, as lamps are lit in nearby houses.  The werewolves are too fast.  By the time the players get to the scene, the alpha wolf is on top of Gilda in the town fountain, while Gilda gesticulates wildly, gasping for air.  Three werewolves turn to the adventures, but the others are are focused on Gilda, waiting for the kill.

The situation is tense.  Gilda will die if the players don’t do something drastic.  Even if the adventurers convince the werewolves to focus on them, and somehow tag the alpha werewolf drowning Gilda, they still need to rescue a half-drowned Gilda, collapsed over the edge of the fountain.  Gilda could be taken as a hostage, or trammeled on through the fight.  It’s more likely Gilda will die in this scenario than live; a fact that should keep the players on the edge of their seats.  All this tension, and your players invested nothing.  What’s at stake is a portion of your world, that you created, and you are willing to destroy.  It might upset the players to see Gilda die, but they didn’t spend hours inventing and playing Gilda.  You did.  But after this encounter, nothing feels safe.  People can die.  The world is out to get you.

And this is good storytelling.  Many writers fall into the trap where they come up with fun and interesting characters, and they love them so much that they can’t bring themselves to do terrible things to them.  But characters—people—can’t change without something forcing them to be greater or worse than themselves.  Without conflict, there is no growth of character, and without growth, characters remain flat on the page, never lifting themselves up beyond their two-dimensional boundaries.

What if nothing bad ever happened to Gilda?  Gilda isn’t coming over our house for dinner on Wednesday nights, and she doesn’t share your video game hobby.  Gilda’s a character in a story.  If nothing dangerous or exciting happened to Gilda, we would stop caring about her.  In the game, she might be a source of information, or she could run small chores, but the players would only see Gilda through a lens of “What can she do for me.”  Over the course of the campaign, the players might see her a few more times, and she could have bought her mule, and it’s possible that she would have enough money to get herself into wizard school.  But if nothing bad happens to Gilda, then she can’t be ransomed by a marauding band of orcs when she wanders too far out of town, and she couldn’t have her life threatened by a pack of student wizards who don’t like Gilda, because she wasn’t born into their society.

Option Three – Sacrificial Lambs

If the idea of inventing compelling individuals with intriguing back stories, then marching them into the meat grinder makes you queasy, you don’t have to do it.  You can get your players to do it for you.

The first horror campaign I ever ran was Expedition to Castle Ravenloft for third edition Dungeons and Dragons.  There are plenty of interesting non-player characters in the city of Barovia, but I knew there would be a problem raising the player’s sympathy for them.  The players’ characters were coming from a very different world.  At the time, we used a product by the name of ‘D20 Past.  The players played Victorian Era characters on the Orient Express.  The train they rode on broke down while inside a mountain underpass, and, after the players walked through the mists of Ravenloft , they found themselves in what they perceived was a backwards Romanian village.

I wanted the players to act self-righteous toward the villagers, and be disgusted by a mountain farming community which hadn’t advanced past medieval times.  If that was going to be the case, then my players shouldn’t sympathize with the Barovians.  Maybe one or two, but not the fire sale worth of peasants that my ‘option two’ asks for.  I needed NPCs that the PCs could identify as a part of their own lives.  So I asked each player to make a sixth level character, and create a first level sidekick they could use via proxy.  I made no bones about it;  the sidekicks were going to die.

If you go this route, I can’t stress enough how important it is for your players understand what your angle is.  You don’t want a player to make a bruiser of a knight, but trap the real personality in the wry squire who trails behind his knight.  Killing the sidekick should not kill the core character.  The extra characters are lambs lead to the slaughter.

This tactic proved very successful in my campaign.  Not only did it help balance the game (The players made a lot of foppish characters, and D20 Past brings a very restrictive role to magic, compared to the Ravenloft campaign setting), but the players’ fates were each entwined to their own doomed character.  The players wanted to protect them, but the sidekicks were the target of cruel fate.  One by one they were ravaged by zombies, or turned into vampires.

Knowing the sidekicks were doomed to die also created its own source of tension.  In slasher movies, we know the majority of the characters are bound for a horrible end.  What we don’t know is when and how, and waiting for those two questions to resolve themselves is what keeps viewers in their seats.  The players don’t want to see their extraneous characters die, but can’t wait to see what happens when they do.

Return to Maintaining the Horror Campaign – Introduction: Why?!  Why?!!