Image by silviarita from Pixabay, small crop by Mike

A couple of days ago I came across a Quora post by Deb Paul describing some experiments exploring hope as a motivational force. The experiments in question were both revolting and enlightening, and I immediately shared the post with the Dungeon Masters Deep Dive group because I could see a connection to group behavior in a TTRPG. It seems a lot of others found the thought compelling, too, because it’s received 17 20 23 24 30 likes in very short order – within the context of this small subset of Quora users, that’s a runaway success.

Hope: The Experiment

The experiment took place in the 1950s (when, it must be assumed, people had a different sensibility when it came to these things).

Professor Curt Richter filled a half-dozen large glass jars half-full of water and placed a rat in each, then timed how long it took them to drown. The size of the jug prevented the rat from clinging to its sides or jumping out. On average, he found, they would give up and sink after about 15 minutes.

With the baseline thus established, Richter then repeated the experiment, but with a twist – just before the rat gave up due to exhaustion, a researcher would pluck them out of the jar, dry them off, let them rest for a timed couple of minutes – then put them back into the jars for a second exposure.

It was important that each rat be rescued only once, so that what took place could not be considered a learned behavior or conditioned reflex. What the researchers wanted to know was how long the rats would continue to swim, the second time around before they reached their physical limits – in other words, how long hope alone could sustain them.

In ignorance of the actual results, most people would expect the rats to swim for at least the same 15 minutes, maybe even a bit longer. Others, more pessimistic, would undoubtedly question whether those couple of minutes rest were sufficient recuperation time, or would only partially restore the endurance of the animals, resulting in a quicker demise.

The average saved-rat swam, the second time around, for sixty hours. One lasted for a full 81 hours. Saving the rats once had given them enough hope that the same thing might happen to sustain them for 240 times as long in the water. The conclusion drawn was that since the rats believed they would eventually be rescued, they could push their bodies way beyond the limits that they previously thought possible.

This experiment is often cited in books about the power of positive thinking, and occasionally in books about cancer survival when they talk about the impact of positivity. (For my money, it isn’t referenced often enough when governments discuss welfare programs – the provision of just a little hope can have a multi-fold “bread upon the waters” impact on citizen’s lives, the extinguishing of that hope has impacts equally profound – at least, that’s how I interpret the experimental results. Or, to put it another way, ‘you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar’. But that’s just my opinion).

Application to TTRPGs

People are vastly more complicated than rats, it must be said. And the coalescence that is a player acting ‘in character’ is even more complex, still. Nevertheless, if it’s an even partially-correct truism of human psychology that hope can give a capacity to endure, while a lack of hope is often a self-fulfilling prophecy – and I consider this amply proven through masses of anecdotal evidence – then it must be true of players and their characters, too.

The experiences may be visceral rather than actual, but identification between player and character is sufficiently strong that an effect would be felt, however diluted. It was this thought that led me to share the answer with the DM’s group on Quora, and which underpins today’s article, which will examine the relevance of the thought and the impact of this phenomenon on RPG campaigns.

Chronologically-sensitive applicability

Depending on the game system, when a player first starts playing a character, they have relatively little investment in that character. His loss can thus be written off with relatively little psychological impact.

When the player has had the character for a long time, their psychological investment is huge, and a threat to the character’s survival can have very real impacts, and an escape from certain death can be almost as exciting and thrilling as the real thing might be. I’ve discussed before how the gaps between PC and player, and player and Game System, would provide a mitigating factor, holding the character’s situation at somewhat of an arms’ length. What’s more, with greater expertise and experience comes greater capability, which also attenuates any sense of threat.

But there has to be an intersection point between these two conditions, in which identification is strong enough for a player-PC complex identity to be vulnerable, while expertise is still sufficiently weak that it can be overcome. This critical juncture will arrive at different points in every campaign, and is directly influenced by choice of game system – some game mechanics make the interface between character and player more superficial, while others mandate such strong investment in a character during the character creation process that identification between the player and character is almost immediate.

I have identified three situations that can arise at this critical point, and thinking about the possible nuances and consequences divided the last into three variants, for a total of five possible scenarios. Every campaign, at its critical point, will fall into one or more of these categories, which I have labeled 1, 2, 3a, 3b, and 3c, respectively.

1. Critical TPKs

In scenario one, a TPK (total-party kill) takes place at the critical point, but the campaign doesn’t end; it reboots or carries on, with new PCs.

Clearly, this would have an impact on the approach of the players in the subsequent campaign, making them more risk-averse; the GM has shown himself to be a ruthless arbiter of fate, so players will be less inclined to tempt such fate going forward. Having started to grow accustomed to increasing levels of character ability, they are also likely to feel acutely more vulnerable from ‘day one’ of the subsequent campaign.

The combination would have an immediate effect on the players, but – equally importantly – it would have an immediate effect on the next campaign. Two of them, in fact.

One: it would bring forward the critical point of the next campaign by making the players more sensitive to danger.

Two: it would delay the critical point of the next campaign by making the players more hesitant to become invested in the characters.

These would tend to oppose each other in terms of the critical phase, but would combine to make the next campaign far more difficult to GM. Engagement would be desultory and difficult to induce.

A GM could be forgiven for such a sequel being an abject failure. But some players might find it to be so little fun that they drop out of the hobby altogether.

Again, each campaign would be different in terms of the intensity of these effects, and there is a general mitigant which I’ll discuss later. So the picture is not all doom and gloom, which is why most players and GMs survive a TPK.

2. Critical character deaths

Scenario two kills some PCs, but not the whole party, and requires that the GM do nothing to rescue the surviving PCs or single out those who die. The impartiality demonstrated immediately becomes part of the expected style of the GM – a ‘hard but fair’ reputation that many GMs actively seek to cultivate. I’d go so far as to describe this as the baseline condition.

Those players whose characters died might be exposed to the same effects described in (1), but these would be contained and potentially negated by the fact that some survived; they just weren’t amongst the lucky ones. I have seen situations in which a character-class prejudice derives from the experience, however – certain classes being deemed more at-risk than others (front-line fighters because of their role within the party, rogues because of their party function, mages because they are always low on hit points – depending on what the player deems his character death most attributable to), which can be interpreted as a more delineated form of the problem. This problem can become more acute with repeated exposure; when that happens, it can indicate a problem with the GM’s approach, which unfairly targets one segment of the PC group, but it’s more likely that this a perceived problem (not an actual one).

At the same time, the survivors are likely to experience a diluted form of the (3c) effect, described below, making them more inclined to taking rash chances. This effect, too, would be moderated by the fact that not everyone survived the critical encounters.

The intersection of the two effects can create rifts between party members in terms of their approach to in-game problems – one group balking while the other is more willing to rush in where angels would feat to tread. Immediate remediatory efforts are required of the GM in the wake of such an event to permit the characters of the respective factions to reconcile these points of difference, but this is wasted effort if the PPK (partial-party kill) didn’t occur in the critical phase of the campaign. While it would be nice to imagine that every GM has sufficient fingers on the pulse of his campaign that he would recognize whether or not this was needed from general communications with the players, it just doesn’t always happen that way. There are likely to be subtleties of communication during the character creation process that might tip off the GM, for example, but if character creation takes place outside the regular game sessions, away from the communal gaming table, he will have far reduced chance to pick up on such signals, let alone to recognize them. It would not be at all uncommon for the GM to remain in blissful ignorance of a problem’s existence until it blows up in his face!

An additional complicating arrives in the form of the question (where relevant) of what power level the new arrivals should be – the same as the party average, the same as their old characters, something less, or complete novices. There are too many nuances to this question to look into it with any depth; suffice it to say that realism and fairness call for one answer, character parity and balance call for another, and most GMs try to compromise on some middle ground that they hope will satisfy both imperatives but usually ends up satisfying neither. Game system is both irrelevant to the question and critical to it – irrelevant in that a game system may or may not have articulated character levels, but those games that don’t have some other mechanism of dictating character expertise; critical because character advancement is often non-linear, amplifying any disparity between characters. Secondary problems can also manifest – there will be a natural tendency for the higher-level characters to hog the spotlight or occupy a dominant position in intra-party decision-making, for example.

The so-called ‘baseline’, then, is a turbulent and complex compound with its’ own unique set of issues for the GM to solve.

3a. The Absence Of Life-threat

Nobody dies. In fact, no-one is even placed under serious threat of dying.

This, too, becomes part of the signature ‘style’ of the GM – their campaigns are seen as problem-solving spaces, a place for puzzles and intellectual stimulation, with a perceived lack of passion and emotional engagement – a ‘safe’ game. While there can conceivably be a place for such a campaign style, for example when GMing for young children, it’s strictly theoretical – I’ve never seen anyone who actually utilizes this style. The safer you feel, the less need there is to hold yourself back. Risk-taking is easy when there is no risk perceived to exist.

I’ve occasionally been accused of doing so by critics, a charge that I strenuously deny. I look on my campaigns more as a collaborative novel, or a series of novels – most such are not all that enjoyable if a favored protagonist falls too early, but the threat, and the danger of doing so must always be present. I make sure that there is at least one way out of any predicament, especially if it’s potentially character-life threatening – but it’s up to the players to find their way through the maze to a valid solution, be it the one that I know or another, and my goal is always to make the experience an entertaining one for the participants. So there are definite life-threats to be overcome. This avoids the worst consequences of this scenario, but leaves my campaigns more vulnerable to scenario (3c) problems – a trade-off I’m happy to accept.

3b. Critical Deus-Ex-Machina Saves

The problems of case (3a) become even more acute and virulent if the GM makes the mistake of pulling the PCs buns out of the fire with a deus-ex-machina. Divine Intervention is always a temptation if the GM thinks that the danger to the PCs is unfair and not of their making, i.e. not attributable to player stupidity. Universally, it happens when the GM has become so invested in his campaign that it has become more important to him than fidelity to its purpose. Some beginners make this mistake from day one; in other cases, it waits until that one ‘special’ campaign comes along, but we’re all vulnerable to the occasional moment of weakness when ‘our babies’ are under existential threat. Since I adopted the perspective described in the previous paragraph, I’ve had far fewer such moments!

There’s another issue of game philosophy that gets entangled with any discussion of this subject at this point – are the PCs ‘special’ in some way, are they extraordinary, or are they ordinary citizens of their game world who become transformed through experiences into something more? I’ve run campaigns with both premises. The more extraordinary the PCs are supposed to be, the more baggage comes with that – Why? Are they the only ones? Why these characters and not those other ones? Who or what made them this way? Does this special status make others more inclined to shelter or protect them? Does the universe go out of its way to save them now and then? Do they have a manifest destiny? Does that intervene directly from time to time?

The whole concept of PCs being extraordinary is sometimes incorporated into the game system, either implicitly or explicitly. The latter has its own baggage, as shown above; but far worse are the cases where it isn’t explicitly stated, because these questions can then be comfortably ignored – right up to the point when they smack the GM between the eyes with the power of a freight train. Solving such complicated questions with first instincts rarely works out well; solving them in advance yields infinitely better answers. Worse still, players and GM can look at the same body of rules and reach diametrically opposite conclusions – building their (potentially flawed) assumptions into everything else they do, respectively. The incompatibilities can prove toxic to campaigns.

There can be a chicken-and-egg relationship to the whole question of extraordinary PCs that is relevant to this discussion – which came first, the deus-ex-machina rescue or the conception of the PCs as extraordinary because that protects the players’ investment in the GM’s world-view? A single mistake in this area can have campaign-devastating repercussions, so I am more inclined to think that it’s the panicky mistake that the GM makes when his campaign threatens to fall apart, especially in the case of a beginner, but that’s not always going to be the case.

3c. Borrowed Time

Perhaps the optimum outcome is a variation on the above, which complicates the whole question. That takes place when the PCs face an existential threat and overcome it on their own (perhaps following breadcrumbs laid down by the GM). This can create a sense that the PCs are living on ‘borrowed time’ and have to ‘make it count’ before their sands of time run out. This benefits the GM because there is no problem seen as too big for the PCs not to buy into it, boots and all – a depth of buy-on on the players parts that inclines them to dramatic action and big stories that are inherently fun to play (and GM). “Street-level problems? Huh – we’ll see your street level problems, flatten them, and pave over the top with good intentions.”

And therein lies the flaw in thinking this is the optimum solution – a fatalistic overconfidence that sees the PCs take bigger and bigger risks until one catches up with them. The resulting campaigns can be short, sharp, and explosively fun – while they last. They are a metaphoric game of Russian roulette with only one player – the campaign; sooner or later, it will crash and burn.

Unfortunately, that exhausts the logical possibilities, showing that there are NO outcomes from the critical campaign phase that don’t spawn problems, issues that can have effects that linger far beyond the campaign in question. It’s not going entirely too far to suggest that a GM’s respect as a legend of the table stems almost entirely from how well he solves the problems that emerge from the critical phase.

For example, I’ve known at least one GM who never ran a campaign with characters of less than 8th level (and usually 10th-plus); his justification was that this gave the PCs the capacity to get involved in serious problems within the game world, and – until now – I’ve always taken that justification at face value, even though it didn’t feel like ‘the whole story’. Now, I think that he was, either consciously or subconsciously, avoiding the critical phase in his campaigns, perhaps after getting burned a time or two.

I’ve spoken to other GMs whose campaigns never last beyond this same sort of point, coming to an end between 4th and 8th levels, and none of them have ever been able to give me an adequate explanation of ‘why’. I’m now of the opinion that its just a different solution to the same dilemma. Both are simply avoiding the problem, putting it into the ‘too hard’ basket.

GMs whose Campaigns have serious longevity can be expected to have (at least) muddled their way through these problems, perhaps without even noticing (due to the mitigating factor I’ve mentioned from time to time) – player experience.

The Leavening Of Experience

Just as a mental experiment, try this: Count up the number of GMs you’ve gamed under. Add 1/4 for every campaign you’ve played with the same GM, after the first. Now, round up. Add another 1 for every different game system you’ve played. The result is a rather arbitrary rating for how experienced you are as a player. My score comes out as somewhere in the vicinity of 24 or 25 – but I’ve been mostly a GM for the last 40-odd years. I have no doubt that some players could decimate that score after with just a handful of years under their belts!

The longer you play, the more that you have seen before, and the less perturbed you tend to be about things. PC died? Okay, isn’t the first time and won’t be the last. GM in over his head gets over-protective, or goes soft? Same story.

GMing for experienced players requires a different mind-set and creates a different experience to GMing a relative novice. If that novice is young, to boot, they have little life experience to buffer the impacts of these psychological effects – and are prone to magnify every problem encountered, to boot.

That doesn’t mean that the scenarios described aren’t a problem with more seasoned players – just that they are less of a problem.

Hope vs Overconfidence

The psychology of heroism also plays a part here. The British stiff upper lip can be said to be ‘endure until there is no longer any hope – and a little longer, just in case you’ve missed something in the gloom. Heroes have to believe that if they keep pushing back against the forces of darkness, sooner or later, something will break. That’s hope, whistling in the dark until it attracts someone with a lantern.

There’s a difference between those traits and a foolish overconfidence. Heroism leads to Adventure, regardless of game genre. It’s the difference between heroic epic fantasy and – well, no examples actually come to mind; every example I can think of is in the heroic fantasy mold, from Mission: Impossible to The Hobbit, from Conan to The Mummy, from Terminator to Alien to Avengers. Foolish Overconfidence leads to a crash-and-burn, to a Shakespearean tragedy, or a Greek tragedy – to wings of wax melting in the sun.

The ultimate difference: one is desirable (in controlled quantities according to taste and genre); the other is not.

Paranoia and Survivors’ Guilt

If you were a player and your party kept getting killed by the same GM, surely it’s reasonable to expect a paranoid “he’s out to get us” attitude to take hold? In terms of maintaining the fun, it sounds rather counterproductive to me.

Equally, if yours was the only character to survive a GM’s stress-testing of the party, I would expect the character to experience some level of survivor’s guilt (which is fine, that’s characterization and roleplay) but it would be only reasonable to expect some level of the same to be felt by the player of the surviving character, and that’s not beneficial. A certain level of objectivity, that isn’t calloused, needs to be maintained.

A Witches Brew: The Ghost At The Table

Circumstances play into experience inside each player’s head after a traumatic event to produce a psychological consequence. The circumstances are the past and can’t be altered; the experiences are also the past and can’t be changed. So the existence of consequences is an inevitability that the GM needs to confront, and manage.

However mitigated, the critical period produces a witches brew of stimulus and reaction; you can even think of the past as an extra player, an invisible ghost at your gaming table.

Solutions

It’s not enough at Campaign Mastery to point out problems and leave them sitting there, unresolved. Practical advice and solutions are required. So, let’s offer some – but I’m running out of time, and every campaign will be different, so there will be no one-size-fits-all solutions that aren’t very broad and general. Nevertheless, that’s a good start, so that’s what I’ll be offering.

Solution: Critical TPKs

Humans have had a long time to figure how best to manage the grieving process. It starts with an acknowledgment, a somber tone, and then a focus on achievement. If the death was in some non-literal medium, like an RPG, the grieving should be just as visceral and conducted through the same medium.

Start the rebooted/sequential campaign with a funeral – it doesn’t have to be for the lost PCs, but should be for someone who could be said to exemplify them in some way. Then recruit the new PCs to finish some unfinished task of the fallen NPC, or to exact retribution for the death, or otherwise to take action inspired in some way by the fallen. This does two things: it sublimates and encapsulates any feelings that might derive from the deaths of the old PCs and then it gives them a purposeful outlet, which just happens to lead them into the first adventure. The lost NPC might or might not mean anything to any of the PCs, it could be simply a random stranger to them – but they meet the description posted with the town criers or in the newspapers or pinned up on an appropriate noticeboard (or come close enough in their own minds to doing so), which has brought them together at that time and place. The quality they share might be a desperation, or a zeal for justice, or simply a willingness to take a risk in order to make a buck (or a gold coin). Or they might be responding to different adverts, each one pitched exactly correctly to lure them in. Those are inconsequential details; the important thing is that they were lured to the service, after which the pitch gets made to them – when it is hardest for them to turn it down.

There are variations possible – a dedication, a celebration, a birthday party – the specifics are malleable to fit the campaign, the society, and the game world. Pick one that works for you.

Solution: Paranoia

Paranoia is a lot harder to combat, and takes longer, and a multifaceted approach. First, the GM has to be overtly helpful for a while – “no need to roll for that, your character will figure it out sooner or later, deducing blah, blah, blah” or equivalent. Secondly, encounters in which failure don’t have the potential to kill or screw over the PCs should feature for a while. Let someone else (an NPC) wear any consequences. Let the players plans work to whatever extent they make sense, up to the point where the players discover the flaw in their logic and can formulate a fresh plan. Finally, any time that you have to rule against the interests of the party, have someone check the appropriate rules and pronounce their doom, erring on the side of the PCs just a little.

Think of it as a karmic redress. It won’t be forever, just for long enough to establish that you don’t pick on the players, that it’s not an us-vs-him situation. Then gradually segue back into making balanced calls, fudging die rolls as necessary to bring the fun.

Solution: Survivor’s Guilt

Assume that whatever the player is feeling, the character is feeling even more intensely. Have an NPC ‘diagnose’ the PC’s situation accordingly. This sublimates and encapsulates the negative emotional baggage, as previously described – then give it a productive outlet, but explicitly suggesting that outlet using the NPC. The survivor may choose to disregard this cue to externalize his survivor’s guilt, but it gets the player thinking along the right lines; eventually, he will come up with his own outlet if one is necessary. Sometimes, the appropriate prodding can be enough for the person to start getting over their problem – and putting it all on the shoulders of the character makes that easier for the player.

Solution: Excessive Caution & Hesitancy

The problems aren’t getting any easier! The best solution to this one that I have come across is to underplay the enemy NPCs for a while, then reduce awards because ‘that was too easy’. Once the players have started to get over any excessive caution, throw a problem their way that has a time-pressure involved; the players are sure to feel that pressure as pushing them towards making a mistake. Deliberately let the PCs succeed (after an appropriate amount of trouble, of course) just this once – when they see that the boldness necessary to deal with the time pressure didn’t end in disaster, a natural progression toward a more balanced posture will naturally begin. They will always be a little conservative, a little cautious; by now, that’s part of the PCs characterization, but it will become more balanced..

Solution: Overconfidence

The hardest problem to deal with of all those presented is overconfidence, because it requires the GM to walk the finest of lines – taking their confidence down a peg without going too far. Sometimes the easiest way to achieve this is to deliberately go too far and then re-balance things with the anti-paranoia or anti-hesitancy prescriptions. But that lacks finesse and makes it more likely that your manipulations will be detected by the players.

The Mastermind Assumption

My preferred solution is “The Mastermind Assumption.” This is a mastermind’s plan in which the different solutions that might be exploited by the PCs are discovered, one by one, to have been anticipated and closed off. The trick is to ensure that one of these ‘ruled out’ solutions only appears to be ruled out of the question; the assumption that the solution won’t work is therefore invalid, but this should not be discovered until the obvious ones have all been perceived as blocked by the PCs. This won’t happen in the course of a single adventure; it will (at the very least) be a small plot arc.

• In phase one of the plot arc, the MM’s moves to block a weakness in his plans is noticed;
• In phase two, a second such makes it clear that events are not occurring at random.
• In phase three, the PCs should learn of the MM’s objective (which they should actively NOT want him to achieve) and they may or may not learn his identity.
• In phase four, they actively search for information, identify the MM if they haven’t already done so, and start looking for ways to prevent his success. That sets the PCs up to have the overconfidence knocked out of them, as they discover that the move that first came to their attention was actually one of the LAST moves to be made by the MM, and that he now has them blocked at every turn.
• In phase five, they thrash about a bit and confirm that the MM has them stopped cold.
• At the 13th hour (eleventh if you’re feeling generous), the now thoroughly-deflated PCs discover the flawed assumption, the one mistake that the MM has made, the one area in which his plans’ protection is not absolute. It should NOT be easy for them, by any means, even now – just possible. This revelation may be a distinct phase six, or it may be the conclusion of phase five, that’s up to you and the specific adventure.
• In the final phase, the PCs do whatever they have to do to exploit the window of vulnerability, even as the MM realizes his mistake and starts moving to counter it. This ramps up the pressure on the PCs so that they will be finding things anything but too easy. But the MM isn’t quite in time, even though the outcome hangs in the balance for a while, the PCs win in the end – perhaps paying a price in the process.

Phases one and two hook the PCs in and phases three and four take advantage of their overconfidence. Phase five knocks the stuffing out of that overconfidence, while the final phase rebuilds confidence to a balanced level. This perfectly meets the prescription offered at the start of this section. I’ve run variations on this outline at least a dozen times over the years – sometimes revealing that the first moves were, in fact, noticed by the PCs at the time and completely mis-attributed, but that’s an artistic flourish, not a necessity.

At it’s shortest, I’ve run this as a 1-2 punch (two adventures); at it’s longest, it occupied about five real-time years (but drew on plot seeds planted eight years earlier that I had floating around for whenever I found use for them), and the final phase was a five game-session epic! Master the Mastermind Assumption; it will amply reward you.

Campaign platform stability

The objective with all these solutions is the same – to do whatever you need to do in order to deal with the legacy of the last campaign critical state that your players experienced, whether that is in the current campaign or a previous one, whether you were the GM or someone else. It’s about shredding whatever baggage the players may have brought with them, and achieving a stable platform on which your campaign can unfold.

The more experienced your players, the less necessary these interventions will be – but the more those players are likely to appreciate what you are doing and why. It’s one less thing they have to worry about, and says good things to them about the GM and his skills – both of which loosen them up and encourage them to both have fun, and to make the game fun for everyone else (including the GM). And that, as it says on the lid, is the point.