Alternately titled: “Turning player loss into dramatic character death” but that sounds way less catchy.
The setup: I have a player for whom we coined the term “D&Dmo.” When he was present at the table, and I mean present and not just sitting there, he was fantastic. Bright, beautiful, an engaging roleplayer, a great tactician, a leader not only in the support sense of the word but in the sense that he really brought the group together. If I could have had that player there all the time, I would have been thrilled.
But he wasn’t there like that all the time. Hence the term–he swung from gung-ho to emo about…well, about lots of things, but D&D was where we interacted, so D&Dmo is what we called him when he went from happy to sullen, pouty, and frequently absent altogether. So when he backed out of my game (again. For the third time.), I decided to add a little finality to his decision. Usually he’d wander off for awhile and his character would merely be indisposed, captured, comatose, off on a solo adventure (all things that actually happened to put his character “on hold” until he decided he wanted to play again), but this time, when he first vaguely tweeted about breaking up with a D&D game, then sent the group an email saying he’d lost that lovin’ feeling again, a flurry of texting between the rest of us began, trying to figure out what to do.
You see, all the characters are pretty integral to the story we’re playing right now, but for reasons I won’t go into here (some of them embarrassingly personal), his PC had become the main character. He really brought the group together–tied together the plot the way a nice rug brings together a room. So for him to leave, and leave suddenly, left the remaining players lurching. His PC is married to one of the other PCs, he’s the lifelong bonded friend of another, he’s the catalyst for the sanity of a third PC, and so on. I wish it could have been as easy as “set it and forget it,” letting his character wander off a cliff to be conveniently replaced by a githzerai monk or somesuch, but unfortunately he was so woven into everything everyone had done up to that point that there was a serious option of abandoning the campaign altogether if we couldn’t come up with a solution.
But solve we did. Some of us were angrier than others for yet again being jerked around and wanted an especially violent and brutal end, others were more willing to let his character just quit the adventure for a life of peace and quiet back on the farm. Neither of these options really felt right, though, and eventually we settled on that iconic trope–The Sacrifice.
Holy crap. I just googled “trope martyr sacrifice save the world” and got a TVTrope entry that describes his character to a bloody T. Amazing.
Ok, let’s not go wikidrifting on TVTropes. I have a point to make here.
The point is this: character death due to player loss does not need to be boring or handwaved away. I mean, it can be, and if that’s what you want to do and move on, go for it, but for someone in a situation like myself where the campaign hinges on character development and plot, it’s a good idea to keep some options on hand.
For this cleric, he died nobly. His eulogy would read something like this: Jaon, devout of Pelor, protector of the realm, bringer of Hope and destroyer of darkness passed this day into Pelor’s eternal light, giving his life force to rend the veil of wickedness and sloth that blanketed the land. Let us celebrate his life and his sacrifice, and be especially grateful that without that weight of that spell upon us we may ever more rejoice in our bright future and long days in the sun.
What about you? Have you ever had to get rid of a PC you actually needed around and what happened?
Yep. A disruptive players and he became a sheriff of the local town, gradually worked into the background and then brought back with a group of npc to avenge a city another player torched. The look of shock on the groups face as the good npc and former PC arrived to arrest the party made it all worthwhile.
Something like this happened in my Deadlands round. A player got himself into a really bad situation due to his own fault and made things worse by shooting at people in full sight of pretty much everybody in Dodge City. Yes, he shot at vampires, but no-one knew that and so he was almost lynched and only the sheriff saved him…for a lawful hanging unfortunately.
That was the moment when the player threw down his dice, gathered up his stuff and left in a huff.
We played that situation for all it was worth, breaking the character out of jail, only to see him brought back to town dead by a posse. The whole situation created some interesting conflicts within the group (in-time) and I think the GM had every right to not save this character. The player is still pissed about it, though.
We once had a DM that really loved the concept of one of the characters and the possibilities it opened up for him to make stories.
As a result, a similiar thing happened to that listed above and that character (and thus that player) started to become so crucial to the game that “they” – both character and player started to dominate things to the point where we had a session cancelled because that one player didn’t show up.
The DM was told to stop playing favourites, and I did – yes, twas I – and the player was told that prima donnas and flakes are not welcome at our group.
After things changed, people started to realise that rather than that player being a master tactician and all round leader of men, it was merely that he was dominating every decision through force of will, and people had just slipped into placid follower roles. He also looked much better than he was because I, as DM, was making look that way cause his character was cool.
If you’re ever running a campaign, or even session, that begins to get dominated by one character or player, then something’s wrong and you should change it.
Even the best can slip into it so be careful. Watch the PAX 2011 live game. Was there any point in anyone else but Jim/Mike even being there?
One way idea to counter this tendency is to remind players that, just as with the difference between what the player can bench press and what the character can, there is also a difference between how intelligent, wise or charismatic the player is and the character is. There’s nothing wrong with tactics being discussed between players, but not in character unless it’s in keeping with them.
For example, many people say that skills should be role-played and not roled. Fine, but that would then mean my used-car selling buddy who plays a stoic ranger can sweet talk the pants off anyone while my rather socially awkward buddy who plays the charming half-ling fasttalker can’t.