Killing off all the PC's (gimicks in modules)

[Marco]

We just released a horror module with, what I had thought was a pretty unique twist: the players get two sets of pre-defined characters (they're high school students) and in the first two acts one set (the arrogant, popular, nasty students) gets killed off.

In the third act the players are all playing the outcasts students who have to deal with the evil that was awakened.

It's a gimmick, to be sure (the adventure is a one-shot) and we were involved in a discussion:
1. What do you (collective) think of gimmicky modules? Are there any other 'tricks' you're aware of that worked well?
2. Was it actually original (someone said they think that's been done before but didn't know where).

-Marco
[ The game system and module are free. JAGS (Just Another Gaming System) is a free universal RPG. The adventure Season of Worms is also free--if you're interested you can get them both here:
http://jagsgame.dyndns.org/jags/index.jsp ]

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Marco,

What seems like a gimmick can often be a door into whole new avenues of RPG design and foundation-assumptions.

Your death-gimmick in the module is actually the entire basis for Sean Wipfli's "Dead Meat," an alpha-level RPG that's reviewed here at the Forge.

John Tynes' no-dice-no-scores rules for Puppetland were, according to him, not originally assumed to be playable, but just a thought-provoking examination of what role-playing wasn't. It turned out to be seized upon by eager role-players and quite viable.

Mike Sullivan's use of the TV in "Munchkins" prompts all sorts of thought toward what a Fortune mechanic might be, or might convey or offer to the players for opportunities.

So I'm all for gimmicks, as a form of experimentation in game design.

Now, there is another meaning for "gimmicky" that means "engaging detail that substitutes for content," in the sense that a very LARGE plastic statue of Miss Piggy is more attention-grabbing than a 4" high, otherwise-identical figurine. But I think that many things that were originally seen by their creators as gimmicks, for an RPG, have a lot more potential once they got out into the role-player-culture scrutiny.

Best,
Ron

[Marco]

Heh,

I take your point: a serious play-variant that doesn't substitute for content might not be a gimick--just a different paradigm.

Another example: Once in a game long ago I took a player aside and gave him a character sheet. "Play this guy" I said.

Him: "What about my character!?"

Me: "Play this guy for like the first hour--separate from the PC's--[specific instructions] and when he's killed off, pretened to be pissed off and then come back in 30 min with your real character."

Him: "heh heh heh ... ok"

I run (in general) very low death-rate games. At least one of the players was *horrified* when he was egrigiously gunned down in cold blood. It established the bad-guys (an oppressive government) as really bad and there wasn't (fortunately) any bad blood. The guy with the slain character did a good job of seeming miffed and everyone else was slack-jawed for a bit.

The 'Fake Kill' may or may not have been a gimick but it did open the adventure in an unexpected way!

-Marco
[http://jagsgame.dyndns.org/jags/index.jsp ]

[Mike Holmes]

An interesting gimmick that I once encountered that has similarities to yours was a one-shot (convention game actually) where the characters were all killed in the second scene in the game. This was rigged to occur, the characters had no hope of survival, and the players subsequently went on to play the killers. These characters were subsequently killed themselves, and the players again went on to play the killers. This gimmick allowed the players to play three characters each during the scenario, and it was entertaining to look at things from each charcters viewpoint.

I've often posited that this would be a great way to break players of a hack n slash mentality. Have the players make characters, but have the characters play through the above scenario with the pregen characters and play the game with a suitable lethal combat system to make offing them easy. Introduce the characters that the players have generated as the second set of killers. By doing this you give the players some perspective on how easily they might also be killed and that those that they are killing aren't just dungeon fodder.

Gimmicks can be amazingly useful and fun even if they don't open up new avenues of role-playing as Ron suggests.

Is yours unique? In all of role-playing, somebodies tried something very similar somewhere. But your application is bound to have some unique parts and will certainly be "unique enough", I'd think.

Mike Holmes

[Mytholder]

I've used a similar gimmick in two games. In both, all but one of the characters gets killed about half-way through the scenario. The other players then play cops/Cthulhu investigators brought in to investigate the mystery.

[wyrdlyng]

I often like to use one-shots to further develop apparently trivial events in campaigns and to emphasize personality points that the regular campaign doesn't allow time to develop.

In a D&D campaign I am running, one of the players had to kill a target in order to join the local thieves' guild. He failed because he wasn't a murderer but the target was killed by another instead. He fled the scene but was arrested by the city guard who were waiting for him along with an "eyewitness". His friends went to get him released and ended up owing a favor to the town's governor.

I then ran a one-shot which was the flip-side to the events that occurred. They played city guard members who were investigating the murder which didn't seem right to them. They had to struggle with the corruption of the city and the effects of inadvertently disrupting the machinations of the town's governor. Through this they got to see how rotten the city really was beneath the enforced veneer of peace.