It’s a sad fact of playing RPGs that if you make a storyline dependent on a particular character, they’ll almost inevitably die. So how do you recover from a round of bad rolls that sees a character suddenly at -43 hit points?
First of all, this can really throw you. So don’t be afraid to be honest with your players and say “look, I didn’t see that coming and it’s going to disrupt the game a bit. Does everyone want to grab snacks/ have a smoke/ give me a few minutes to work around it?” They’ll understand that sometimes this just happens, and isn’t planned. Next, have some backup options. Does the prophecy say something like “the person carrying the sword of BLAH will defeat the Demon King”, rather than “this specific person will defeat the Demon King”? This way, someone can pick up that sword and carry on in their wake. Or if it’s just a mission, like “liberate my homeland”, you might have slightly more problems, unless a younger sibling or distant cousin wants to pick up where the left off? You can always introduce new characters- consider how the plot would react with them gone. If you have a magic prophecy, does a “new” candidate get introduced from the wings, like the Potential Slayers from Buffy. If someone then gets resurrected, how does the prophecy cope with two agents? (Does one of them then turn evil?) Another option is to keep them “alive” but defeated in another way- permanently injured, disfigured, captured, and so on. You want failing (and being “killed”) to still have a consequence, though, so this can be harder. Imagine if it was a TV series though- if one of the characters is killed... where does the storyline go? (Originally posted on Game Masters Stash on 4 March 2019) Comments are closed.
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AuthorI'm Luke. He/him pronouns. Archives
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