Can't Someone Else Do This?

I'm currently catching up on Blogs on Tape's backlog of excellent, well...blogs on tape. I haven't always been super tuned-in to the blogosphere, so there's plenty of quality stuff I've missed. I'm grateful for Blogs on Tape for giving me the opportunity to catch up on what I've missed (and reexperience old favorites) while I'm driving, cooking, playing Mariokart, etc.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to listen to the reading of Nick LS Whelan's Questgivers are Evil from his Paper and Pencils blog. In this post, Nick writes:

Your PCs are not an army, they’re a handful of dudes with weapons who are willing to kill stuff for money. Who hires people like that?

People who want you to do some bad shit. People who want to deny knowledge of something. People who want to blame “those outsiders.”

In other words, questgivers are evil.

There is pretty much NEVER going to be a long chain of dudes who want to hold your hand while you become an icon of heroic heroism and noble nobility, all while making sure your endeavors remain profitable.

Accepting a quest should mean that you’re about to do some shady ass shit that will probably hurt some good people.

I really like this conclusion. It doesn't make a lot of sense that people (whether they be commoners, nobility, or the merchant class) would turn to crazy, heavily armed outsider mercenary warriors and mysterious sorcerers to solve their local problems. Commoners would expect their rulers to protect them. The nobility presumably have some sworn vassals or other means of asserting their authority, which they would also use to keep the goblins away from the homesteads at night. The merchant class's resources are more limited, but they would likely appeal to the authorities with their problems as well, rather than turn to unknown elements.

I don't necessarily think that questgivers should be Evil. I like to occasionally sprinkle an Evil questgiver into my campaigns. A wizard who offers boatloads of gold to any adventurers willing to butcher a nest of pegasi and steal their eggs for his weird experiments offers a hook for Evil characters, a dilemma for Neutral ones, and an inverse hook for Good ones - "We have to take out that wizard!" The occasional questgiver who willfully gets the player characters into trouble to accomplish their own insidious ends adds some spice to an otherwise textbook campaign - but only if used sparingly.

If all questgivers are Evil (or at least, all the ones offering money are), then players might simply stop doing quests (at least, not for the gold). This might be a good thing, as the players will learn to start doing things out of the Goodness of their hearts, rather than due to the lightness of their purses, and their characters will become true heroes in so doing. Alternatively, they can dance with the devil, getting in trouble from one settlement to the next, suspecting every patron of ulterior motives, getting the gold, burning bridges, and escaping just before the other shoe drops.

That does actually sound kind of fun. D&D should be more like a picaresque - the player characters are Cugel the Clever or Larry David-like protagonists (not heroes), who do things for their own benefit, alienating others and either getting their comeuppance or causing some hapless associate to take the blame instead. But that's not what I'm arguing for here.

What I'm coming to find that I prefer in my own games is instead this: the authorities - or those in power in the setting - are either Evil, incompetent, indifferent, or powerless. People in these tight-knit communities turn to strangers for help because their rulers or would-be protectors either actively prey upon them, approach the communities' problems ineffectively, don't care about them, or lack the means to address them directly.

Perhaps the rulers are Evil, motivated solely by greed or domination. Maybe the government, as it exists, is in a state of decline or negligent decadence. The bureaucracy functions poorly or not at all. The rulers are not interested in doing good work or getting things done. Their hands are tied by distant wars. Their ideology is one of self-reliance and hands-off rulership. The government is physically far away and unable to project power - which works especially well in a typical "frontier" campaign setting.

This also solves the issue that I refer to as "exceptional individual demographics". Surely, the 1st-level player characters are not the only exceptional individuals in the setting, or else where do replacement player characters and henchmen come from? Who trained the fighter, tutored the wizard, or initiated the cleric? Who rules the strongholds, churches, and thieves' guilds? My general rule is that 1% of people in the setting are such individuals with class levels. Most of them are low level, but 5% are very high level. Why don't these people solve the setting's problems?

Because they're Evil, or indifferent (it would probably be wrong to characterize 20th-level NPCs as incompetent or powerless). They may have bigger fish to fry or they may simply not care.

The crux of the issue is that the local power structure - and powerful individuals in the setting - are flawed in some critical way, unable or unwilling to affect change or help regular people. This allows for a variety of scenario set ups. The government and powerful NPCs may be antagonists, or allies with limited accessibility/utility. They may be accustomed to employing mercenaries and regularly post rewards for work that needs doing. The merchant class may be the ones driving progress, or communities may pool resources to attract entrepreneurial adventurer types. 

Of course, on occasion the questgiver is or should be Evil, but it is this general, dominating zeitgeist of anarchy, indifference, or self-interest which allows those Evildoers to flourish, and to recruit stooges (the player characters and/or their rivals and enemies) to do their dirty work and to take the fall.

When the Players Don't Care

Sometimes, the players just don't care to do something. They may have other priorities, the quest may not sound interesting to them, the reward may not be compelling enough, the patron may be too suspicious, or the players may simply be too afraid to fight the dragon. This is totally fine. The game is about players making choices, and while those choices should always have consequences, it's not exactly fun gaming for the fictional player characters and the setting to be punished over and over again because the real-world players simply weren't interested in the hook. 

Some hooks land with some groups, players, and characters, and some don't. It's why I throw out as many hooks as I can reasonably prep scenarios for. Eventually, something will interest them, and I can prep the next volley of hooks while they're busy pursuing the one they're currently invested in.

But what happens to the other scenarios? I just said that the powers-that-be in the setting are unwilling or unable to do anything about these problems, so don't they just get worse?

Maybe. The players have chosen to leave it to fate. I like to use a simple 2d6 roll to determine what happens when a scenario is neglected:

• On a 2 or 3, the worst possible thing has happened. Another group of adventurers or the local ruler has finally gotten around to intervening, with disastrous results. The source of the problem has triumphed and strengthened, and is retaliating in some way. If the local power structure is Evil, perhaps they have resolved the scenario in a way which strengthens them instead. The Evil sorcerer-king has aligned with the orc warband and is now using them to enact their next nefarious scheme.
• On a 4 or 5, a setback has occurred. Someone tried to do something about the problem and failed, and now the problem is worse in some minor way. Adventurers tried to defeat the necromancer, but died, and now the necromancer's dungeon is more dangerous (guarded by the reanimated corpses of said adventurers). The goblins are emboldened by their victory, and now are raiding homesteads closer to the local settlement.
• On a 6, 7, or 8, the status quo is maintained. No meaningful action has been taken towards resolving the scenario.
• On 9 or 10, something good has happened. The local rulers have finally gotten around to sending soldiers to guard the town against the nearby gnoll stronghold, or, another group of adventurers made a foray against the gnolls and managed to clear out a few rooms before retreating. The scenario is now easier, should the players choose to pursue it.
• On an 11 or 12, the problem has been resolved in the best possible way for the setting (though this might not benefit the characters). A rival band of adventurers have solved the problem, and are hailed as heroes. The player characters have to listen to everyone constantly talk about how brave and strong these other heroes are.

On Total Party Kills

Total Party Kills are a funny thing in Dungeons & Dragons. The "killer Dungeon Master" is a myth and a trope as old as the game itself, originating in the earliest days of D&D when the game was more lethal and DMs were maybe more adversarial, and becoming popularized in the imagination of the play culture due to internet discussions and, eventually, memes. 

DMs love to lean into the trope too, in spirit, if not in practice. If you were to form your conception of D&D based purely on the "dndmemes" subreddit, you'd probably think that every DM was out to get the player characters and that PCs were dying left and right in every session and campaign. DMs are constantly excitedly talking about the next way they're going to "get" their players' characters, yet stories of actual TPKs treat them as some monumental, rare, unforeseen, and often unfortunate outcome. 

After all, a TPK means the game is over.

Right?

"Dead Adventurer" miniatures from Tiny Furniture

The popularity of 5th edition D&D and associated actual plays like Critical Role has polarized the player base on the topic of TPKs. After all, D&D is a game about telling a "story" about heroic characters who overcome the odds to vanquish evil and save the realm, and they can't do that if they're dead.

Right?

(As an aside, I don't think that this is what D&D is "about", and it certainly isn't the assumption in my games, but it does seem to be the popular way for modern players to approach D&D and 5e in particular.)

This "to TPK or not to TPK" discussion is also roughly as old as the hobby itself. Gary Gygax wrote the following in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1st edition) Dungeon Master's Guide (Conducting the Game, page 110):

Interestingly, this passage draws a distinction between PCs who "die through no fault of [the player's] own" and those who die because the player has "done something stupid" or "not taken precautions".

It's also worth noting that the idea of story-focused campaigns in which PCs more or less have "plot armor" is at least as old as AD&D 2nd edition's Dragonlance modules, in which the players control characters from the novels who are unable to die for story reasons. While these modules may have started the trend towards TSR's and Wizards of the Coast's D&D adventures being "story"-focused, I still feel that the 5e play culture is uniquely occupied with the preconceived notion of "story", even if this tendency is present to some extent in all fantasy TTRPG players due to the outsized influence of fantasy epics like The Lord of the Rings (which is not necessarily the type of fiction D&D was originally attempting to ape, hobbits and balrogs aside).

Total Party Defeat and Campaign Collapse

Although TPK stands for "Total Party Kill", suggesting that all PCs are dead, it's worth it to discuss Total Party Defeats as well. A TPD is when the PCs are soundly defeated in combat but not necessarily killed. PCs always have the option of subduing rather than killing monsters and nonplayer characters, and that's a two-way street. TPD'd characters might be imprisoned, ransomed, robbed, or put into any number of detrimental positions depending on the monster or NPC's goals. There are other TPD conditions as well, which don't necessarily result in direct harm to the PCs, such as the villain achieving some goal - killing a key NPC or securing a powerful magic item. These conditions don't end the game. Why should a TPK?

I can't think of any time that I've TPK'd my players, but I can think of a few TPDs. On one occasion, the PCs were double-crossed by a cambion and a rival party of adventurers. Ambushed at their camp while resting after a harrowing fight with plague-ridden demons, two PCs were killed, two fled, and the fifth was taken prisoner. On another occasion, three were petrified by beholders while three barely escaped. In a different campaign, the PCs fell to infighting over a magic item.

Only the latter ended in a Total Campaign Collapse, which was because the in-game defeat was so fractious for the real-world players that we felt the only way to continue playing was to start something fresh (the perils of immature, adolescent gaming). On the other two occasions, the party regrouped and liberated, resurrected, and unpetrified their companions and eventually overcame the enemies that defeated them.

Well that's all well and good, but the PCs can't exactly do all that if they're all actually TPK'd, so surely the campaign must end in a TCC.

Right?

Total Communication Failure

There has been some consternation as to whether a TPK is a failure of the DM or of the players. It can be one or the other or both, but doesn't have to be either. There is such a thing as good DMing and good play. 

A good DM provides their players with information to make choices. As it relates to TPKs, this information is mainly concerning threat level. In an "old-school" game, threat level is usually consistently determined by the level of the dungeon the players are exploring, whereas the wilderness's danger is more unpredictable due to the nature of random encounters. In more linear games (and often, adventure modules), players can usually trust that as long as they are doing what they're "supposed to do", the threat level will be appropriate for their characters. 

This is more challenging in a sandbox game, where areas of varying danger will be scattered about somewhat randomly. Occasionally, threats will be telegraphed by some other means, such as by having distinct regions which are obviously more or less dangerous, or by having more dangerous areas located further from civilization. A good DM will make the players aware of these game assumptions or rules of thumb. In a more random sandbox, a good DM will use rumors and other delivery methods to convey information about threats to the players.

Good players use information about threats to make wise decisions, whether by taking game assumptions into consideration or by making an effort to gather in-game information before embarking on a given adventure. They will use their own judgment to determine whether to attempt to explore the next level of the dungeon or venture out into the wilderness, engage in "side quests" before advancing the "story", travel to the next, more dangerous region, or choose to embark upon either the adventure where they'll be fighting goblins or the adventure where they'll be fighting ogres.

A failure by the DM is a failure to convey information. A failure by players is a failure to make decisions that correctly take that information into account.

Total Imagination Failure

There is an idea that a TPK is due to a failure of imagination on the DM's part - every monster or NPC should have a motivation other than killing the party, so if the PCs are defeated, they always have a chance to live another day and fight again. But sometimes monsters are just monsters - the dragon's motivation might be simply to eat someone (or four-to-six someones); the undead abhor life and seek to snuff it out at every opportunity; the ooze just dissolves things.

I opt to take the choice out of my hands by determining monster and NPC motivations somewhat randomly, depending on alignment, reaction rolls, and random tables to determine personality traits, ideals, bonds, flaws, and the like. Whether my monsters and NPCs fight to kill, subdue, or achieve some other end isn't strictly up to my imagination, but some combination of imagination and randomization.

In the same vein, a TPK could be a failure of imagination on the players' part - they never imagined the possibility of fleeing, for example.

The true failure of imagination is the failure to imagine what comes after the TPK.

In a typical D&D game, the afterlife is a real and somewhat tangible thing. Depending on the setting, the PCs' souls are whisked away to some other plane of existence, where they may or may not maintain agency, and where further adventures are surely possible. 

In my recently-concluded 5e game, I planned for a true TPK from the outset. In the event of a TPK, each character would be spirited away to an Outer Plane corresponding to their alignment - the Chaotic Good barbarian would find themselves in the Beastlands, the Chaotic Neutral wizard in Limbo, the Lawful Evil ranger in Gehenna, the Lawful Neutral paladin in Acheron, the Neutral Evil warlock a lemure in Hell, and the Neutral Good bard in Elysium. They would have their work cut out for them if they intended to traverse the Great Wheel or head to Sigil to regroup, but adventure would await them wherever they went, and with good play there was always the possibility of returning to the mortal realm. We never got there, but I was ready for it if we did.

As always, DM and player communication and collaboration is key. If the goal is to play a story-focused game with high narrative stakes in which character death will seriously derail the campaign and cause it to collapse, or the DM wants to try their hand at being the "killer DM" or run a Tomb of Horrors-style adventure, those expectations should be communicated at the beginning of the campaign. Both DM and players should be on the same page as to whether the PCs are destined heroes or fodder. If a TPK does occur, it warrants a discussion between both parties as to whether the game should continue in one manner or another, either with the same characters in a new situation, new characters in the same setting, a new setting, or a new game system entirely.

On Epilogues, Baldur's Gate 3, and "Session Omega"

Baldur's Gate 3 has been out for a few months by now, so many people have played through it at least once (a lot of people had somehow beaten it within days of it coming out, and I'm now in the third act of my second playthrough).

It's a great game - maybe the game of the year, and one of the better RPGs in recent memory. Larian managed to take 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons's tabletop engine and put it into a video game largely successfully (there are a few weird changes I don't like, but by and large they are improvements on the system). People on the internet have hailed it as either "Everything that's good about D&D" or lambasted it as "Everything that's wrong about D&D", so...welcome to D&D discourse!

The game's first act is a near-perfect video game encapsulation of a D&D sandbox, where it feels like you can go anywhere and do things in a variety of ways, and like a good Dungeon Master, the game always seems to be prepared regardless of your approach. The second act is a bit more linear, same-y, and dreary, like a DM forcing you to play Curse of Strahd, but the game is good enough at recreating the power fantasy of mid-level D&D that it's still highly enjoyable.

Then, it kind of gets messy. The companions the players has traveled with and learned to love and care about throughout the first two chapters of the game cease to have anything interesting to say about pretty much anything (or so I've heard - I intensely dislike Larian's nonplayer character companions and decided in early access I'd be playing with a custom party instead). The characters fight the big bad and the player chooses to save the world or rule the world or whatever and the game abruptly ends.

Does anything seem missing?

Oh, right.

To give Larian credit, apparently they are working on adding epilogues in a coming patch, so we'll check in on that later and see how they do.

I started playing AD&D 2e in elementary school, and from then until some time in high school, neither me nor my friends who DM'ed never really knew what we were doing. We had seen Lord of the Rings and they had read Dragonlance, so those were essentially our group's Appendix N. We tried, but, in retrospect, I don't think we were playing the sort of game that D&D is meant to be. So when I played Baldur's Gate and its sequel in high school, in a lot of ways it felt like my first real D&D experience. Now, when I'm not sure how something in my games should "feel", Baldur's Gate is one of my foremost touchstones (along with Jack Vance, Conan, Fritz Leiber, and the rest of the typical Appendix N fare).

"Tier 1", as it's known in 5e, is exploring the Sword Coast, discovering and solving local problems like the Nashkel Mines and the Iron Crisis, and trying not to die along the way. Tier 2 is when you make it to the big city and uncover the sinister plot which will plunge the region into war unless its thwarted. By Tier 3, the player is a full-fledged hero of the realm - they may draw the attention of powerful enemies and go toe-to-toe with reality-shaping spellcasters. In Tier 4, they fight an existential battle which shapes the cosmos itself, and cement their legacy, for better or worse.

Then, there's the epilogue. It just a single slide of text that tells the player what became of their companions after those adventures which are within the scope of the campaign.

Session Omega

Every few sessions or so - usually towards the end of the current quest or adventure - I'm talking to my players about what they want to do next, or if they want to do anything at all. I'm either trying to figure out what to prepare for them, or I'm trying to determine if they're ready to be done with the game. My most recent game went to 20th-level and beyond (using epic boons, ability score improvements up to 30, feats, and multiclassing for advancement beyond 20th-level), but for me, the game ends at any point when the players decide they are done, at any level.

When we all agree that we're done, we talk about what becomes of the characters. If we need to, we might schedule an entire "session" just to do so - sort of the opposite of a Session 0. Let's call it "Session Omega".

The point of this is to reach a satisfying end for the characters without needing to work it into the game itself. Of course, if a player wants their character to achieve something, they are encouraged to take the steps to do it in-game, but sometimes everyone agrees that the game is over, even though some of the characters might have unfinished business.

An example of this was the party's kobold warlock, who sold their soul to a devil early in the game to be brought back from a more-or-less TPK. After another near brush with death, it occurred to this character that if they died, they would likely be stuck in Hell as a lemure, as the devil owned their soul, and the devil's contractual obligations (bringing them back to life that one time and investing them with warlock powers) would be fulfilled. To avoid this, the warlock began conspiring to become a lich, to sequester their soul away in a phylactery so that the devil couldn't claim it. I laid out a process for the warlock to accomplish this, and over the next ten levels or so, they did it. 

The same character also wanted to become the new kobold god of death, but the characters were level 20 by that time and other players had things they wanted to do with their characters. Becoming the kobold god of death was out of the scope of the campaign, but the character's story didn't feel complete until that issue was resolved.

During the campaign's "Session Omega", we talked through the "epilogues" of each character until we were satisfied that their stories were done. The kobold lich became the god of death. The eldritch knight and aspiring necromancer became their apprentice. The barbarian opened an adventurer's guild and trained the next crop of young adventurers, becoming a local legend and protector of the campaign's main city. The paladin led an army of fire giants and ghouls in a campaign against the Draconic Principalities and conquered them (and was a irresponsible ruler who did little besides starting wars). The wizard became the center of a fungoid hivemind which stretched across the world, making him omnipotent (imagine A Song of Ice and Fire's Three-Eyed Raven). The lizardman found the tarrasque in hibernation, killed it, ate it, gestated for a millenia, and became the new tarrasque, then emerged from hibernation and had to be put down by the members of the party who were still active in the world at that time.

Part of this feels wrong in some way. The story of a character is what they accomplish in-game - if you didn't do it in the game, you can't say you did it. But we all agreed - the game was over. And I love epilogues. If we had all the time in the world, and we all agreed that we wanted to spend it playing this one campaign, I'm confident that we could play out all of these scenarios.

There's another utility to these epilogues, which is to develop the DM's setting and enrich the next campaign there. A player in a future campaign can play a death cleric who worships the kobold player's character, or they might be an adventurer trained by the barbarian's guild. A future campaign could center on the problems caused by the inept rulership of the paladin conqueror. A future Circle of Spores druid could easily tie back to the fungus wizard, or the wizard could serve as the patron to a warlock (using a subclass I may or may not be working on). The lizardfolk-turned-tarrasque could be a Tier 4 encounter for a future campaign, or the start of a campaign could be framed around the emergence of the tarrasque and the ruin that the ensuing battle causes in the world.

In short, campaigns are always going to end. If the DM and players know a campaign is going to end, they should try to end it right. Epilogues give the DM and players closure, enhance the setting, and enrich future campaigns.