Hi there, I'm apparition13 and I haven't played in 15+ years. I've been collecting RPGs, but no actual play. Recently I started visiting here and RPG.net and I find myself thinking maybe I should start up again. I've got half a dozen settings I've been fiddling with, but I found myself, upon reading into Midnight, interested with the potential of that setting and the advantages of doing something in a commercially available setting. This has lead me to a bit of a quandary, so I hope you’ll bear with me while I put it all into context. I may go on a bit, but germaneness is in the offing.

For those of you who may not be familiar, Midnight is advertised as a setting analogous to Middle Earth had Sauron won. It posits a world wherein Good has lost the Last Battle and if engaged in a desperate struggle for survival. What sets it apart from other “after the disaster” (I’ve got one of these settings myself) settings is that the opportunity to strike back remains, even though hope of reversing defeat is bleak. It struck a bit of a chord, and I mulled the idea over for awhile before coming to the conclusion that, while the official 100 years after the defeat of the Last Battle timeline had it’s appeal I was interested in doing things a little differently. There are plenty of settings foreshadowing a calamity, and many afterwards, but games taking place during the cataclysm are not so common.

My idea was to play a campaign I’ve taken to calling “Midnight: in media res”. Play would start during the last battle, in a little lull in the action that would allow the players to introduce their characters (maybe some flashback scenes) before the assault that turns the battle against them begins. It’s too late to do anything to change the outcome of the battle, so the game is built around what they do next. As I thought about it my sim-brain remembered that most casualties happen during the rout phase of a battle, and that it seemed realistic to expect PCs to get killed in the first session, maybe even in the first assault once play starts. Not generally a good idea... but I decided to go with it. The idea of losing PCs would be built into the game and frequent death would help reinforce the bleakness of the setting. Kinda like Paranoia, only not played for laughs. So a sequence might go like this:

Lets say there are four players. Their PCs are fleeing from the battle when they run into a group of orcs. Combat ensues, and one of the PCs is killed before the orcs are vanquished. They continue their retreat, encountering another group of fleeing soldiers which allows the player who lost the PC to rejoin the party with another PC. As play continues and the party gets further from the battlefield they might find refugees rather than soldiers joining the party etc. etc. I suspect that PC casualties would be highest in the first few sessions before settling down to a more conventional rate. (The present idea is for the replacement PC to be have roughly the same capability as the lost one. The game would not be d20, but in those terms a fifth level casualty would allow for a fifth level replacement and so on.)

Then I found out there is a new edition of Midnight coming out, so my enthusiasm was put on hold in anticipation of the new book.

Yesterday I found myself on RPG.net reading Ross Winn’s “Close to the Edit” columns and ran across this quote:

At one point in my life I had sworn off fantasy. It was simply that the genre was tiresome to me. I had explored damned near every game that I had seen and I was tired of it.
Of course then a friend of mine named Sam decided he wanted to run a fantasy game set in Harn using GURPS. It was a brilliant game. The group played together for damn near two years and I don't recall a bad session in the lot. I always assumed that he had some cool new ideas. What I never realized, until he told me yesterday, was that the entire cycle was ripped off from Richard III. Of course the minute that he said it, I felt like a complete ass for not realizing it. I have read something like twenty-six of Shakespeare's plays, and liked Richard III quite a bit. Still he threw in some other elements that made it different enough that it was entertaining to all of us, and as importantly I think it seemed fresh and new.

First thing to jump at me: Reduce handling time, generate several characters RIGHT at Chargen. Draw up a frontlines assault troop, a footman, and a commander.

I'm wondering what kind of structure this needs. If you're looking for the misty-eyed, frog in throat yea, tis safe assumption to be thinking this is going to be Nar. Gotta make the players care about the characters...like most stage tradgedies, Act 1, introduce the characters, have dinner, get to see them and their families. Act 2, show the "Bad Thing" be it their own flaws or the plot outside of them, Act 3 throw the two together and watch in horror as the main character falls, usually heroically.
Wondering...some kind of structure akin to that? Give each character an "Introduction" "Revelation" and finally "Conclusion" scene? PTA almost- set up several scenes, one of which is the characters Intro, followed by their Revelation, and ends with their conclusion. Interesting at times to have an Introduction for one character and a Revelation for another going on, or a Revelation and a Conclusion.

So "Last Stand: The RPG" where it's not about winning (more XPs, more levels, more treasure) but about how you choose to lose?

Well, here's an interesting thread on the emotional aspects of combat to check out: Fear and Confusion.

The real challenge here is to get people so engaged with their characters that character death matters, yet have character death be relatively common. DaMoose Neo's suggestion of "show the characters having dinner with their families" is a good one. Further suggestion: The "get to know these characters" scene doesn't have to be at the beginning of the game:

Allow players to call for flashbacks and play out mini-scenes establishing their background, their families, their aspirations -- all the things they have to lose. Then, when a player decides to sacrifice a character's life, that character's last, heroic action gets a bonus directly proportional to how much that character has to lose. So if you're currently playing "Spearman #5" and decide to have him hold off the rampaging orcs while the others escape, well, nobody knows anything about this guy, so there's no bonus. But if you're playing "John of Kent, blacksmith, father of three girls whose mother died in the plague, and who is slowly learning to love again" and decide to send him to his doom... whopping mondo bonus.

Which of course gives the players a lovely little stab in the heart: the more they care about a character, the more they want him to be one of the few who survives, but the more in-game effectiveness they get when they "cash in his chips."

Ooh: You could even have a literal pile of chips on the character sheet and add something every time you establish a bit of backstory. Then the bad guys catch up with you and everyone looks around to see who has enough chips to save them.....

P.S.: No need to make this setting-dependent at all, anymore; as you said, it could be Tolkeinesque twilight or World War II.

P.P.S.: In GNS terms, you could either go Simulationist or Narrativist with this and still get strong player investment in the characters. It'd work either way. I suspect the difference is if you want to have the game be about "this is how it feels to sacrifice yourself nobly in a losing cause," you want Sim; and if you want it to be about "do you sacrifice yourself nobly or try to survive?" then you want Nar. But I'm not GNS expert.

[EDIT: Oh, and you should read this discussion on character death in RPGs.]

Ooo- Just made me think of the finale to Man in the Iron Mask- where Datanion reveals he's Fillipe's father- we've established
A) Brillaint soldier
B) Devoted servant
C) even more devoted to love

and now a heartwenching
D) Father to king & outcast

and POW, he's the one that dies, and because of that the other Musketeers live. Works, and fits the theme. Just gotta pack it all into a half hour of play now.

daMoose_Neo wrote: First thing to jump at me: Reduce handling time, generate several characters RIGHT at Chargen.

I'm wondering what kind of structure this needs. If you're looking for the misty-eyed, frog in throat yea, tis safe assumption to be thinking this is going to be Nar. Gotta make the players care about the characters...like most stage tradgedies, Act 1, introduce the characters, have dinner, get to see them and their families. Act 2, show the "Bad Thing" be it their own flaws or the plot outside of them, Act 3 throw the two together and watch in horror as the main character falls, usually heroically.
Wondering...some kind of structure akin to that? Give each character an "Introduction" "Revelation" and finally "Conclusion" scene? PTA almost- set up several scenes, one of which is the characters Intro, followed by their Revelation, and ends with their conclusion. Interesting at times to have an Introduction for one character and a Revelation for another going on, or a Revelation and a Conclusion.

Sydney Freedberg wrote:
The real challenge here is to get people so engaged with their characters that character death matters, yet have character death be relatively common. DaMoose Neo's suggestion of "show the characters having dinner with their families" is a good one. Further suggestion: The "get to know these characters" scene doesn't have to be at the beginning of the game:

Allow players to call for flashbacks and play out mini-scenes establishing their background, their families, their aspirations -- all the things they have to lose.

Then, when a player decides to sacrifice a character's life, that character's last, heroic action gets a bonus directly proportional to how much that character has to lose. So if you're currently playing "Spearman #5" and decide to have him hold off the rampaging orcs while the others escape, well, nobody knows anything about this guy, so there's no bonus. But if you're playing "John of Kent, blacksmith, father of three girls whose mother died in the plague, and who is slowly learning to love again" and decide to send him to his doom... whopping mondo bonus.

Which of course gives the players a lovely little stab in the heart: the more they care about a character, the more they want him to be one of the few who survives, but the more in-game effectiveness they get when they "cash in his chips."

Ooh: You could even have a literal pile of chips on the character sheet and add something every time you establish a bit of backstory. Then the bad guys catch up with you and everyone looks around to see who has enough chips to save them.....

apparition13 wrote: not all deaths are heroic. Sometimes you just get hit with artillery or "cash in" in the first round of an ambush.

apparition13 wrote: Any ideas on how to adjudicate chip-awards?

Sydney Freeberg wrote:

[EDIT: Oh, and you should read this discussion on character death in RPGs.]

Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Ooh: You could even have a literal pile of chips on the character sheet and add something every time you establish a bit of backstory. Then the bad guys catch up with you and everyone looks around to see who has enough chips to save them.....

I'm personally tempted to be as brutal as possible: You can only spend a character's "investment" in backstory by sacrificing his/her life.

Now, to be gentler, you can allow backstory to gain characters traits that they can use in all sorts of situations short of martyrdom, e.g. "I think of my wife's love for me and, with one last desperate effort, claw my way up out of the pit"; or even, as you suggested, letting people help each other out, e.g. "While the medic works on him, I hold his hand and tell him about springtime on my dad's farm in Iowa and how he's gotta visit when this war is over."

But that does take the focus away from the moment of sacrifice and broadens the game. Which is neither good nor bad, just different, and a decision you need to make carefully.

Heads-up on the name:

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apparition13 wrote: How do I set things up so that, ideally, everyone at the table can feel that “frog in my throat, eyes getting misty” feeling a great self-sacrifice scene can elicit? How do we make PCs distinctive and “real”, even if they are only around for half an hour? How can players connect with characters they may not be around for that long?

Sydney Freedberg wrote: I'm personally tempted to be as brutal as possible: You can only spend a character's "investment" in backstory by sacrificing his/her life.

Now, to be gentler, you can allow backstory to gain characters traits that they can use in all sorts of situations short of martyrdom, e.g. "I think of my wife's love for me and, with one last desperate effort, claw my way up out of the pit"; or even, as you suggested, letting people help each other out, e.g. "While the medic works on him, I hold his hand and tell him about springtime on my dad's farm in Iowa and how he's gotta visit when this war is over."

But that does take the focus away from the moment of sacrifice and broadens the game. Which is neither good nor bad, just different, and a decision you need to make carefully.

I'm very skepital this is possible in such a short time span. I'm also skepital that you can repeat this pattern over and over every single session and get the same emotional response from the players.

I agree with timfire. You don't want to have a flashback with every new GI just tossed in. Players will get bored by yet another wife and kids scene since they want to move on with the action. I suggest that the game should be as much about surviving as about dying. So we have the possibility of cruel random death, which is cool, and the possibility of noble self-sacrifice, which is also cool. But survival should be an option, too, and not only an option but a goal.

Here's an idea: Each time he has survived a critical situation, a character gets a scene that features his personality. You would not necessarily call for a flashback every time. Rather, you could have a dialogue in a quiter moment of battle, or some other scene within all the chaos and destruction that establishes some theme for the character. You could do something like: Every third personality scene is a flashback that tells us more about the character's background.

I would suggest a character creation method "as you play". Characters could use basic templates like "foot soldier", "officer", "knight" etc. Pick one special fighting skill, go. Use a name list to quickly grab a name. Roll for rank, if you will. Establish personality traits and relationships only as you create the related scenes. Like in a novel or movie, the character gains profile and also gains importance (chips or whatever). His chance for survival doesn't increase, however.

So you will have increasing emotional investment with characters that survive a lot of critical scenes. That would fit very well with a war story: There are those guys who stick around barely long enough for you to remember their face, and then get blown away. And then there are the guys that stay around for a long time, and you really start to like them. But you can never know who's next.

Man, I would buy this game.

What Frank said, enthusiastically.