Serial TPK Campaign

[Foxwarrior]

Let us imagine, for a moment, that someone wants to run a campaign where the PCs are all permanently slain by the end of each session. However, this purely hypothetical person wants to maintain a strong sense of continuity in the campaign, where the accomplishments of players in the previous sessions (before their sudden yet inevitable character deaths) affect the current session in a believable and satisfying way.

How would this best be achieved?

[John Magnum]

You could do the Infinity Blade thing, where you have a single immortal foe and each new group of PCs are descendants of the original group. Thus they inherit some knowledge of the dude's dungeon, their parents' dope gear, and a quest for vengeance. You make incremental progress every time until finally you blow up the dark lord and win forever.

[Foxwarrior]

I'm not very happy about the "incremental progress" part, especially if it involves refighting a bunch of battles, but this "descendants" bit opens up the fascinating and politically incorrect Hero Breeding minigame possibility.

[Vebyast]

Time travel. The first half of the campaign is a succession of doomed Kobayashi Maru scenarios. Eventually, one of the parties cheats enough to win, at which point they start going back in time to save previous parties. The second half of the campaign involves the players unwinding the stack of Legendary Heroes until the original doomed party is saved to finish off the original BBEG. The thing is, each party receives a message from the future or a prophecy or something and they know that this is what's going on, so the first half of the campaign is every party setting itself up to die in the best way possible for when they're saved by time-travelling intervention from the future heroes.

[Parthenon]

I think the best working example of something like this is Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem for the Gamecube. The main character experiences (e.g. you play as) a series of characters, jumping from one viewpoint to another sometimes centuries at a time, coming back to the same characters a few times. Most of them die horrible deaths, at least one of which you end up killing a zombie version of.

The plot device is a magical book that stores the accumulated knowledge which appears to the characters. After it appears they can use all the magic powers and abilities they've gained so far through the story. As the story progresses you find out more of what is going on and how to stop the BBEG with the main character.

---

My thoughts on how to adapt this to an RPG were iffy at best. My first plan was to have the PCs select the characters, give them some sort of memory recording device without telling them, and have them sent on a suicide mission. After the TPK they wake up and find they were just experiencing what happened 3 or 4 years back to another party, and they go on from there, sometimes unlocking new memories and sometimes dying horribly.

Except that there are some huge gaping flaws with this:
[*]It means most of the time the DM creates the PC characters, which may be cool for little one-shots (e.g. you are all old veterans with aging penalties! / an excuse to try out a different mechanic to normal!) but reduces player control and ownership.
[*]It creates the whole "it was all a dream"/inception deal where you have no idea what is real and how far down you are, which can make a lot of players give up.
[*]What happens if only one PC dies? Especially in a way that loses the recording device?
[*]What happens if the PCs decide to do something else entirely?


I think it would be better to draw more directly on the artefact theme- have one set of major PCs find the artefact and give them pretty straightforward enemies, while having them experience little one-shots where they all die, giving the real PCs little magical powers and inherent buffs to the weaker PCs. You'd have to make it obvious that the original PCs are the real ones so they get attached, and have the artefact give them a power where unless there is a TPK you can summon back a deceased/missing PC with little to no cost.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Eternal Darkness is an interesting example of something like serial TPK.

Here's a more RPG-friendly version. The players control disposable agents of an organization. Let's say this is Shadowrun, in that case you are vat-grown cyborg-ninjas, tailored to your espionage or assassination mission. Or D&D, and you are angelic spirits who special channelers have called to use their bodies for a mission fighting evil.

After the mission is over, the cyanide canisters in the surviving ninjas activates, or the remaining angels get reabsorbed into the Celestial Gestalt. And then you have an epilogue about how you advanced the organization's cause.

[Juton]

A less magical/fantastic way to accomplish this is to have each player play a faction or an organization. The organization still exists if individual characters die and it could be used to justify why some characters are very similar as they all had the same training.

[nockermensch]

Let us imagine, for a moment, that someone wants to run a campaign where the PCs are all permanently slain by the end of each session. However, this purely hypothetical person wants to maintain a strong sense of continuity in the campaign, where the accomplishments of players in the previous sessions (before their sudden yet inevitable character deaths) affect the current session in a believable and satisfying way.

How would this best be achieved?

Have the game be about two huge organizations fighting a war of attrition, and each PC party is yet another disposable group that begins each mission (session) being briefed about the current situation, in a way that mentions how the last group performed.

To make it easier to the players to accept what's essentially one suicidal mission after the other, make the PCs short lived by definition and belonging to some kind of hive-mind. Maybe their organization is an insectoid hive whose warrior caste lives for just one week? Maybe each PC is a robot hastily assembled by an IA in a setup where their internal battery can't be recharged?

[Silent Wayfarer]

Let us imagine, for a moment, that someone wants to run a campaign where the PCs are all permanently slain by the end of each session. However, this purely hypothetical person wants to maintain a strong sense of continuity in the campaign, where the accomplishments of players in the previous sessions (before their sudden yet inevitable character deaths) affect the current session in a believable and satisfying way.

How would this best be achieved?

Why not some form of campaign where PCs play bodyhoppers? Ties into what nockermensch says about two big organizations fighting each other; the PCs skinride some schlubs and run ops against the rival organization, which also has their own possessed agents. Maybe the process is irreversibly damaging to the host (it magic jars the soul out of their bodies but doesn't let it come back in) and so the PCs are encouraged to die gloriously and start over with a new person.

[unnamednpc]

Isn't that (the bodyhopping) the premise of Eclipse Phase?

[squirrelloid]

You could also run a Matrix campaign where death simply kicks you out. It isn't all a dream, because there's something critical *in* the Matrix that you actually need (information probably). But you fully incarnate in teh matrix, and the whole party can get their avatars routinely wiped without actually killing the characters. Of course, failure means you use time re-inserting and potentially re-navigating the Matrix to where you want to be, and you also alert whomever you're up against that you exist and quite likely clue them in to what you're after, so failure has a cost. Fail badly enough and you may even face retribution in the real world.

[wotmaniac]

Kinda makes me think of this.
I've toyed around with it (with various takes on it) on-and-off for the last 4-5 years .... every time I get back to it, I can't help but notice how railroady it likely will be.

[Stahlseele]

Clones?

[squirrelloid]

Kinda makes me think of this.
I've toyed around with it (with various takes on it) on-and-off for the last 4-5 years .... every time I get back to it, I can't help but notice how railroady it likely will be.

If that was referring to me? You make it not railroady by letting the players have a way in which they can access the Matrix at their option, and they can act and have goals in the Matrix as if it was a real (albeit digital) world, with consequences in the real world.

In addition to the obvious movie, reasonably good sources include Otherland and Snowcrash.

The real question you want to ask yourself is: 'is d20 really the right system to do this in?', since you probably want the players' out-of-Matrix incarnations to be effectively separate characters. (And at absolutely no point do you let people trade power in the Matrix for power out of the Matrix, and vice-versa.)

Edit: I should note that pre-Planescape planar adventures in the Outer Planes *were* actually like this, because when you died you traveled back along the silver cord to your actual body and woke up. They just also had rules for the silver cord getting severed - whether that's an advantage or not is up to you.

@"Clones?" - well, that's the Paranoia theory. =)

[wotmaniac]

If that was referring to me?

just to the thread as a whole.

You make it not railroady by letting the players have a way in which they can access the Matrix at their option, and they can act and have goals in the Matrix as if it was a real (albeit digital) world, with consequences in the real world.

See, looking at it through the matrix paradigm actually really does a lot for me.
I've always envisioned that particular plot hook as kind of a Quantum Leap type thing.
This gives me a lot to chew over

[Emerald]

I've run a campaign like this before, the body-hopping version. The premise was that because of [plot device you don't care about], summoning and calling magic were blocked and celestials and fiends could only access the Prime via channeling/possession--and even then only those outsiders with great power and strength of will could manage that--and the PCs were high-level fiends assigned to advance the cause of Evil on the Material Plane. Taking a cue from that old AD&D rule that slain fiends took 100 years to rematerialize on the Lower Planes, I declared that the only time outsiders could manifest in this way was when the stars were aligned correctly; celestials were on a 60-year cycle and fiends were on a 40-year cycle that lined up with each other, so every third PC cycle they and their NPC nemeses were manifested at the same time, while on the other cycles the PCs only faced good churches and other minions of the celestials so the PCs had two cycles to accomplish goals while their nemeses weren't there to face them.

Each time the outsiders were channeled they could only remain that way for three days, until the third sunrise, at which point the outsiders would de-channel in a short blaze of glory, so each adventure was three action-packed days of the PCs playing low to mid level heroes and accomplishing all the goals they could and maneuvering themselves to be in the best position they could for sunrise, when they had a few rounds to be themselves in their full balor-y or pit fiend-y or [whatever]-y glory and finish off their goals, then they'd return to the Lower Planes to plot for the next cycle while their vessels were left high and dry and most likely killed.

The plot (and their nemeses' plans) advanced between cycles based on what objectives were accomplished and by what margin of victory, and since the fiends could watch the Prime between cycles, just not interfere, I would write up what happened while they were in the Lower Planes a day or so after each session so everyone would have a week to plot and scheme before the next one. The players had a lot of fun playing under a consistent time constraint with a logical rationale behind it, playing as high-level demons and devils during "boss battles," and just generally messing around with their disposable minions.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

How about a Groundhog Day scenario? Whenever the party loses, the game resets to a certain set point in time.

[wotmaniac]

How about a Groundhog Day scenario? Whenever the party loses, the game resets to a certain set point in time.

A friend and I just talked about this the other day.
The conclusion we came to was that after the 2nd time of not "winning", the game will immediately devolve in to a session of mother-may-I Q&A until we "figure it out", and then claim iterative probability as a reason to not have to go through the scenario/adventure yet again.

It seemed like a nifty idea at first; but unless I'm missing something, it's best left up to movies.

[hogarth]

I could see playing the Call of Cthulhu campaign "Masks of Nyarlathotep" in that way: at each stage, you have a group of PCs who get massacred and then a different group of PCs that pick up the trail based on investigating the strange incidents that occured to the previous group (from notes, police reports, unusual artifacts of scholarly interest, etc.). A number of H.P. Lovecraft stories are structured in a similar way.

[Stahlseele]

That is certainly a more interesting Angle than the Trouble with Clones . .

[angelfromanotherpin]

I like an overarching conflict where contact with the enemy necessitates suicide – some sort of hideous contagion or mind-controlling taint that means that survivors would be a threat to their own side. So each PC group goes on an urgent commando mission, and at the end any survivors have to put themselves down.

Continuity is maintained by the visible ebb and flow of the conflict and call-backs in mission briefings.

[Stahlseele]

Kenny McCormick.
The only way to leave the sunken city of Rlye is to kill yourself so you wake up in your bed as if from a bad dream.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

I really want to run a mashup of Masks of Nyarlathotep and Paranoia now. I imagine making Mi-Go Ultraviolet and clones coming from Dark Young-cum-Axlotl tanks would a hoot, and since most of the travelogue is already a bit of a racist pastiche, replacing the different locations with groups of Alpha Complex Romantics aping world cultures could honestly be handled with a lighter touch.

[fbmf]

I like an overarching conflict where contact with the enemy necessitates suicide – some sort of hideous contagion or mind-controlling taint that means that survivors would be a threat to their own side. So each PC group goes on an urgent commando mission, and at the end any survivors have to put themselves down.

Continuity is maintained by the visible ebb and flow of the conflict and call-backs in mission briefings.

Henceforth, this shall be known as the Bothan Method.

Game On,
fbmf