Downsize Your Disasters: GMing catastrophes in your RPG
We hesitated before running this piece, which was written prior to the disaster on Haiti. It is certainly not our intent to trivialise what has occurred or in any way to be insensitive to the ongoing emergency there. Ultimately, we chose to run it at this time so that we could encourage all those reading this to support aid and disaster relief efforts in response to the tragic earthquake. Donations to The Red Cross can be made from this page (choose the second option), or to The United Way from this page.

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It’s tempting to use a disaster to show your characters that there will always be things beyond their power and restore a sense of perspective. When I originally conceived the idea behind this post, the topic was going to be how to go about doing so, but the more I thought about it, the less that made sense.
Why Is The Sky Falling?
Disasters are often a way for the GM to show off his power to the players, which is profoundly juvenile behaviour (to say the least). But there are more legitimate reasons for their occurance within a game, and that’s what the blog was going to be about – and in some ways, it still is on that topic.
What are those reasons? Firstly, the GM might wish to subject his campaign to a “Radiation Accident,” with the cataclysm serving as justification for a radical evolution within the campaign premise. The disaster is simply a mechanism to stir up the status quo in a campaign that has become (or is becoming) too predictable.
Secondly, the disaster might derive from some unique aspect of the existing campaign, or be be the logical end product and ultimate dramatisation of existing campaign trends. The best example of this reasoning is still “Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov. There’s a reason this short story has won so many awards!
And finally, the intent might be to challenge the PCs with something a little more extreme (mundane or otherwise).
But – and this is where planning for this post went astray – isn’t that also the end goal of all the other justifiable reasons for a disaster? The intervening steps might vary, the disaster might be nothing more than a means to an end, but the objective remains the same, whether the challenge stems directly from the disaster, or indirectly by way of the aftermath.
A No-Win Situation
The more I thought about the types of disasters that could occur within a scenario, and the reasons for them, and how best to handle them as a GM, the more I came to realise that a full-scale disaster is a no-win situtation for the GM.
Either he frustrates the characters through their inability to prevent the cataclysm, or he permits them to do so (in the process voiding any reason he might have had for unleashing it in the first place).
The only ways out of this conundrum are to have the calamity take place out of the PCs reach, or to employ it purely as background for a more immediate struggle, or to downsize the calamity to a scale apon which the PCs can plausibly intervene to prevent the tragic outcome. What that scale is will vary from campaign to campaign, and genre to genre.
Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind
What does moving a calamity out of reach of the PCs entail? Well, it means that the disaster has become inevitable by the time the PCs know about it. Either it has already happened, and the consequences are only now beginning to catch up with the characters, or it took place so far away that all there is left to do is to deal with the knock-on effects – in other words, placing the catastrophe trigger at a distance either temporally or geographically or both.
In this circumstance, it’s not the disaster that’s the story, so far as the characters are concerned, it’s the repercussions, and those can be dealt with in relative isolation or as a local impact, rather than dealing with the disaster as a whole; in effect, the disaster has been downsized purely by removing it from the PCs frame of referance.
Dark Shadows Across The Stage
Using the disaster as a background element, bigger than the PCs but only affecting them (and everyone else) indirectly, is the second approach that was mentioned. And once again, those effects are local and not global, though they may be ever-present, a constant consideration that impacts on every decision made by the PCs.
This is the approach that I am taking through the initial stages of my Shards Of Divinity campaign, in which Magic is failing and becoming unreliable. Right now, it’s purely a background phenomenon, but over time it will become a central factor in the life of each member of the party – at which point, they will have the necessary motivation to do something about it beyond idle curiosity and intellectual challenge.
The Lesson Of Ragnerok
I actually employed both these approaches in handling Ragnerok within my superhero campaign in it’s previous incarnation. Not only was the cause of the disaster something tiny and seemingly innocuous, by the time the PCs knew it was happening it was already inevitable. It then became a background element, providing motivations for various characters to act in ways that led to confrontations with the PCs. When the disaster actually struck, there was to be simultanious action in four different locations.
But the problem was that it overstayed its welcome. The sword of Damocles can only dangle overhead for so long before frustration sets in, and I let it linger there for too long while the campaign stagnated. Eventually, the only solution was to take a lengthy break while I fictionalised the climax, revealing all the answers that had been lurking behind the curtain, and setting the foundations for the campaign to enter a new phase with new characters, which is now known as the Zenith-3 campaign.
As a background element, Ragnerok was tremendously successful. It transformed the campaign. But not all of the ways in which it did so were either intended or even recognised at the time.
(As a side note – the PCs in the Zenith-3 campaign have only recently discovered the causal triggers behind the circumstances that led to Ragnerok happening at all – and with it, the suspicion is growing that it’s not completely over yet…)
Getting back on topic, reducing the disaster in this way is simply another means of limiting its scope – since the PCs aren’t expected to be able to do anything to stop it, all they are left with is coping with repercussions.
Downsizing
If both the techniques for making indirect disasters tolerable within a campaign can be characterised as downsizing, how about circumstances where the characters are expected to actually confront (and possibly prevent) the calamity in the first place?
Well, either it’s too big for them and they are reduced to treating it as a temporary environmental circumstance, or they are up to the task and can confront it head-on. In either case, the disaster has either been downsized to something manageable or was already at such a scale by definition – in either case, the answer is the same. The disaster has been downsized.
Peril lurks, however, if the PCs do not clearly recognise which of these two categories the disaster falls into. This is especially likely in high-level Fantasy campaigns, where characters have the magic to deal with extraordinary conditions; in high-tech sci-fi campaigns, where they have the technology not only to intervene, but usually to see the potential train-wreck coming; and in superhero campaigns, where an ‘immovable object’ is merely a figure of speech (as is an irresistable force, for that matter). These guys and gals are used to dealing with cosmic level threats; disasters, either natural or artificial, are unlikely to faze them.
A secondary peril is that characters can be left out. While the high-level Wizard might be able to cope with a flood, there isn’t a whole lot that the high-level fighter can do about it.
The solution to both these dangers also lies in the concept of downsizing. Let the fighter lead a heroic attempt to reinforce the levee banks while the wizard is seeking the source of the greater problem. The campaign is better served by treating the disaster as a local phenomenon as much as possible – in other words, by downsizing it.
The story isn’t the flood, it’s the saving of the town from the flood.
With that realisation behind us, let’s look at some specifics…
Really Really Big Disasters
These resist downsizing after the fact. The sun going nova; time getting stuck in a loop in which nothing can change; the planet (or just the PCs) getting sucked into a black hole; a planet-killing asteroid heading for Earth; Ragnerok… well, you get the idea.
There are just two ways to downsize these into manageable proportions: either you violate the precept (whatever it might be) that prevents post-cataclysmic downsizing (time may be stuck in a loop but there can still be changes; Ragnerok isn’t the end, it’s merely a transition; or whatever) – or you let the party discover the imminant disaster in time to do something about it.
Locally Cataclysmic Disasters
Famine, Plague, Flood – think Biblical. Volcanos erupting, tidal waves, earth runs out of fossil fuels. Wars and Invasions. These are all disasters, but they are small enough that the consequences can be dealt with locally, so the GM doesn’t have to be afraid of letting them happen; the techniques already provided are perfectly suited to these, especially the maxim of focussing on a succession of consequences that are localised to whereever the PCs happen to be at the time.
And the same is true of everything smaller. A leaking gas main, a burning building, a small avalanche, even an icy street – just keep it all local to the PCs and all will be well.
Personal Disasters
This is a completely different kind of disaster. It encompasses everything from losing one’s job, to being framed for a crime (or actually committing one in a moment of madness or poor judgement), to being diagnosed with a fatal disease, to having a loved one so diagnosed, to being tricked by a swindler, to investing badly and losing the kids’ college fund, or the house, or whatever.
Some of these are hardly the-end-of-the-world-as-the-character-knows-it, others should so affect the character so strongly that they will never be quite the same again. Individual dispositions and psychology should have as much to do with such differentiation as any absolute measure of calamity.
But here’s the problem: if you inflict one of these on a PC, at least one of three things had better be true: either there’s an easy way to undo it, or it is done with the player’s active and willing cooperation, or it turns out not to be as bad as it seems – in other words, it is downsized. And in any of these cases, there had better be a good reason for it in terms of the plotline of the campaign.
The reason is that if these are not the case, then you are arbitrarily inflicting discomfort and inconveniance on the PC in ways that he cannot fight, and for no good reason. That lands us right back at the unacceptable reasons for a disaster that I described at the start of this article.
On the other hand, if just one of these conditions are true (plus there’s a good reason for the event), then the personal tragedy is analagous to any other form of disaster. It is either projected into the background with only the repercussions affecting character decisions and plotlines – that’s the same as a personal tragedy for the character that’s inflicted with the cooperation of the player – or the calamity is reduced in permanence or in significance.
In other words, the disaster is either unacceptable or it’s downsized.
Exceptions
Once I percieved this general rule, I tried very hard to find exceptions. In the end, I only found one: When the disaster is something that is unique to the game setting – the campaign world or the game system – then it is actually beneficial to play up the disaster.
By “unique to the game setting”, I don’t mean just that it affects a race that is unique to the world, or that such a race be the focus of responsibility for the disaster (though that might be the case); I mean that the phenomenon itself is somehow directly identifiable with this particular game.
Emphasising such disasters not only emphasises the unique aspects of this specific campaign, it makes them stand out against more mundane catastrophes as something exceptional.
In D&D for example, a plague that only afflicted divine beings would get a lot of attention. So would the failure of magic.
In a sci-fi campaign, it’s always fun (but a lot of prep) to mess with one of the universal constants. Or perhaps an alien race deploys some sort of energy field that makes hyperspace wildly unpredictable. Or something has happened to the flow of time. Or someone is running an experiment that could start a chain reaction, destroying the whole planet. Or there is something happening that could make the sun go nova. Or an anti-matter asteroid is about to strike an inhabited planet.
Most of those work in a superhero campaign as well, as does the rise of some Nameless Horror Man Is Not Meant To Know.
In Cyberpunk, some sort of computer virus is always fun because of all the man-machine interfaces. Or perhaps a drug that leaves the AIs in control of implanted cybertech, or a computer becoming self-aware, or a flesh-eating virus that only affects clones (including a PC who didn’t even know they were a clone?).
All these disasters deserve prominant attention, should they occur. But they are the only class of disaster that I could think of that can in any way be considered an exception to the general rule.
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January 18th, 2010 at 11:17 am
Another great article.
I think there is another type of justified disaster: One that happened before the campaign started. Dealing with the aftermath or finding a way to reverse the disaster can be the whole premise of the campaign, or just some inconvenience.
I am currently planning for a campaign I will probably start next year some time, the premise behind it is that there was a nice one-two punch that has taken the world down to it’s knees. First there was a civil war between the gods, which resulted in the most powerful of them (who created the world and elevated the other gods to divinity) and most of his supporters being destroyed. Then an ancient empire destroyed most of the world when their attempts to harvest power from the negative energy plane didn’t quite go as planned. The campaign world is flat and finite (like how Europe viewed it during the middle ages) and is crumbling at an alarming pace. It will be up to the PC’s to eventually do something about it.
You can also pull this card in the event that the PC’s failed to stop a disaster from occurring. If the second disaster I mentioned above (the negative energy plane one) was a major plot point of a previous campaign and the PC’s failed to prevent that disaster everyone can just roll up new characters and continue in the same world (as long as there is still some world left) and try again, this time with the added inconvenience of dealing with the aftermath of a major disaster.
January 18th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
I’m going to nitpick at your article here, because I think that you’ve come at the topic from the wrong angle.
First, the scale of your “disaster” varies wildly through the article, from Ragnarok to flood to personal crisis. And, yet, I think that these things are actually very different. I don’t believe that a personal crisis, such as losing a job or being diagnosed with a disease, qualifies as a “disaster.” It is a life-changing crisis for the character, and there are articles galore on techniques for handling this. Similarly, Ragnarok/Armageddon/etc. is, by definition, a campaign changer. You have to split your world into “before” and “after” or it’s not really an “end of the world” scenario. Again, that requires some specific techniques to do well, that aren’t at all applicable to dealing with, say, a flood.
With a flood, you are working on a scale that is well above a PCs ability to stop, and yet on a level that the setting is likely to recover from with only minor permanent change (maybe a change in a trade route, or a specific city being abandoned, or a plague creating a new class of monsters). The stories revolve around saving who you can, maximizing the clean-up effort, and dealing with unexpected consequences (like an earthquake cracking open a prison for supervillains).
My other nit to pick has to do with your choice of terms with “downsizing.” You seem to think that the only way to make the disaster into something that the PCs can meaningfully interact with is to make it less of a disaster. I think it is more helpful to refer to zooming in and out on the disaster. When the Great Fire is consuming London, it is still a massive disaster regardless of what the PCs do. In a handful of campaigns, perhaps the PCs can actually battle a blaze of that magnitude. More likely, though, the story will be about saving people, salvaging artifacts before they are lost, assisting with the firefighting efforts (e.g., creating massive walls of stone as a firebreak), or working to save one specific locale (e.g., a cathedral). The story is about whether the PCs can make a difference, not about whether they can beat the disaster.
A disaster is really nothing more than a massive set-piece. It moves under its own power and at its own pace, often regardless of what the PCs (or the villains!) can do. Improperly handled, it can serve to severely de-protagonize and dis-empower the PCs. Properly handled, though, it can provide as many moments to let the PCs shine as any military action (the most common sort of disaster seen in RPGs).
.-= Lugh´s last blog ..Time goes by so fast…. =-.
January 18th, 2010 at 10:19 pm
@ Robert: That is the sort of thing that I meant when I wrote about distancing the disaster from the campaign temporally ie in time.
And you’re absolutely right in that doing so lets the GM be as grandiose and gratuitous as he wants to be. In fact, it’s probably better that he gets it out of his system before the campaign starts!
@ Lugh: Feel free to nitpick. There’s a lot of truth to what you’ve written, and perhaps zooming in and out is a better metaphor. I would contend that, differences in terminology aside, our approaches aren’t all that dissimilar. Your examples of dealing with the Great Fire are exactly what I meant by “downsizing” – it takes the greater disaster and reduces it to a series of character-sized scenes. Instead of spending all your time as GM narrating the epic conflagoration, you get the players involved.
I would contend that the same principle applies regardless of the scope of the disaster, and I tried to illustrate that by considering disasters of different magnitudes throughout the piece – from Ragnerok to Flood to Personal Crisis.
Your reply seems to assume that disasters are inevitable. But a lot of decent plotlines can stem from seeing a potential disaster and preparing accordingly, or trying to head it off or weaken it in advance; the threat of doom can be more useful at times than the doom itself.
Thanks to both of you for taking the time to contribute.
June 17th, 2014 at 12:36 am
[…] Downsize Your Disasters: GMing catastrophes in your RPG […]
February 5th, 2016 at 8:58 am
I often find that disaster in gaming misses the critical point of it all – what impact does that have on people? In the games I run these days, I try to present players with the real disaster of what happens in these tragedies. People get hungry, kids are missing, crass opportunists will be there to be vultures.
In the end, you can’t save everyone and PCs have to start making choices about what they will focus on. Done right, this actually gives PCs more agency, not less.
Focus your fighting elements in your party to escort refugees or focus on the goblin party that is actually causing all this? Use your ranger to reconnoiter the evacuation route or leave it to chance and use his talents to map out enemy defences?
All these choices then reveal the PCs true colours and aren’t necessarily right/wrong. But they do show whether PCs are more humane vs the greater good. Emotional vs rational.
In designing scenarios which involve human tragedy like this, don’t cheapen them. Do your research if you don’t have experiences to draw from. Read history books once in a while.
February 5th, 2016 at 2:02 pm
I agree, Robert, and that’s the whole point of the article. Assuming that there is no game mechanism that permits the disaster to be avoided/prevented in the first place, make the disaster about the personal experiences that the PCs have in trying to help the victims, and the choices that they have to make – help many people a little or rescue a handful? Deal with the immediate problem and ignore the medium-term complications that will result, or deal with the larger issues while people suffer and die who the PCs could help if they made that their focus. Even a disaster averted should leave its mark on anyone who knew it was coming.
I especially agree with your final paragraph. Giving the PCs a chance to show their humanity, or even testing it, is NOT a good enough reason to inflict a disaster on the inhabitants of your campaign.
At the same time, however, it should be remembered that one of the great attractions of RPGs is that this is an environment in which Dragons can be beaten, to use a phrase that I came across just today. They should give hero characters the chance to be heroic. Don’t cheapen the PCs in your efforts to be realistic about disaster, either.
March 28th, 2017 at 3:37 am
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