The Art of Backup
[ movies/television | roleplaying games ][ characters | movies | rpgs ]
[ January 15th, 2009 ]
[ by: Alvan ]
(Warning, post contains spoilers of the movies Feast and Beerfest, not that you’ll ever watch them anyways)
So, there you are with your traditional RPG group, with great ideas about what the campaign will be about – you manage to get the players to do a perfect mix of characters and know how you’ll make the plots personal to the characters. Or the other way around – the players make a great group of characters made with great plot ideas you intermingle with the core thoughts of your campaign. In either case, the Dark Prince and his Troop of interesting NPCs will be essential because one of the characters used to work for him, and the birds are singing as the day is perfect.
And then the character dies. You have spent some 10 game sessions building up things and everything has gone by so well, and now a blank hole is staring at your face. The respectable way is to look at the character sheet, shed a tear and roll another character. If you’re lucky, some of the personalized plots you’ve created are such that they can be salvaged and reused by changing a couple of names and details.
But a lot of things are now lost for good. And if you as a GM had built the game heavily on very personal involvement of the characters, you might be screwed. If you had built the Dark Prince and his Troopers to be the character’s old company, full of his old friends, offing this character turns these NPCs more or less into faceless thugs with maybe some interesting characteristics, but thugs still. The personal attachment is gone.
But hear ye, hear ye. I have seen the light, and I shall preach of the light. In the movie Beerfest, the protagonist group is made of essential individuals, who are personally invested in the plot. In particular, there is a character in the ensemble called Landfill, who is a key part of the team. And he dies in the film.
After his death, there is the typical pause to remember how good man he was, and the characters are at his funeral, wondering what to do. Without Landfill’s unique skills, everything is doomed and a couple of plot points are left dangling.
Insert Gil, a new character to the film, who is the identical twin brother of Landfill. When I mean identical, I am talking how he manages to fill the spot of his now-dead brother. He is described as being the person who taught Landfill everything he knew about beer, and is implied to be as good as, or better than, Landfill in every possible aspect of life. And to top things off, Gil asks to be called Landfill, to honor his brother’s memory. And the movie goes on as if the death had never really happened.
Wait. What?
In Beerfest, the death of the character isn’t essential, which is pretty uncommon thing – normally characters only die, when it is required by the plot to happen. In Beerfest, death just happens. Thus it quite well fits a typical RPG death where the character dies because of the rules of the game, not because of the reasons of the plot. The Risk/Reward thing that’s written in the rules usually require that there is the risk of death for the characters, and it rarely follows the needs of the plot. So, what can we learn from the untimely death of Landfill and how can we abuse it for our own games?
I’m claiming that by taking a look at your plots, you can convert some of them into viral plots that can transcend a single character. Of course, doing it the full Beerfest way and just making a carbon copy of all the plots and abilities on the next characters, will be just silly (Beerfest was a comedy, and comedy is hard). But it doesn’t mean that some of the plots cannot continue living past the character’s lifespan in other people.
One thing this will need is some added transparency between the GM and the players during the game. Once the basics are there – characters are ready and you, as a GM, have an idea where you want to take them, you’ll need to be honest. This means saying to the players that “Ok, looking at your group and your characters. You are all unique snowflakes that are needed to complete the story that will unfold. Should one of you die, these here are the skills, traits and plots that I want to keep in the group. So take a look at them, and think who would work as a backup for them should things go bad.”
And the players should then form minor connections that can serve as full-fledged anchors for the plots should the push come to shove. And if you can’t make the current characters fill the shoes of a dead character, plotwise, make sure their replacement will fill them.
So, best case scenario, when a character dies, his plots will get distributed amongst the other characters, or there will be a pre-visioned Landfill’s brother out there to fill the parts of the position that won’t be distributed amongst the survivors.
This all was done much better in the horror/comedy/monster movie Feast, where the characters are very much nameless stereotypes filling a very specific role in the plot. A role that is exploited very much is that of “The Hero”. In the beginning of the film, The Hero rushes into the bar, explains the situation and how if people listen to him and do as he says, they’ll stay alive. He then immediately gets killed by a monster. After this, The Hero’s wife (now introduced as The Heroine) takes charge and keeps the hope alive amongst the diminishing group of survivors.
When she eventually dies, there is a short transition scene where one of the minor characters of the movie looks at the Heroine’s stuff and finds the conviction she needs to take up the mantle, turning the character into “The Heroine 2″. Bascially, the character had the potential to become the one who keeps the hope alive and takes charge, but doesn’t do it before the need for such a character presents itself. This transition isn’t unbelieveable, and you can imagine the GM telling the players that “Ok, to make this work, there needs to be one character at all times who is willing to take charge. Think in which order this role gets passed on should the current Hero die.”
So, to return to the Dark Prince and his Troop of Named Minions, where the main plot point you want to keep alive might be that character #1 has been a part of the Troop in his past – and thus sees the Troop as something else than just a group of faceless thugs, eventually leading to the question of “are minions evil and is it ok for us to kill them?”. This is such a personal plot that it would normally die along the character, but creating a backup, should things go bad, will be worth it.
A player wants his personal plots to be personal. This means that when you make backups for the plots of the player’s characters, you should make it clear that they are just that, backups. They do not activate until the original character is unable to interact with them. It means that a new character joining the group should have his own personal plots, but the potential to take over the plot of some of the older characters. If in Beerfest, Gil had been previously introduced, he shouldn’t have been a person that didn’t have anything to do with beer. The fact he’s a beer-expert would come to play only when he needs to take the position. Nothing is as annoying to a player to realize that the personal thing he had going for himself was in fact just a huge consipiracy everyone was involved in.
And with character #1 and his backup #2, and their relation with the Dark Prince, One example could be to keep a certain Dark Trooper and #2 apart as long as #1 is alive, because they actually know each other. Should the need to pull #2 as #1s backup arise, just have the Trooper and #2 meet and develope their relationship on a humane level. The players know beforehand that there is a backup to the plot in the meeting, and will keep the characters apart until it is needed.
In summary. When you do a traditional game where your characters’ personal plots are in fact huge parts of the main plot, you should talk with your players and make sure that the vital plots can survive the death of that character. But also to be firm on the fact that the personal plots of the players stay personal as long as the character is alive.
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Tags: characters, movies, rpgs
