Kind of mind blowing, but I'm about to run our 100th session of the STS Fulton campaign tonight. Incredibly grateful for the players in this game. I've still got two more PCs to add to the graveyard (both played by James!) with blog posts on each but wanted to just take a moment and marinate on how much fun I've been having and how lucky I am.
We've had a few deaths, then a TPK, and a WHOLE lot of close calls in this game. My ideal is that whenever a PC dies the player response is "yeah that makes sense" and no one is surprised. A little upset is fine, heck I sometimes think I get more upset when their PCs die, but I always want it to feel fair.
The first death happened within the first few sessions. Two PCs went to talk to a sleeping dragon, one ignored warnings about not asking to ride the dragon, and the dragon killed her. Everyone on the same page with that one. It also helped to set the stakes for the game early one, which I appreciated.
Next two PC deaths were much later, due to a battle with some naked bandits. This one was a little more random but I think (hope?) fit in with the general potential danger of the setting. I'm also very intentional with trying to make encounters be more than "enemy kill!"
How do these deaths get handled from a play perspective? I have a standing policy of "immediate integration" for new PCs which means the new character shows up, everyone is groovy, and play continues.
The first death was real close to them landing their pod so we just handwaved it "oh yeah new PC was just walking slow." For the next two, the party was way out from their drop pod so I said that the Fulton shoots down new cryo pods because it can detect that someone from the Expedition Party has died. This does not stand up to scrutiny AT ALL because it can be exploited in all kinds of ways by my (very clever) players but we all agreed that it was a cool, hand wavey convenience and not meant to introduce new tools or resources for them. Highlights the importance of everyone being on the same page.
Great so random individual deaths are covered. What happened with the TPK? The party attempted a very bold plan of action to steal an airship from an island of pirates. It was not going well. After two PCs went down Gucci triggered the party's suitcase nuke and that was it, Total Party Kill and Total Pirate Kill. The one downside was that two of the players were not in attendance but I tried and failed to come up with some kind of rationale for how they might have survived the nuke that leveled the island they were on (no refrigerators). I really couldn't think of another way to handle it, and the players were sad but okay, but it still broke the general rule of "if you're not here then your PC is safe." It was a pretty extreme situation, at least.
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| All the best TPKs are player-driven. |
In a more standard fantasy game a TPK might just mean you roll up a new party and pick a town to start in but the STS Fulton has an in game method and logic for where new PCs come from. That logic, as represented by the station AI H3LENE, dictated that there would not be a new party thawed out of cryo right away. In fact, 200 years passed in game before H3LENE woke up the next set of PCs. This gave the world a chance to progress and in turn gave the players a new, but still familiar, situation to deal with.
How do you handle TPKs in your game? I liked (and the players liked) the time jump so much that I think I'd go for it in a more fantasy type game as well.
Landing page for the STS Fulton campaign I've been running in Troika.
Session Count:102 (as of 12/28/2023)
Tempo: Every Thursday night
It's looking more and more like my A Rasp Of Sand game is going to come to an end in the next couple of weeks so I've been trying to get things together for the follow-up game. I do not like using lore dumps or giving reading homework for games, much preferring to have players learn about (or create!) the world through play. I use this "Five Things" technique to help hit the right balance. I picked it up from someone way back on google wave and I've found it very useful.
It's simple enough: you need to write exactly five interesting pieces of information. If you have too many things you want to say then it forces you to whittle down to only what is essential for the topic. If you can't come up with five things then maybe the topic needs some work to make it pop more for the players. Here's what I wrote up and sent to my potential players to pique their interest in the game.
Hopefully it worked! In my last campaign I used Five Things at different world levels to highlight important things that the characters would know, taking it a step further than just the campaign ad. Start off with Five Things about the game / world overview, then give a Five Things for major political entities and so on as needed. You could do historical events too depending on how complex they are, or just put them under some other topic's Five Things.
It's not a world-shattering technique, just one that helps me focus on doing only exactly the amount of prep work that I need and nothing more. Everything else can be invented or decided along the way.
One of these days I need to write an actual review of A Rasp Of Sand but the short take is that we've been having a lot of fun and it's real good.
