Playing Doomed Characters

#1

I have lately been running a lot of @jesseross’s Trophy. It’s a game about a group of treasure-seekers going on an expedition to the heart of a forest that does not want them there. The game focuses heavily on psychological horror and the fact that the characters are doomed. By the end, they are either dead or irreparably broken.

I talked about my experience with the game here at 03:32:21:

What I find most fascinating about Trophy is how knowing the players are doomed affects the way you play them. In my experience with it, players really lean into playing up the paranoia, the betrayal, the basic brokenness of the characters precisely because they know the characters are doomed. The game makes space for that kind of fun, essentially. (Trophy is a very bleak game, to put it mildly.)

A few things:

  1. I’m curious to hear about other games that start with the players knowing the characters are doomed.
  2. How does knowing the characters are doomed affect the way you play?
  3. I find this sort of thing to be very enjoyable—it’s my kind of fun—but I’m curious to hear how you feel, generally, about playing in that kind of bleak space.

If anyone wants to check out Trophy, the core game is available in Codex - Dark 2, which can be found here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/268198/Codex--Dark-2-Dec-2018?term=codex+dark+2

New Trophy add-ons come out every month in Codex.

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#2

Call of Cthulhu was the first RPG I played where the default assumption is that the characters are doomed. (Its many “sequels,” like tremulus and Cthulhu Dark, also include this assumption.) That led to a lifelong enjoyment of RPGs where the characters are explicitly doomed, or at least highly likely to be doomed: The Final Girl, Hunter: The Reckoning (this one could probably be argued, but in my experience it fits), A Guide to American Soap Carving, Seppuku: Fury of the Samurai, Ten Candles, and others.

I love playing doomed characters! It gets everyone on the same page right away, which is always useful. It’s liberating, because it flies in the face of the trad RPG assumption that you want your character to thrive and survive. Since that’s also a default approach to living and being human, it’s oddly relaxing to set out to do the opposite of what I do in real life – and to make that doom, when it comes, as entertaining as possible.

It also encourages everyone at the table to collaborate on pacing the session, which I dig. Everyone knows the rough arc of the session, and can decide – more or less – at which point in it they want their personal doom to conclude.

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#3

Those are all great points. The Cthulhu Dark mention is particularly appropriate here, since Trophy is inspired, in-part, by that game.

The Final Girl is interesting. Those characters are doomed, but the space that gets created is really, really different. Knowing those characters are doomed makes you want to play up what raunchy idiots they are, so that when they are finally offed, it feels good. I also think it’s interesting that one of those characters may not be doomed, and the way the players start to bond with the characters they want to see survive leads to some really interesting gameplay.

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#4

One of the things I love about Cryptomancer, that a lot of people criticized it for, is that the player characters will inevitably fall victim to the setting’s extra-national surveillance apparatus. It’s not a question of whether the Risk Eaters will get you, but when.

In Cryptomancer this creates an interesting tension. In most situations, you can turn your failed rolls into successes by accumulating Risk. But the more Risk the group gets, the more likely the Risk Eaters are to descend. So, you’re constantly measuring short term success vs long term survival.

Cryptomancer’s also interesting because the doom is tracked for, and eventually comes down upon, the entire group rather than by individual character.

As a player, I like doom when it’s, like, a distant thing that I can see coming. When it descends abruptly, out of the blue I find it kind of jarring and off putting. Big reason why I’m not a fan of funnel adventures.

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#5

Being a product of the English school system of a certain age, to this day I still have the scene from Educating Rita discussing tragedy vs. the tragic embedded in my brain:

I think this definitely applies to my taste for doomed/tragic characters in RPGs. I really enjoy playing flawed characters, characters put in impossible positions, characters who are heading towards doom, or who just cosmically deserve doom. And I really like systems that provide that or lean in that direction: Trophy is incredibly upfront about it, but I also really like the way Night Witches and The Watch have those tragic beats coded into the game - Marks in the former, and the Jaded moves in the latter. (The Jaded moves are really tasty, as you can literally accelerate your tragic end by the choices you make in the game). And sure, there’s a fair bit of “padding” between the character and the doom in these games, but I think just knowing how finite the character’s story is changes the feel of it.

Conversely, I think there are some games - say, Call of Cthulhu or playing Tomb of Horrors in D&D - that are “merely tragic”. The game itself doesn’t really inculcate the same sense of doom I don’t think. Sure, there’s always a high chance your character might die or otherwise suffer - due to statistical probabilities or not realising something was a “gotcha” before walking into it - but this outcome is largely arbitrary. And arbitrariness is antithetical to tragedy.

I think my favourite thing in the horror stories I enjoy - and other tragedies - is the anticipation when you start to work out what is going on, and in doing so know how it is going to end, and are just waiting for it to happen. (Also John Irving does this really well in his stories). There’s just that particular sense of tight-chested tension I get from stories in this mould - the recent Haunting of Hill House was a perfect example. And to get that sort of dread from an RPG, I think you need to be complicit in it. And - shameless brown-nosing alert - it’s what I really love about the Janus Mask in The Between. You, as a player, have to come up with the awful things you’ve done in your past that have led you to this point (or will do in the future). And once that is all in place - that’s it, unless you’re exceptionally lucky, your story is probably going to reach its tragic end.

On a less intense scale, it’s one of the things I always really liked about playing L5R - or at least, playing it with all the GMs and players I have. The flaws you pick up, and just the general decisions you make in play, will tend to come back and haunt you. But in a way that definitely skews towards tragedy. You’re not necessarily as inherently doomed as, say, playing an investigator in Cthulhu. But the bad things that do happen will probably be because of choices you’ve made - and the society you operate in - rather than just because you’re playing a game that is designed to make long-term success impossible.

I think there’s definitely a sense of freedom in playing a character you know is doomed. I mean, in short-term games, there’s always the “stolen cars” impetus anyway, which is also fun! But there’s something about knowing you will, or are likely, meet a tragic end that makes playing nastier characters more fun for me. Having those flaws, playing to them, and enjoying the ride, knowing where you’re likely to get off.

I think it is important that everyone is on the same page about games with this sort of tone, though - or where this sort of tone is possible. And I have an odd sort of corollary effect here. While I do like games where your characters are, or may be, doomed, I don’t like games that are just devoid of hope. So a lot of the shit-and-mud fantasy end of things really turns me off, because ultimately if you;re playing in an entirely corrupt world where there is no hope in anything changing… I just don’t care anymore? I think the doom has to be personal to be fun. It has to speak to the character, rather than being arbitrary and generic.

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#6

Playing doomed, or doomed-adjacent characters is also very much my jam. So much so that it takes conscious effort to de-doom as a player. This probably shines through in my designs.

Carolina Death Crawl is quasi-competitive, and one player “wins” by surviving, but you go in knowing that you are, pretty much, doomed. Played as intended, the math in Night Witches is not your friend. The colony in Durance usually doesn’t have a happy ending. Grey Ranks is the exception to this trend, because the game itself is so unrelentingly awful that I felt it was important to give players some agency, so your little partisan is never doomed unless you crave the doom.

Many, many short-form larps reach for the quick, easy emotional punch of certain doom. There’s even a name for this sort of bleak, intense game - “dying in cold water” games. It’s a bit facile at this point and I think there are better ways of getting the same intensity and investment in larp. I still like it for tabletop and I’m not sure why exactly.

I think I like doom because it is liberating - with the character’s arc circumscribed, you can play hard toward interesting and satisfying story beats and character goals, knowing the rest will take care of itself. There’s always a satisfying tragedy at the end but you don’t have to worry too much about engineering it. I also like it because it provides an actual end, which many games just don’t.

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#7

The game that fascinates me in this regard is Ten Candles. All the players know that all of their characters will die at the end. There is no “gotcha” about that. What is interesting is that the game explicitly instructs the players to portray their characters as having hope as believing that they might survive.

I think it is this latter piece - knowing your character is going to die but playing as though they think they aren’t - is the reason the end of the game is so powerful. Somehow the cognitive dissonance the players have been having to deal with ends and it is a real gut-punch emotionally. It is really quite fascinating.

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#8

Oh yeah, Carolina Death Crawl is awesome for this too! Really enjoy that game :sweat_smile: And yeah, I’d agree that despite the unrelenting horror I wouldn’t consider the characters in Grey Ranks to be doomed either. Likely to meet a terrible end, sure, but there’s always a chance they won’t. Fighting for a doomed cause, but with hope still alive in their hearts.

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#9

I also enjoy doomed characters in games for all the reasons you suggest. I think that it frees players from wanting to ‘protect’ their characters and allows a different story to emerge. It reminds me a lot of a quote from Elin Dalstal which epitomises how I like to play characters - ‘play vulnerable’. Because stories are far more interesting when you stop trying to protect your character.

But I also think that it allows players to think about the ending they want for their character. Sure they are doomed, but will they sacrifice themselves nobly, die in cowardice, die protecting someone or be the last person standing who still cannot escape. The ending can be incredibly satisfying if you have the opportunity to think about it in advance - satisfying in a way that rarely happens if you are in ‘protection-mode’.

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#10

I enjoy the ‘doomed character’ idea. As my group transitioned from trad to more indie games, there’s definitely been a collective shift.
In Tremulus half the group narrated their characters’ definite or implied demise in their epilogues as it felt like an apt close to the story. I ran a nWoD campaign years ago where one player created a character specifically to die and get replaced with another as the logistics of the established fiction meant he couldn’t play the replacement character at the start of the story. It was interesting seeing him play in a way which was completely normal, but with the open invite for me as GM to do whatever to get him offscreen when the time was right.

Games with it baked in (Final Girl, Cthulhu Dark, Dread) are good for encouraging this kind of play in the normal settings. I know one of my players says that he likes to run any character as if they’re in a one-shot. He’s my little chaos engine.

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#11

This actually gives me a lot of inspiration for the RPG I’m currently designing. Even if you’re not doomed per se it’s definitely designed to have a high player turnover as you’re playing as hapless minions bound to die in the service of the dark one.

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#12

One of the many, many reasons a I love the Watch is the feeling of mortality and creeping doom. Even the mechanic of giving Euologies is just sublime. When it’s built into the fabric of the game and players lean into it.

Moving through the creeping fall into the shadows grip and the increasingly overwhelming challenges of the war. The scars of sacrifice and the doom are beautiful notes to hit.

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#13

I feel like I should have something to say on this subject :slight_smile: although only one of my games has absolutely doomed characters (Midnight at the Oasis’s characters probably won’t change during the game but, uh, take it from me, some figure out a way later on.)

I think a great deal of the tension in Red Carnations comes from knowing that a) this will not end well and b) not knowing who will die even when you know that half of the characters will. And I’ve seen how people line up for that doom–you can often get a sense of who is not going to make it for at least some of the characters, although there’s always room for people to make a sudden decision right at the end.

And of course, part of the design is intentionally that you have to choose who dies but that does not save you; it’s entirely possible that random chance will grimly reap more of the characters. As a tensioning device, this works fine and keeps things tight right up to the end. (Have I mentioned that I’m looking for a trauma reader and some formal derolling exercises for the final text?)

All that said: I’ve seen some wonderful tragedy in Carnations; I’ve got a couple of character deaths that I portrayed and were gut-kickers. But without a doubt the most poignant, plot-effective, and tragic death happened in the (in)famous third session I facilitated at Dexcon 2018. On the last scene of Act II, Louise’s player decided to have Louise be killed randomly, out of the blue, by a falling artillery shell. And suddenly the game slanted sharply into darkness; the montage scenes were mostly reactions to her death and funeral, and Act III felt even more desperate than usual. (And then we had far more tragic stuff happen in the epilogue, but that’s another post.)

This kind of game is my jam too. I love Witch: the Road to Lindisfarne and of course Montsegur 1244. Shaping a tragic character arc means that you can invest your moments of hope with real intensity in my experience, counter-intuitive as that sounds. Maybe it’s the ironic distance, or the fact that to sell yourself on making your character believe they can still survive you have to really push yourself.

I will say aftercare is important. I had tears at RC when I ran it at Breakout; luckily we had some larpers who were good at doing deroling and we were able to walk off all right. Montsegur or Witch can have similar impact. I mean, it’s to be hoped everyone will be on the same page when you sit down to play, but you can never tell what might happen. (On a somewhat coincidental note, I just saw a Twitter thread that referenced “A Game of You” from Sandman, which I think is relevant–I mean, I was looking for melancholy tragedy and pointless death, after all, but then again I was also weeping uncontrollably at 3AM and feeling betrayed. So you never know.)

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#14

Like many people here, I enjoy playing doomed characters as well. On the one hand, you can just let go of the brakes and drive your character as hard as possible against a wall they can’t even see, and that is a lot of fun.

But even stronger is the struggle a character might put up even though they know they’re doomed, and maybe that don’t even fight to be un-doomed but to achieve one specific goal even though they are going down. This glimmer of hope, of something better amidst all the desperation is really the beat I want to hit - bitter, but with a slight touch of sweetness that makes it even worse, because I like to root for my characters.

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#15

Hell yeah. Doomed stuff is amazing. I’ll talk more about games that risk doom in a bit, but I first want to hop on about games with explicit doom.

The first thing that came to mind are a suite of games that really tell a tighter story than normal. By constraining the play experience to be explicitly framed as “you will lose” we play to find out HOW something happens rather than what something happens.

Three games come to mind I want to share.

  1. Downfall - The Hobbs’ game about a society and a doomed reformer (GMless)
  2. Polaris - Romantic tragedy of chivalrous knights of the frigid, starlit north pole. (GMless)
  3. Lovecraftesque - Collaborative storytelling of lovecraftian narratives (GMless)

All three games here really almost free you playing them by pushing really hard to avoid the inevitable tragedy. Often we as players have a lot more control in these narrative games over how things respond to the character (rather than say D&D where we don’t have a choice how we respond to the 10d6 fireball), so our inevitable march to death, doom, and/or tragedy is paced out in a pleasant matter. We don’t know what others will suggest of our characters but by the end of these games we all feel drained and amazed how evocative they can be.

Ok so now on to the other games. Games that really play with the idea of death at the forefront of the experience but don’t guarantee it. You’re not doomed, but you’re also not-not doomed. We play to find out if we survive.

  1. Moldvay D&D (also DCC and a lot of other OSR retroclones)
  2. Night Witches

Older emulations and the real thing of older D&D had higher body counts because the play experience was supposed to have the odds against you sort of feel. The death made the victories sweeter, sorta. In my time with these games, it lets us not really care too much about what are characters eat, think about, or dream of. We don’t know how they complain about the awkward length of their chainmail. Instead we’re worried about the door and the sounds of orcs. You focus on the now. The life and death. The more you survive, the more we build a legacy. Your characters stand on their pedestals of accomplishments. From surviving in the present, you begin to care about their past. So when a single hit from an orc will crush us, but if I go first my own axe could do just as well-- there’s a gunfighter exhilaration when playing so close to death.

Night Witches is a game that I bring up because that game also has a high death count, but it’s not the same as old D&D. It’s just as lethal but that game we DO as players sorta get in the heads of our characters and worry about how they dress, who they love, as well as if they just survive from the get-go. But the juxtaposition of Night Witches being a game about a community and war makes it so great. The stakes are too great personally and professionally. Great game. In my NW campaign, we had one PC survive the whole thing from mission 1. She eventually became a jaded, emotional wreck of a commander, never flying missions herself, but teaching the new recruits and giving them the mission directives. One of my favorite campaigns of a game, ever.

3:16 is another game that isn’t on the list above, but apparently military RPGs really play with that doom question, don’t they?

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#16

I don’t know if any of these things are exactly how I feel about doomed RPG characters, but:

  • Maybe the greatest escapism is to embody something that dies – but to still, yourself, continue beyond it.
  • There’s something alluring about knowing the fact of doom but not knowing how, when, or why it will happen. This is maybe the formula for just about every popular horror movie ever.
  • Doomed characters have you playing not so much to see what happens as much to see how it happens … I think this is partly why Trophy is so triumphant as a one-shot system: It adds focus to every action, and, as the clock ticks, pushes players to answer the fundamental question rather than raise a new one.
  • I come from strategy gaming, so my instinct is to play for optimal survival. The fun of not surviving is something unique to the ttrpg experience for me, and embracing it helps me subvert that impulse.
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#17

I was going to mention all the same doomed games as @AviatrixCat and @shane (unsurprisingly, since the 3 of us play a lot together): Red Carnations, Witch, Ten Candles, and Montsegur 1244 – all games I love. Playing doomed characters actually relieves me of anxiety! In my real life, I’m the sort of person who is often anxiously formulating contingency trees 10 steps ahead of what’s happening, so what a relief to know that I’m probably going to die a horrible death in the next 4 hours! Finally, I have license to zero in on the moments as they’re happening!

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#18

Reminds me a little of the Klingon philosophy of war, when the general says to his troops before boarding a ship: “we are already dead. We fight to regain our lives.”

Also wanted to throw out a mention of Icarus, where you don’t necessarily play a doomed character, but rather a character in a thriving civilization doomed to eventual collapse. Allows a strange dichotomy of being able to play a character throwing gasoline on the fire of social ruin while blithely trying to exploit the situation.

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#19

I’m not generally a fan of playing doomed characters. I’m fine (more than fine) with characters who can die, but the baked-in fatalistic framing winds up disheartening me to the point where I wind up not being able to get into the game.

Knowing that my character faces very-likely-certain doom (Call of Cthulhu, say) is one thing - I can throw myself into managing that - but completely defined doom? Just not my cup of tea.

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#20

The first game I played where you really knew you were doomed was Ten Candles. Just in case anyone reading this isn’t familiar, I’ve written a little review over here

https://planesailinggames.com/ten-candles/

I’ve mostly played one-shots in recent years, and I’ve always enjoyed the doomed trope most of all. It’s a bit like the movie Titanic - we all know the boat is going to sink, but there are interesting stories to be told along the way.

This approach has instructed the design of my current work in progress (due to Kickstart next month) A Cool and Lonely Courage. It’s set as a tragic story game, and right at the outset you know that you are women spies in WW2 France who have been captured by the Nazis and are facing execution. During the game a series of flashbacks reveal the highs and lows of their life leading up to the spot that they are in right now. Many will not survive, but all are remembered by someone. It’s designed to be an emotionally intense game, and the feedback that I’ve had from players is that it hits that design goal.

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