Benedict Arnold, Notorious Traitor
One of the keys to running a good campaign is keeping the players invested. A fantastic way to do this is to make character backgrounds integral to the major plot of the campaign. A lot of this can be done in character creation.
The idea for this came from a few board games I enjoy, most notably Betrayal at the House on the Hill and Shadows Over Camelot. These games, like D&D, are cooperative. Somewhat unlike D&D, though, these games involve a mechanic called the Traitor. You’ll see how this plays out further along.
Brutus, Betrayed Julius Caesar
During character creation, give every player the opportunity to add something to their character’s origin. We’ll call it the Dark Secret. Usually, players want to throw something like that in there anyway, and making it part of the character creation process gives these ideas a chance to come to the forefront. When everybody has a Dark Secret for their character, write them down on cards. These cards are your bible.
Periodically, give a player a choice: reveal their Dark Secret to solve a short-term goal, or offer a 10% session XP reward to keep the Secret, taking the more difficult path to success. Write these events on the cards, and this will show you to what lengths characters will go to protect their Secrets.
At some point (say, mid-Paragon, if you’re playing D&D), take the player who has proven they have the most to hide (by protecting the Dark Secret) aside, & tell them you’re thinking of revealing their Secret. Tell them that, as a result of their excellent role-playing, their character is shaping up to be the perfect choice for the campaign’s major villain. Tell them that the character won’t be taken away, from them, but will be going on a hiatus. Offer them the chance to become a new character, one that can even be connected to the old one somehow.
While the rest of the group plays on, this player can be helping hatch out plots for the villains continued rise to power.
When the campaign is coming to its end, find an appropriate exit for the sub-in character. Noble sacrifices handle the job nicely, or they may even betray the party, becoming a henchman of the antagonistic character. Either way, the player once again takes control of his original character, and plays out the final confrontation.
Your Job:
What does this mean for the DM/Game-master/Referee/Etc.? For one, you will not be stuck looking for plot hooks. If you can’t think of one, tap the Traitor. Use their backstory to motivate the campaign arc. That player will get a sense of satisfaction watching their plots unfold, or be challenged by their unwravelling. It’s then the DM’s job to fill in how the world reacts. How do oppressed villages feel about this new tyrant? What dark forces align themselves with this malign person? Do they remian loyal, or turn on their master at the height of the final conflict, forcing the traitor to re-align himself with those he betrayed? These and other questions are all yours.
I think this concept is great, and with the right group of players, there can still be enough twists (especially the big one) to keep everyone entertained.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Let me know!
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I have a player hiding a dark secret (she’s a spy for an enemy of the group’s house) but I really don’t like it. Betrayal is a “cool” idea, but I don’t think it’s really good in D&D. The problem is, D&D is a cooperative game, and the players expect it to be such. In the end, I worry that this betrayal will feel more like a “real life” betrayal, and lead to hurt feelings. Have you tried this idea in practice yet? If so, how did it work out?
That’s why I say you need the right group of players. You need people with experience and the right level of maturity to handle what happens when a teammate goes rogue.
D&D is totally a cooperative game, and I don’t mean to take away from that, but just because someone’s working against the group doesn’t mean we’re breaching that protocol. In fact, the betrayal in this sense can’t really be taken that way, because nobody (save the DM) will know who the betrayer is until just before the key moment. The betrayal is just something that flows organically out of the notes taken on the Dark Secret cards.
Some of these other short-term cooperative board games get by on the concept of a betrayal that can’t be taken to heart, because they’re short-term. Fair enough. If you can, however, expand this concept into a campaign, it’ll be a barn-burner.
Betrayal is often used as a hook in fiction, and it works well there because the author has total control over the characters involved, and the only one being surprised is the reader. In D&D, though, you have to tread very carefully if you’re going to use betrayal. The problem with betrayal in D&D is that, if handled incorrectly, the players might feel betrayed or hoodwinked by you, the DM, and that’s never good. Even if handled correctly, it may have the desired effect in the short term, but the long-term ramifications are going to be that the players will be far less likely to trust anyone, PC or NPC, which can have a number of negative effects on the campaign.
First, you’re probably not going to be able to use betrayal as a hook again for quite some time. Fool me once, et cetera. Second, if the PCs are constantly second-guessing each other, it may occasionally lead to great role-playing scenes, but more often than not it’s probably just going to bog down the game and slow things down. Third, if the players are unlikely to trust any of the important NPCs you introduce for fear that they’ll be betrayed, you’re going to have a really hard time getting them to become attached to or invested in any of your NPCs, which can make it hard to motivate them to go on any of your adventures. This, I think, is the biggest issue.
To mitigate some of this, I’d be inclined to be upfront with the players about the possibility of betrayal. When they’re write up their dark secrets, tell them that these secrets might lead to one of the PCs betraying the others. Tell them that this might lead to one of their characters becoming a major campaign villain. This will solve two problems. First, it’ll soften the blow of the betrayal a little bit, but maintain the surprise to a degree. The players will likely take the betrayal in the spirit in which it’s intended (as an interesting plot device), rather than feeling hoodwinked and betrayed themselves. Second, it’ll prepare them for the idea that their characters might leave the story early and become a villain, prompting them to play a new one for a while. After all, if you’ve spent ten or fifteen levels developing and growing attached to a character, and the DM comes to you and tells you he’d like to make that character a villain, how are you going to feel if you didn’t see that coming?
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this technique isn’t going to solve all the problems inherent in using betrayal as a major plot device. For this reason, I try to use betrayal extremely sparingly, I try to restrict it to the NPCs, and I try to drop a hint or two, so that the players at least have a chance of figuring it out, and so that it’s not such a “gotcha” moment.
[...] a post over at RPG Musings about using betrayal as a major plot device in a D&D [...]
Good points here. I didn’t write it in the posting, but I’d be totally transparent with my players about this from the word go.
This is a very different style of play, and I’m offering it up to get us thinking about making this sort of thing work.