Genre Police: Looking For Augusta

So, I had a long discussion about chickens. This isn’t actually weird in our house given that we have chickens as pets, but this was especially odd because this particular chicken wasn’t real. And it had just been killed.

We recently got the kids the video game Stardew Valley as part of a project to help them to understand how economies work, teach decision making and consequences in a safe way and just have fun new experiences. And they were having fun, my eldest naming all her animals and world building, my youngest treating the game like it was Zelda, really only maintaining his farm enough to fund his forays down into the mines, killing monsters and rescuing artifacts so he can learn about the settings history. That was until my eldest accidentally left a chicken outside overnight.

We never saw what took Augusta the chicken. We have no idea what beast came out of the night and dragged her off. But as the search for the missing Chicken spread from moving about the map to online searches about what might have happened, the picture of her being hunted, dragged far from home and devoured began to emerge. It was something we didn’t know could happen, and it rocked my eldest to her core. She’d loved her chickens, and she went through the whole cycle of grief, at times blaming herself, feeling anger and pain so bad she couldn’t sleep. And finally, acceptance and the knowledge that she will never forget them outside again. Let me clarify again; This was a digital chicken in 8-bit graphics. It seems ridiculous, but we all went through an emotional roller-coaster and learned lessons in those 24 hours in which the loss of Augusta rocked our family.

Now that the dust has settled and Augusta II is happily clucking around the farm I begin to wonder what we can learn about RPGs from this experience. Particularly about NPCs, Immersion, our responsibility as storytellers and consequence.

Let’s Talk About Immersion

I’ve talked about investment in games before and how we keep a group in the driving seat on a session-by-session basis, but we can also talk about investment in the fiction of a game from a long-term perspective. What keeps a group coming back week in and week out? It’s not the only reason, but I’ve noticed that the players really start to invest in a game when their characters start to have deeper relationships with each other and NPCs that exist in the world. Once each person has a relationship they care about and can change and evolve, they’re connected.

There’s no shame in forcing these connections as a DM. Early on in any game, you should be throwing a variety of interesting allies, enemies, resource owners and mysterious NPCs in the direction of the characters. Some will click more than others, but keep an eye on the ones the players like and try to make sure they come back. And when they do, add a layer to them. Don’t just give the same performance. Show us something they care about, hate or a weakness they have. If you can show us the inner life of character that explains who they are or connects them to the world it breathes life into everything connected to that decision. It just makes the world feel more real. And players will invest harder.

Blood Choices

A thing that is more difficult is perhaps the question of when to kill off a beloved NPC. Doing so adds a level of drama to a game but the decision shouldn’t be taken lightly. An actual horrid death of someone the party cared about with no way to bring them back can really cause ripple effects in players that you had no intention of causing.

My highest-level party might be 19th-level badasses who are fighting high-level demons like they are nothing. But they are also a mixed bag of trauma and mistrust. They’ve face so much story and lost people along the way. The end of the campaign isn’t really about if they can kill a big bad any more, but instead what peace looks like for any of these characters. Luckily I’m blessed with a group that have invested in this story but it could have broken the spirit of other players. All the people they’ve lost. All the chaos that has happened. And the reason it feels that way is because the players invested and fell in love with NPCs and locations. They’ve the agency of their choices through what they’ve saved – but also what they haven’t.

Above, I mentioned the responsibility we have as storytellers. And I meant it. We have to serve a story, but often, the temptation is to use everything the players care about as hostage material or to cut a huge swathe through everything in order to tilt on the players. But we must make sure we don’t slide into the players losing hope. Because hope is the engine that drives a lot of RPG stories. Your characters are the people who dare to dream.

Which is why when I decide an NPC is going to die in the story, I make a few choices. I either decide the consequences of the plot mean that an NPC is for it and make sure the players aren’t around to have any input and the drop that on them later. Or I decide an NPC ‘might’ die and put the players right in the middle of that moment and I go hard but give them a chance to change things.

Because both these choices are working to accomplish more than just a sense of narrative. The first is to show that sometimes things happen outside of the PCs and they shouldn’t blame themselves. They never had agency to affect that thing, or if they did it was a while ago. In the second, the players instead are granted agency and can make the difference, solidifying that they are the heroes of the story.

An example of this is the Battle In The North. The party and a group of sailors on a frozen beach, illthids flying in, undying mindless krakens wrecking the ships they’d come in. In this combat, I’d planned that the NPC A’tir, a friendly but reckless Eladrin dandy was going to die unless the party worked to save. Trapped among the kraken on a ship, he needed rescue. The party worked hard and saved A’tir, but in the resulting attempt, a different NPC, the reliable goliath captain Keros was cornered by an Illthid and his brain was sucked out. I’d given the players a chance to save someone but the dice had decided someone else died. This was maybe the least hurtful death in the campaign because the players felt they had agency. They were able to process the loss. They could gain closure. No one was getting dragged off into the night never to be seen again. RIP Augusta.

I guess in conclusion, I’m asking you to consider the weight of investment your players have in things before you burn them down. It can be the most amazing storytelling moment – but you need to make sure it doesn’t become the moment your game became unpalatable for your players. No one wants to be looking for Augusta.