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View Full Version : Game Tone and Maintaining DM Sanity



Terracotta
2012-01-27, 01:10 AM
I recently picked up a copy of Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Roleplaying: Grindhouse Edition (LotFP:WFR:GE) and am working on a campaign to bring back to the gaming group in the next month or so.

To give a brief idea of the overall tone...

The basic description for the fighter class includes the phrase, "Fighters are these soldiers that have seen the cruelty of battle, have committed atrocities that in any just universe will damn them to Hell, and have survived."

The summon spell is first level, and a critical failure can accidentally summon such horrors as "The Collective Unconscious Desire for Suicide" (Everyone the summoner is aware of save against magic or attempt to kill themselves by the most lethal means available. Continue saving throws each round until everyone is dead or everyone saves successfully.)

While characters die instantly at -4HP, at -3 they are still alive, but WILL die and cannot be saved by any means, magical or otherwise. There is no non-zombifying resurrection spell of any kind.

Perhaps most horrifying of all, there are detailed rules for investment and venture capitalism.

What this adds up to is a dark, exciting, high risk game that will keep the blood pounding (and flowing) for any well-constructed session. I've wanted to run a game like this for a long time and have an engaging world for the players to get lost in. Unfortunately, I find myself getting progressively more discouraged and depressed the more I try to put the world together.

Does anyone have any strategies for creating a dark and dangerous campaign world without feeling like a terrible person? More importantly, for keeping the players from getting discouraged in the (probable) event of a TPK or two?

Anxe
2012-01-27, 01:37 AM
AHAHAHAHA! Just run something like the Paranoia universe. I'd play it humorous.

Quietus
2012-01-27, 01:42 AM
Well, if it's morally ambiguous (or straight up terrible) things you're trying to avoid using ... that's easy. Simply scale the world back. There isn't a significant sized town every couple of days travel, just the occasional substinence village - or nothing. It takes weeks to travel between cities, though each one tends to be slightly larger. Living in those villages-between-cities can be hellishly difficult, but you get people living there who either spurn the bureaucracy of the cities, or simply doesn't want to leave the home they built from the ground up.

Inside the cities, you can darken the setting by adding plot elements and determining who's in charge. The city police try and do their job, but it's hard to accomplish when the thieves' guild is rich enough to bribe key people. People try and do business to make money for themselves, but much of the land is owned by a small number of individuals, and between paying to set up shop on that land and paying taxes to the city, it's hard to keep your head above water.

Essentially, look at where fiction draws from. Batman comes to mind; Gotham is a terrible place in a lot of ways, but you can take some keys from that. The police are under-funded, and have to rely on vigilante "adventurers" for any criminals that would be easily able to kill squads of officers. The people have come to accept that living here is a terrible thing, but they can't make the money to move, or simply recognize that moving anywhere else will be the same thing over again. Choose emotions that you want your setting to evoke - I'd go for despair and hopelessness, personally - and then work backwards as to WHY people tend to feel that way.

Grod_The_Giant
2012-01-27, 01:47 AM
Hmm... the player side of things is hard. You have to make sure everyone understands that the system is both very lethal and very dark. Maybe run a more lighthearted game (possibly with a different system) every few weeks to cleanse the pallet, so to speak.

For worldbuilding, I would start by limiting the scale of things. One country, or, better yet, one city. A nice big city gives you plenty of elements to play with, but you also only need to come up with one set of terrible things.

Vitruviansquid
2012-01-27, 02:00 AM
The way I figure it, there are a couple of ways to set up a "dark and dangerous" world.

1. Pick a few angles to go at it and start from there. What is the defining trait of the last thing you found genuinely and profoundly scary/terrible? A lot of survival horror video games use a sense of loneliness, in which the protagonist(s) can depend on no outside help in a struggle against an invincible adversary. A lot of post-apocalyptic fiction uses the theme of cannibalism - people cannot sustain themselves without destroying other people. Lovecraft's stories approach horror by exploiting the fear of the alien, and their protagonists often attempt to wrestle with forces that they don't even come close to understanding.

2. A "dark and dangerous" world is made much more so by the destruction of human morality. This can be done in FATAL's way, in which the word of God simply states that people like misbehaving. Or, to make a more interesting world, think of a normal, human society and then modify it so that people are compelled to act in a way we would consider immoral. Take the settings from Warhammer and Warhammer 40k. They tend to be normal, medieval fantasy settings, but people in the Empire/Imperium are compelled to act extremely intolerant (an immoral value by our standards) because tolerance for the deviant may result in the appearance of horrible demons that kill everyone. I think even more interesting are the settings that take a "normal" society and then remove some of the impetus to act good. Imagine a society in which the impetus to do good is almost universally cast in a religious sense. Now start your campaign when the society has just found out their God is gone/nonexistent/dead/evil the whole time.

As for your second problem, I would solve it by warning your players ahead of time to roll two characters. Have one to play and maintain one in the pocket for their inevitable death. Also, maybe prepare for TPKs by writing your campaigns so that the party's failure will allow you to make a time skip and put the second party to play in an even darker and more dangerous world. :smallbiggrin:

Terracotta
2012-01-27, 02:18 AM
I had planned on keeping the campaign within the holdings of of a city state, which includes one big city, some castles, and then wilderness and little towns the farther out one gets. That's a discussion for a different thread, however.

It's not that I don't have good ideas for how to make the setting dark. A little application of the Cthulhu mythos (I really love that summon spell) coupled with making even the most basic of the undead a force to be reckoned with will go a long way to creating a sense of ominousness and dread, both early on and late in the game. I will say that I won't make people roll for anal circumference. That's silly. Also HUUUUUUUURGH.

My big issue is a personal one, maintaining that tone throughout the games without getting too attached to what I'm doing. It's less a problem with the setting and more a problem with me as a DM. I tend to go with whimsical and fairytale-ish with dash of humor thrown in. I usually end up being quite forgiving when it comes to bad die rolls, for example. This is not a game that supports that sort of thing, and not taking advantage of that feels like a waste. If I only say it's an unforgiving murderscape and then start fudging die rolls to keep people or NPCs alive, there's not much point, is there?

My question is less how to set up and run the game and more how to handle running it in the first place. My usual, relatively friendly "storyteller" style simply doesn't gel with this sort of game, and if I go in with that sort of mental approach, I'll only end up feeling like a jackass when the party gets cornered by Necrosis Elementals. What sort of mindset should I be in, here? Gleefully sadistic? Unattached?

Vitruviansquid
2012-01-27, 02:23 AM
Hmmm...

I'm currently writing a system with accompanying setting about Arthurian fantasy, and whenever I want to put myself in the mood for writing, I play some video games or read some stories about knights.

Maybe consume some media in the vein of what you're about to run before every session?

As for your urge to fudge rolls, I'd start rolling stuff like damage and to-hit in the open.

Totally Guy
2012-01-27, 03:48 AM
My big issue is a personal one, maintaining that tone throughout the games without getting too attached to what I'm doing. It's less a problem with the setting and more a problem with me as a DM. I tend to go with whimsical and fairytale-ish with dash of humor thrown in. I usually end up being quite forgiving when it comes to bad die rolls, for example. This is not a game that supports that sort of thing, and not taking advantage of that feels like a waste. If I only say it's an unforgiving murderscape and then start fudging die rolls to keep people or NPCs alive, there's not much point, is there?

I think you can improve yourself here by thinking about failure before the dice are rolled and announce to the group what will happen.

It sounds like a bad idea but it really isn't.

It means you can't chicken out of using the cool yet evil things you think of. The players will be bought into having those evil things happen because they rolled the dice in the face of the risk.

"If you fail this then..."

Siegel
2012-01-27, 05:48 AM
"If you fail this then..."

This can even lead to the : "wow that's a really cool idea, now i WANT to fail that roll!"

Badgerish
2012-01-27, 05:56 AM
If you want to keep the game running stable through PC-deaths and possibly TPKs, give the players a organisational hook to build from.

e.g. all the PCs will be members of the same military company, commercial company, evil cult, good cult, pirate crew, village, etc. This way, there should be a commonality between the starting PCs and later PCs, rather than random group of adventurers #1 and random group of adventurers #2.

'props' can go a long way to help build/maintain tone; not physical props, but items in game that evoke the tone and that the PCs can interact with. Crude but sturdy black-bladed swords, dark bottles of rough rum, etc.

Hyudra
2012-01-27, 02:42 PM
Badgerish has it right. My best games have worked off the premise that all PCs have a common, thematic tie.

Here's the thing: Show, don't tell. This extends as well to the results of die rolls and your explanations.

What I would do is...
Fewer, harder encounters.
Ramp up the intensity. Each encounter is a little harder, and the stakes for those encounters are a little higher.
Conflict. Everyone has enemies, and nobody pulls punches in dealing with those enemies. This extends from the small scale (the meat merchant in the market) to the large (the church vs. government vs. bandits vs. thieves guild).
Deviate some from the usual 'this is the players' story' approach. I'm going to explain this in more depth:

When I say change the focus from the players, I mean you should leave room for this to become anyone's story. If everything revolves around the PCs and their actions, then it becomes a gang of Mary Sues, and you turn to lighthearted amusement and stuff to compensate, while failure sort of becomes less and less possible because everything hinges on the group.

Design some cool bad guys, ones you want to see succeed, because the potential for something interesting is there. If the PCs fail, see it less as a failure on your part and more as a chance for their adversaries to advance their own stories. Once you adopt this mindset, you may find you can let yourself be more brutal and less forgiving.

NichG
2012-01-27, 03:53 PM
As to the destruction of morality point, my advice would be not to do that as a sort of cosmic dictum, but rather have it arise from natural consequences.

If 'being a good person causes demons to kill your family', thats just going to A. Make the players want to suicide by taking on the demons, and B. Make the NPCs in the world look like chaff for not collectively trying to do something about the situation. If its something that can be fought, expect someone to fight it or ask why the guy ten times as strong as them isn't fighting it. If god says 'you must be Bad', then expect the PCs to want to try to kill god.

On the other hand, certain things can make immorality easy and are very hard to 'rage against'. A world with a population of twenty billion and only space and food for a hundred million is going to have a lot of dark morality, and its not a problem that you can just swing a sword at. Only one in 200 people will survive the next ten years. That guy you just met? He's as likely to be dead as alive in a year.

Plague is another one, especially a plague that is nearly 100% lethal but takes a month of incubation and another month during which it is highly infectious, and is only visible in the last two weeks. That family's boy got the plague? That means the entire family could have it, better send them to the plague camps.

Situations in which only one person can 'win' can also lead to this sort of thing, but its easier for those to be hokey since a rational person might rightly ask 'Really, is the prize worth all this?'. Something like a sinking ship scenario has this nature - there's only food and room for 20 people to survive out of the manifest of 100. Or the old 'stowaway in a spaceship with perfectly measured atmosphere and fuel' scenario, where the added mass throws off thrust calculations and one person must be jettisoned or all will die, though that is defeated by the rational argument 'why weren't there buffers in the design in case of system failure?'.

In general, I don't think I've ever played in a group that would be satisfied with a diet of only grimdark like this though, so you might want to just go with your inclinations and just have there be one or two things which you and the players know 'when this thing shows up, things get dark'. For example, if you like fairy-tale scenarios, make Faeries mysterious, unforgiving, implacable, arbitrary, and dangerous, but perhaps everything else in the world is fairly light. So when 'I think there are faeries in the wood' is spoken by an NPC, the PCs will grimace because they remember how their old friend was turned into a mayfly for a night and came back 95 years old, but forced to live out his full natural lifespan in that dilapidated body.

Terracotta
2012-01-27, 05:06 PM
@VitruvianSquid
For personal immersion, I have the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft on the left and all five A Song of Fire and Ice books on the right. If that doesn't get the proper effect, nothing will.

@Totally Guy
LotFP's tutorial book contains an example gaming session that ends, unlike most example sessions, with a TPK. This is why you do not put the magical blacklight torch in the slot marked "ritual torch goes here" after dumping twenty or so dead cultists into the pit in front of that demon statue.

I'm hoping that I can make what happens awesome enough that the players want to roll up new characters RIGHT AWAY, or want to get revenge for the garroted count RIGHT AWAY. They'll want to try again, if only so that they fail better next time.

@Hyudra

LotFP is downright lethal, which should quickly dispel the idea that the party's survival/ fame is guaranteed. There will be plenty of encounters that can be avoided and will garner little to no reward (other than injuries and paltry XP) if an engagement occurs to make them take things seriously.

@NichG

Oh, I have some delightfully unpleasant ideas already bouncing around in my noggin. Thanks for the advice all the same. Actually, the elf race/player class as put forth in the rulebooks is quite similar to the random/capricious style you've proposed, and I was planning on including an enclave of them in the depths of the White Woods.

You do not want to visit the White Woods.

@Badgerish

I'll definitely be taking advantage of having the players make two parties which will have some tangental connection to each other. Character creation is a relatively fast process in this game. As for the tone, once again, I have some lovely things planned.



Thank you everyone for all your helpful advice. I'll be posting a thread in the world building section soon and I'll show off the stuff I've come up with there. :smallbiggrin: