I have covered a lot on this blog over the months and sometimes find myself struggling to grab onto something new to write about. Fortunately the RPG world is not only full of surprises, but is endlessly deep and convoluted. Today's subject: "plague" plots.
Wha? Yeah, I am talking about what is usually intended to be a wide scale plot on the RPG in which a deadly contagious disease is ravaging the lands, taking victims by the hundreds/thousands/whatever is mass scale to that particular game. It sounds like a great way to create widespread misery, suffering and panic--and clear out a lot of underused characters in the process. This is what makes it so alluring to gameowners. Kill two {or 2,000?} birds with one stone!
So they ask their players: Hey guys, how about a plague hits the town? The reaction is typically enthusiastic. Who wouldn't want a twist like this if the game was, maybe a little slow, or even just needed something new. Plagues make history. They're THE plot material, and the best part is, no real complex plotting or character motives need to be worked out. People start getting sick and dropping dead and the rest takes care of itself.
Nothing can go wrong with this, until somehow it just goes wrong. More like it doesn't go at all. I've seen it again and again. Now, time for a disclaimer! YES I am sure that somewhere, somehow an RPG has made this work and work beautifully. About as beautifully as two thirds of a town's population dying in incredible pain and ugliness. An RPG somewhere made this work for their game to what was considered great success.
I'd love to see such an example, because in my more than a decade of PBP roleplay, I've seen several attempts to make it work and not seen one take off in more than a minor way. At best, what is intended to be a major plot settles for a minor side story, with a handful of players participating and less than a handful of characters actually dying, unless NPCs are used, and then who really cares anyway? None of them were actually characters. So, other than a bunch of red shirts and maybe an amount of real characters you could count on your fingers, nobody is actually dying of this plague, not even largely abandoned characters or underplayed ones, and so, it is the plague plot itself that dies.
Nobody wants their characters to actually DIE in the plague.
But I noticed something. Pick any battle going on in the game that's reasonably large and you see characters dying left and right. Not to mention death in childbirth, a very popular way to kill off female characters, I have observed. It isn't that people are unwilling to kill off characters. It's that they don't want to do it by disease.
Why? I thought I'd write about why, seeing as it might save people the trouble of trying one of these plague plots for their game--at least, on a large scale, and then being disappointed when it flops.
Killing characters by a disease involves deciding beforehand that the character will die, and then carrying it out slowly and painfully. People develop emotional attachments to characters they play, to the point of actually going through grieving processes, though muted, when they kill them off if they had played them enough. People seem okay to do it as long as it's over quickly. Death in a battle is pretty quick, as is childbirth. The character can sometimes linger to say a few parting words, then go, and their suffering, if horrible, was at least brief. Killing off by disease will prolong what is usually a painful process. There is no hope, and a million chances to regret one's decision to do it, and emotional pain when they realise what they got into and that they cannot get out of it. I had a lot of people who initially decided to do it, begging halfway through for their characters to pull through as a survivor. Some actually got uptight when pointed out the "this thing takes no prisoners" rules they had agreed to themselves at the start. A few people did play it out, to great emotional effect. They were excellent mini-plot threads. They were anything but a large scale plot.
Larger isn't better, but a game benefits from having both large and small plots, and when you plan out something big and it fails, it can translate to a lot of wasted energy, even on something as easy to plan as, "If your character gets this disease they start to vomit blood, and in 3 days they're dead."
But you want to try one anyway? Well, I have nothing to suggest that can guarantee its success and my main suggestion is to avoid these plots as major plots. Unless you're using abandoned characters as fodder, and even then it can fail, because people will be playing them again and there's every chance to get reattached. If you want to try a plague, start small, don't play it up like it's the 'next big thing' for your game and you may very well get a few devoted players with strong resolve to give a drawn out, horrid ending to their beloved characters.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
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