RPG MUSINGS Play The Game You Want To Play

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?