TPK: Your Own Worst Enemy

"Precious and few are the moments that you and your own worst enemy share."

TPK is like a feature, something I'm going to return to semi-often on the blog. On TPK I'm going to discuss problems that might cause a pen and paper game to end early. Good games go bad for millions of reasons, and a lot of them are social. However, a lot of them are also super easy to avoid and only really require a certain amount of planning or a different mindset. I'm hoping pointing them out at least gets people to think differently about GMing, which is really what this first one requires. We're not covering the most COMMON problem, the dreaded "scheduling conflict", instead we're covering the most insidious: the GM tying his own hands.

I'll unpack that one for you momentarily. First, I have a little story. This is a story about a whale.

NO. 

This is a story about a hot-shot test pilot named Captain William. The 'Homeworld' game was set in the Star Wars universe and used Star Wars D20 for its system. SWD20 has many problems but, blessedly, with our game's relative lack of force users not a lot of those problems came up. Our SW games tended to crash and burn before players had their fill of their concepts, so a pilot was something we'd tend to see at least one of in a game. However, the Captain's player, Ray, added a slight twist to the concept: He was the Homeworld scientists personal guinea pig, testing anything from new technologies to weapons or ships. It was a pretty sweet twist to something that can get pretty boring, considering SWD20's space combat system was neat, but deadly and seldom used.

So we were making characters(I made a droid at first, if you must know) and rolling for stats since the GM likes it that way. 4D6, drop lowest, and you can rearrange your points if you'd like. Ray rolls a really badass set that I can't precisely remember, but what you need to know is that it had something like two eighteens, a sixteen...and a six.

Now, the GM, Dean, rightly believes that a character is made from their flaws. Be they mechanical, emotional, physical or social. So, when he sees the set, Dean jumps up on a hickory stump and says "If you keep that set, you're keeping that six.". This was partly because he felt William's other amazing stats needed some sort of balancing factor, and I'm sure he thought a 'six' would cause some interesting role-playing opportunities.

Now, what you know of Captain William, where would YOU put a six? INT? He needs that stat. STR? maybe, but dumping STR or CHA always feels like a bit of a copout. No, William sure sounds like he'd have a WIS of six, doesn't he? You'd have to have a low one to happily test a salve that makes your arms disappear by shifting them by a few microns into another dimension.

Well, it turned out Dean was right. Horribly, horribly right. Ray turned out really good at properly roleplaying a WIS of six, and had a blast doing it. This also means that the game would derail one or two times each night. The other PCs (A career-military diplomat and a brawling, Michelle Rodriguez-style repair specialist, among others) sort of vaguely disliked him, but he was so earnest and personable that he was never confronted or reigned in. At one point Dean even decided to test him with the world's worst bank-robbery plan, to see where Captain William would draw the line. It turned out he didn't HAVE one, and the robbery(which took up about half a session) nearly ended in William being killed or incarcerated.

William did retire, though. Eventually, even Ray felt bad and William sailed off into the Aether on the wings of an experimental ship. Too weird to live, too rare to die. His replacement was a Jedi, which should tell you something about what Dean was willing to accept in replacement.

My point is, this could've gone a lot worse. William was a wrecking ball swinging wildly around the game, and we all narrowly avoided destruction. It's a GM's job to challenge the players, to throw difficulties in their way and things for them to overcome. However, when you're designing these things, you have to think of how the PCs are going to react and what the 'challenge' is going to mean for you: Basically, I'm telling you to always look at the bottom line. Make sure every problem you throw their way is a problem they'll have to deal with instead of you. In this case, something that was meant to challenge or balance Captain William ended up simply being a constant distraction.

Consider a game of intrigue where the PCs aren't certain who they can trust, they're repeatedly double crossed and constantly on the run. That sounds like a great game and really does have the potential to be a lot of fun, but you'd better hope you don't need to introduce a new PC or an NPC they need to trust. Too much paranoia and it will grow completely impossible and the new PC will end up off in the corner playing Smash Bros or something.  Remember even Mulder had Mister X and the Lone Gunmen.

Think of how the PCs will react, and not about how you want or need them to react. Even something as simple as highlighting how a goblin village is full of women and children(as it would logically be) can cause the pacing of your game to dive into the toilet, giving the PCs a moral quandary when you'd rather the PCs just move on. Every group is different, and you've got to learn when to play your cards, and when to hold them for another time.