Session 13D: A Time of Tragic Rest

Poor puppy…

In my experience, there are very few immutable rules when it comes to being a Game Master: Something that would completely ruin one game might be the ultimate coup de grace in another, either because the mechanics are different, the setting is different, the players are different, or just because the situation is different.

But there is at least one truism: If you kill their pets, you are guaranteed an emotional response.

That response will almost certainly include anger, but it will also include anguish and guilt and regret. If you want the PCs to be motivated to seek vengeance, you’ll probably get more consistent results from knocking off Fido than you will from slasher-slaughtering their boyfriend.

Now, if the death of that pet is capricious or forced, then a lot of that anger can end up getting channeled at you. This is one of the advantages of cultivating a reputation of fairness and impartiality: If your players trust you not to just screw with them arbitrarily, then when the hammer comes down they’ll turn their emotional reaction into the fiction and it will deepen their immersion into the game. If they don’t trust you, then the emotional response will be channeled out of the game and damage their immersion.

You can see a fairly clean example of this in the current session: Elestra had been cavalierly sending her python viper into dangerous situations for several sessions, and that had now created a situation which (a) nearly got the entire party killed and (b) resulted in the python’s death.

Heated arguments. Recriminations. All of it turned inward. All of it focused on the relationships between the characters, and thus strengthening the reality and the significance of those relationships (fictional though they may be). Great stuff.

A slightly less clean example happened in my original Eternal Lies campaign. (No spoilers for the published campaign here.) One of the characters owned a horse. The bad guys killed the horse. In this case, I think largely because the event happened “off-screen” while the PCs were in a different country, there was more recrimination aimed at me as the GM. But it was a legitimate consequence: The PCs had let the bad guys identify them; the bad guys had sent them a warning. And that emotional burst was quickly turned back into the game and focused on those bad guys, adding fresh resolve to the investigators and what they were trying to accomplish.

(I will say, though, that I’m pretty convinced killing the horse evoked a bigger response than if I had chosen to target one of their other Sources of Stability – i.e., NPCs who are specifically important to them.)

Conversely, these strong emotional reactions around pets can also be inverted. For example, in the first 3^rd Edition campaign I ever ran there was a time when the party got unexpectedly cut off inside a dungeon. By the time they’d managed to work their way back to the surface, they were fairly convinced that the pack animals they had left tied off – including their beloved steeds – would be dead. There was a fair amount of emotional dread and pre-guilt. Instead, they found their horses unharmed and surrounded by catastrophic devastation and a dozen or so dead bad guys.

Not only was the emotional relief a much-needed “win” at the end of a scenario which had unexpectedly taxed and stressed them in a number of ways, it also deepened their curiosity regarding the mystery of what exactly had happened while they were in the dungeon.

(This technique doesn’t work, of course, if everyone knows that their pets have plot armor and death immunity.)

You can get similar results by putting beloved pets in jeopardy, thus investing the sequence to rescue them with a heightened emotional tension. Although, once again, it’s important to remember that if the danger is capricious or forced, the reaction to it will be directed out of the game and instead reduce the stakes.

Her pet of long years – her last connection to her home in Seyrun – had been slain. Dominic laid a blessing upon the body that would preserve it for three days and nights, but there was nothing more that he could do for it.