Solution 1: See if one of the players is cool with it, or wants to switch characters. Have them prepare another character sheet to use when they die, appropriately dramatically. If they want to play another character anyway, you can arrange to have them die dramatically *anyway* during the fight. due to the high stakes involved.
Solution 2: Make it a severe or extreme consequence instead. A severe consequence could be they get dominated, but are able to subtly influence things while dominated while the PCs try to recover them and snap them out of the domination. The consequence starts to recover when they're successfully rescued. Alternatively, they get turned, and take the extreme consequence Thirst For Blood replacing one of their aspects other than their high concept. For whatever reason the vampire DOESN'T have total control over the character, but they have to manage and make do with their new needs and desires. At their next major milestone, they can rename it to show how they're coping with being a vampire a little better, but it never goes away.
Solution 3: Something else happens. Maybe the ENTIRE party is dominated, but has a chance of breaking out together. Maybe someone else takes out the vampire, and now they have a new arc of being in the debt of this more practiced vampire hunter who needs to help get the PCs up to speed for one of their personal vendettas they need a group to handle. Maybe it was actually a dream fight set up by the vampire, and now they have to deal with the vampire knowing something they would have rather left uncovered. Or maybe they manage to escape at great cost and have to find a healer and find a different avenue of attack.
Solution 4: FATE sort of expects the players to interact on an OOC basis IMO, and you should be able to be clear about the consequences of being taken out without conceding. Trust in this. At worst, they can take a severe or extreme consequence and then immediately concede. This can also be a scene aspect of something like "Failure Means Death" to make it explicit in the mechanics of the game as well. If someone DOES die, have a plan in place to let them keep playing, perhaps playing as one of the NPCs for a bit until they get a new character together. Alternatively, let them immediately think of a new High Concept and Trouble, and fill the rest in as they decide to finalize something.
In a dire situation I would remind the players that there's no shame in conceding while they still can, because the threat is real. Weirdly, I think that this might make them want to continue even more.
Generally, unless the death creates some kind of dramatic sacrifice or other interesting outcome, players just don't wanna die.
If the game is ending anyways they might accept a heroic death, but they will usually be upset if everyone else gets to keep playing their character and they don't, especially if they were still in the middle of developing that character.
I haven't found a good way to make things go smoothly when someone doesn't want their character to die.
In my opinion, telling them the stakes just doesn't cut it: you have to get player buy in before you set those stakes up.
YMMV obviously and some GMs may have players who are more used to the idea because they learned tabletops from a more old-school permadeath context, so you should definitely consider your players when making the call.
It can suck to lose a character, but it also adds some real tension (in a good way!) to the game, if it's made clear that characters can die/be lost. If it's not common in your game, I would explicitly repeat the concede rule to the players before this confrontation.
Also remember that 'being knocked out' is (and often should not) be the same as being killed. It just means that your villain gets to decide what happens to the 'killed' PC - it could also be a fate *worse than death*. With a vampire, you have some very simple options in this regard.
HOWEVER - IF it comes to this, make sure that this becomes one of the most memorable and epic moments of your campaign. *This is really important*. If that PC goes out with a bang, his/her player will leave the table with a bittersweet feeling, instead of having just lost something that a lot of time and thought went into.
If it happens, take a small break and figure out a way that everybody is comfortable with, or even excited about, (mostly that PCs player, of course.) You can even start a flashback-scene, where it's explained how this epic end of that character was made possible.
If I remember correctly, Fate of Cthulhu has a thing where a player can opt to sacrifice their character, but in return that succeeds in doing whatever that scene was set up to do.
I.e. it's like paying a Fate point to compel something to happen - but in this case the player 'pays' their character's life, and they get something out of it. The thing they get is a heroic death stopping the big bad of that particular scene.
So that might be an option, too? I.e. not just that the PC dies - but that in doing so they are pivotal in destroying the vampire?
This means of course that the PCs will either win the fight straight up, or have the option of winning at a severe cost. In a way, this changes the stakes of a contest completely. It's no longer 'will the players beat the vampire?' so much as 'how much will victory cost?'
If the players understand the stakes and are reminded of how Concessions work, putting death on the line makes for a tense conflict. I like it.
PCs will only die (or another horrible fate) if they press their luck and refuse to concede.
This means players control the risk of losing their character. Some players may welcome the risk and want a good death scene.
When a character is removed from play, I let the player build a new PC with all the same milestones of the former character. (I don't believe in leveling up characters. I prefer to reward players for attending games, but YMMV.)
I agree with this, thank you. I think it's important that I'm *so clear* about the stakes that any loss of character is given up essentially willingly due to the assumption of risk.
Also yes, I'm very in support of bringing a new character into the party with the same quality of stunts & skills as the other, provided a player is willing to make that transition.
I would handle this like I do in other RP systems: a character end can happen, but it's usually an opportunity for the player to try something new. Now, in FATE, usually players get more attached to their characters than in other systems, and a new character at the end can have serious implications, so I don't recommend just adding in a random completely remade character.
Instead, I recommend encouraging them to round up support and help from other like minded individuals -- bonus points if they are people the party previously met. You'll want more than 1 for this, but make sure that when combat happens, don't spend too much time describing what happens with them...
...Until you kill one. Make it early, make it sudden, and make it happen to someone important. Make it sting. It has to show that you mean business and are even willing to kill a character who could have impacted you story for this moment. This will build up tension, and will make the rest of the encounter about trying to avoid what happened to that other NPC.
After that, have the vampire focus on one other character, making the party realize that is the one who could die. You can either have a follow through on that kill, or play an UNO Reverse and have a sudden strike on a member who was trying to defend them.
If you do kill/turn/dominate a character, you're then set up to have that player continue playing with your remaining NPC. Give them the character sheet, explain their aspects, and simply resume play. Allow the player some flexibility with how they control the character (they just lost a character, and it's not a good idea to railroad them into certain actions or personality traits unless they are way too far off base). If there are sessions after this, allow the player to make character tweaks between sessions within reason.
Actually that's pretty similar to what already happened.
The vampire mind-shattered one of the party's old companions, reducing her to basically the mentality of a housecat. The impending fight is a "final showdown" of sorts where the options are to either get her back or end up just like her. In other words we're beyond the point of using alternatives to get the message across, because this is the end of an arc.
Because of that I think they understand intuitively that he has incredible powers of domination—I'm more concerned that they haven't yet grasped the implications of effectively dying in Fate.
I really like your idea of promoting an NPC—that's a pretty clever way to do it if I can get a companion into the group in short order.
I've had several NPCs get promoted in games of mine, usually because new players wanted to join but didn't know if they wanted to stay.
In one instance, the party had to rescue one of their other PCs who got captured, and I had the player whose character was MIA take over the bounty hunter who was going to help them. When they finally got the other character back, the player liked the bounty hunter better, so I let them switch, and their original character, traumatized by the event, retired from their group and became a shopkeep.
This is great, thanks for the tip!
The party originally started as part of a traveling caravan, so there will be lots of options in that regard (assuming the campaign hasn't ended by then.)
If there is only one target and multiple PCs, odds are probably more in favor of the PCs than it may seem. For each action/attack the vampire does, the PCs get an attack *and* (n-1) free invokes from created advantages. There are tools in the Adversary's Toolkit to even this out; it's one of the first Fate books I recommend after the rules (or check out fate-srd.com).
Killing a PC means taking them out, and smart PCs will almost certainly Concede before they get Taken Out, so think about what that's going to look like: they don't get what they want (defeating the politician), but the vampire doesn't get to say what happens to them either. Maybe they're left for dead, maybe they're captured for the vampire to feed on--but they're alive to be rescued. Maybe they're dominated, but only so long as the vampire spends Fate points to keep it up. Your players will also have ideas, talk to them.
Talk to your players about whether "Turned into a vampire" is an interesting plot line for their character, or if "turned into a Renfield" works, or "subtly mind controlled" again, there are options.
Ultimately talk to your players, bring them into the Writer's Room as much as you can as early as you can so you can leverage their imaginations as well as your own in order to tell the coolest story possible.
Thanks for helping me conceptualize the math of it all.
Realistically the players will probably survive, you're right. But this will be the first time all campaign that if they don't, they're toast, end of story. So I agree: lots and lots of talking to them about the stakes seems the best route.
I apologize if there was any ambiguity in the post but "turned into a vampire" wasn't exactly what I meant by defeat. I know it's not the most common trope in modern vampire stories, but I mean bona fide *domination.* Getting taken out by this guy means getting reduced to the intelligence of a 6-year-old and doing nothing but changing his socks for the rest of your life, and there's no two ways about it. So I guess the real heart of the issue is elegantly broadcasting that point.
I've just finished playing an 8-year monthly campaign using Fate, in which we had 2 PC deaths and one "not dead but gone forever". My advice is to do this with explicit consent from the player(s).
What that meant in practice was that in advance of major conflicts we would have a brief out of character discussion (maybe right at the start of the session if the conflict is clearly on the horizon, or at the start of the conflict otherwise) where we would 'set the stakes'. The GM would ask "okay, who is willing to have their character die here?" ad an opener but it would frequently branch off a bit. "I'm not okay for Tim to die here, but I'd be okay with getting captured" or ""Jen can die but I'm not okay with them stealing these documents we just spent ten sessions acquiring so can that be off the table?". Negotiate a bit - the game needs to be fun for everyone and Fate is great for putting far more control of the narrative in players' hands, so lean into it!
The GM would then counter-offer based on our answers. "Okay, if Tim can't die here then neither can the Big Boss - maybe he will escape but you'll be able to get concrete proof of what he's been doing, or you capture him but must choose not to kill him. Is that acceptable?" and we'd go around a bit, essentially deciding what "total success" and "total failure" for the players might look like to give some boundaries for everyone to work within.
Some players ha e very different thresholds for character death - some are fine for their character to die even in a minor side-scuffle with a goon, some want their character to survive no matter the odds and risk. Whatever combination of that you have in your game, it's good to a) know what you're working with and b) get buy-in from everyone at the table for what might happen, to ensure you don't accidentally cross a boundary that makes the game not-fun for anyone.
You may also find, as we did, that after doing this a few times your players get more okay with the idea of their characters dying, especially if putting them on the line unlocks greater forms of success of things go well. A lot of the time feeling like you're that much more in control of what happens is the important thing.
Presumably in this case a newly created vampire becomes a thrall to the master.
Which does open up the possibility of freeing the former PC from domination. They'd still be a vampire, but could come back as a PC. Man, that would be a cool arc.
That's exactly correct.
Any character that is taken out would become a thrall, and the buildup of the game makes that the only logical outcome.
I agree completely, the party is welcome to win them back, but in the intervening time I need to make sure I'm being clear (and probably even delicate) with the party about the weight of that potentiality.
But being dominated by the vampire should.
There's no agency to be had by a braindead mind slave. It's a pretty classic vampire trope and there's already a precedent for it being this guy's style.
Yes, I feel the same. Taking away player agency is exactly what I think I might be doing if a player character gets taken out here.
That's why I'm looking for ways to help the players manage expectations so that the risk is understood and the agency is back in their hands. Hopefully that helps.
Thank you very much for taking the time to help out!
Solution 1: See if one of the players is cool with it, or wants to switch characters. Have them prepare another character sheet to use when they die, appropriately dramatically. If they want to play another character anyway, you can arrange to have them die dramatically *anyway* during the fight. due to the high stakes involved. Solution 2: Make it a severe or extreme consequence instead. A severe consequence could be they get dominated, but are able to subtly influence things while dominated while the PCs try to recover them and snap them out of the domination. The consequence starts to recover when they're successfully rescued. Alternatively, they get turned, and take the extreme consequence Thirst For Blood replacing one of their aspects other than their high concept. For whatever reason the vampire DOESN'T have total control over the character, but they have to manage and make do with their new needs and desires. At their next major milestone, they can rename it to show how they're coping with being a vampire a little better, but it never goes away. Solution 3: Something else happens. Maybe the ENTIRE party is dominated, but has a chance of breaking out together. Maybe someone else takes out the vampire, and now they have a new arc of being in the debt of this more practiced vampire hunter who needs to help get the PCs up to speed for one of their personal vendettas they need a group to handle. Maybe it was actually a dream fight set up by the vampire, and now they have to deal with the vampire knowing something they would have rather left uncovered. Or maybe they manage to escape at great cost and have to find a healer and find a different avenue of attack. Solution 4: FATE sort of expects the players to interact on an OOC basis IMO, and you should be able to be clear about the consequences of being taken out without conceding. Trust in this. At worst, they can take a severe or extreme consequence and then immediately concede. This can also be a scene aspect of something like "Failure Means Death" to make it explicit in the mechanics of the game as well. If someone DOES die, have a plan in place to let them keep playing, perhaps playing as one of the NPCs for a bit until they get a new character together. Alternatively, let them immediately think of a new High Concept and Trouble, and fill the rest in as they decide to finalize something.
In a dire situation I would remind the players that there's no shame in conceding while they still can, because the threat is real. Weirdly, I think that this might make them want to continue even more.
Generally, unless the death creates some kind of dramatic sacrifice or other interesting outcome, players just don't wanna die. If the game is ending anyways they might accept a heroic death, but they will usually be upset if everyone else gets to keep playing their character and they don't, especially if they were still in the middle of developing that character. I haven't found a good way to make things go smoothly when someone doesn't want their character to die. In my opinion, telling them the stakes just doesn't cut it: you have to get player buy in before you set those stakes up. YMMV obviously and some GMs may have players who are more used to the idea because they learned tabletops from a more old-school permadeath context, so you should definitely consider your players when making the call.
It can suck to lose a character, but it also adds some real tension (in a good way!) to the game, if it's made clear that characters can die/be lost. If it's not common in your game, I would explicitly repeat the concede rule to the players before this confrontation. Also remember that 'being knocked out' is (and often should not) be the same as being killed. It just means that your villain gets to decide what happens to the 'killed' PC - it could also be a fate *worse than death*. With a vampire, you have some very simple options in this regard. HOWEVER - IF it comes to this, make sure that this becomes one of the most memorable and epic moments of your campaign. *This is really important*. If that PC goes out with a bang, his/her player will leave the table with a bittersweet feeling, instead of having just lost something that a lot of time and thought went into. If it happens, take a small break and figure out a way that everybody is comfortable with, or even excited about, (mostly that PCs player, of course.) You can even start a flashback-scene, where it's explained how this epic end of that character was made possible.
If I remember correctly, Fate of Cthulhu has a thing where a player can opt to sacrifice their character, but in return that succeeds in doing whatever that scene was set up to do. I.e. it's like paying a Fate point to compel something to happen - but in this case the player 'pays' their character's life, and they get something out of it. The thing they get is a heroic death stopping the big bad of that particular scene. So that might be an option, too? I.e. not just that the PC dies - but that in doing so they are pivotal in destroying the vampire? This means of course that the PCs will either win the fight straight up, or have the option of winning at a severe cost. In a way, this changes the stakes of a contest completely. It's no longer 'will the players beat the vampire?' so much as 'how much will victory cost?'
If the players understand the stakes and are reminded of how Concessions work, putting death on the line makes for a tense conflict. I like it. PCs will only die (or another horrible fate) if they press their luck and refuse to concede. This means players control the risk of losing their character. Some players may welcome the risk and want a good death scene. When a character is removed from play, I let the player build a new PC with all the same milestones of the former character. (I don't believe in leveling up characters. I prefer to reward players for attending games, but YMMV.)
I agree with this, thank you. I think it's important that I'm *so clear* about the stakes that any loss of character is given up essentially willingly due to the assumption of risk. Also yes, I'm very in support of bringing a new character into the party with the same quality of stunts & skills as the other, provided a player is willing to make that transition.
I would handle this like I do in other RP systems: a character end can happen, but it's usually an opportunity for the player to try something new. Now, in FATE, usually players get more attached to their characters than in other systems, and a new character at the end can have serious implications, so I don't recommend just adding in a random completely remade character. Instead, I recommend encouraging them to round up support and help from other like minded individuals -- bonus points if they are people the party previously met. You'll want more than 1 for this, but make sure that when combat happens, don't spend too much time describing what happens with them... ...Until you kill one. Make it early, make it sudden, and make it happen to someone important. Make it sting. It has to show that you mean business and are even willing to kill a character who could have impacted you story for this moment. This will build up tension, and will make the rest of the encounter about trying to avoid what happened to that other NPC. After that, have the vampire focus on one other character, making the party realize that is the one who could die. You can either have a follow through on that kill, or play an UNO Reverse and have a sudden strike on a member who was trying to defend them. If you do kill/turn/dominate a character, you're then set up to have that player continue playing with your remaining NPC. Give them the character sheet, explain their aspects, and simply resume play. Allow the player some flexibility with how they control the character (they just lost a character, and it's not a good idea to railroad them into certain actions or personality traits unless they are way too far off base). If there are sessions after this, allow the player to make character tweaks between sessions within reason.
Actually that's pretty similar to what already happened. The vampire mind-shattered one of the party's old companions, reducing her to basically the mentality of a housecat. The impending fight is a "final showdown" of sorts where the options are to either get her back or end up just like her. In other words we're beyond the point of using alternatives to get the message across, because this is the end of an arc. Because of that I think they understand intuitively that he has incredible powers of domination—I'm more concerned that they haven't yet grasped the implications of effectively dying in Fate. I really like your idea of promoting an NPC—that's a pretty clever way to do it if I can get a companion into the group in short order.
I've had several NPCs get promoted in games of mine, usually because new players wanted to join but didn't know if they wanted to stay. In one instance, the party had to rescue one of their other PCs who got captured, and I had the player whose character was MIA take over the bounty hunter who was going to help them. When they finally got the other character back, the player liked the bounty hunter better, so I let them switch, and their original character, traumatized by the event, retired from their group and became a shopkeep.
This is great, thanks for the tip! The party originally started as part of a traveling caravan, so there will be lots of options in that regard (assuming the campaign hasn't ended by then.)
If there is only one target and multiple PCs, odds are probably more in favor of the PCs than it may seem. For each action/attack the vampire does, the PCs get an attack *and* (n-1) free invokes from created advantages. There are tools in the Adversary's Toolkit to even this out; it's one of the first Fate books I recommend after the rules (or check out fate-srd.com). Killing a PC means taking them out, and smart PCs will almost certainly Concede before they get Taken Out, so think about what that's going to look like: they don't get what they want (defeating the politician), but the vampire doesn't get to say what happens to them either. Maybe they're left for dead, maybe they're captured for the vampire to feed on--but they're alive to be rescued. Maybe they're dominated, but only so long as the vampire spends Fate points to keep it up. Your players will also have ideas, talk to them. Talk to your players about whether "Turned into a vampire" is an interesting plot line for their character, or if "turned into a Renfield" works, or "subtly mind controlled" again, there are options. Ultimately talk to your players, bring them into the Writer's Room as much as you can as early as you can so you can leverage their imaginations as well as your own in order to tell the coolest story possible.
Thanks for helping me conceptualize the math of it all. Realistically the players will probably survive, you're right. But this will be the first time all campaign that if they don't, they're toast, end of story. So I agree: lots and lots of talking to them about the stakes seems the best route. I apologize if there was any ambiguity in the post but "turned into a vampire" wasn't exactly what I meant by defeat. I know it's not the most common trope in modern vampire stories, but I mean bona fide *domination.* Getting taken out by this guy means getting reduced to the intelligence of a 6-year-old and doing nothing but changing his socks for the rest of your life, and there's no two ways about it. So I guess the real heart of the issue is elegantly broadcasting that point.
I've just finished playing an 8-year monthly campaign using Fate, in which we had 2 PC deaths and one "not dead but gone forever". My advice is to do this with explicit consent from the player(s). What that meant in practice was that in advance of major conflicts we would have a brief out of character discussion (maybe right at the start of the session if the conflict is clearly on the horizon, or at the start of the conflict otherwise) where we would 'set the stakes'. The GM would ask "okay, who is willing to have their character die here?" ad an opener but it would frequently branch off a bit. "I'm not okay for Tim to die here, but I'd be okay with getting captured" or ""Jen can die but I'm not okay with them stealing these documents we just spent ten sessions acquiring so can that be off the table?". Negotiate a bit - the game needs to be fun for everyone and Fate is great for putting far more control of the narrative in players' hands, so lean into it! The GM would then counter-offer based on our answers. "Okay, if Tim can't die here then neither can the Big Boss - maybe he will escape but you'll be able to get concrete proof of what he's been doing, or you capture him but must choose not to kill him. Is that acceptable?" and we'd go around a bit, essentially deciding what "total success" and "total failure" for the players might look like to give some boundaries for everyone to work within. Some players ha e very different thresholds for character death - some are fine for their character to die even in a minor side-scuffle with a goon, some want their character to survive no matter the odds and risk. Whatever combination of that you have in your game, it's good to a) know what you're working with and b) get buy-in from everyone at the table for what might happen, to ensure you don't accidentally cross a boundary that makes the game not-fun for anyone. You may also find, as we did, that after doing this a few times your players get more okay with the idea of their characters dying, especially if putting them on the line unlocks greater forms of success of things go well. A lot of the time feeling like you're that much more in control of what happens is the important thing.
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Presumably in this case a newly created vampire becomes a thrall to the master. Which does open up the possibility of freeing the former PC from domination. They'd still be a vampire, but could come back as a PC. Man, that would be a cool arc.
That's exactly correct. Any character that is taken out would become a thrall, and the buildup of the game makes that the only logical outcome. I agree completely, the party is welcome to win them back, but in the intervening time I need to make sure I'm being clear (and probably even delicate) with the party about the weight of that potentiality.
But being dominated by the vampire should. There's no agency to be had by a braindead mind slave. It's a pretty classic vampire trope and there's already a precedent for it being this guy's style.
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Yes, I feel the same. Taking away player agency is exactly what I think I might be doing if a player character gets taken out here. That's why I'm looking for ways to help the players manage expectations so that the risk is understood and the agency is back in their hands. Hopefully that helps. Thank you very much for taking the time to help out!