An idea for a complicated story

[q556]

Hello guys, I’m new here and I need few advices about my new campaign idea.

Here’s the deal: we are group of players who tend to run long and complicated stories – some small talk at the beginning of new campaign can cause horrible consequences in future. And everyone likes these stories, but it caused bad aftermath: usually it’s important to keep all PCs alive (otherwise, their stories won’t work properly) so players feel it, and PCs acts like they are completely invulnerable. So, then I had an idea…

The story starts in a prison. PCs wake up in a torture room, without any idea what has happened. Then, a couple of masked guards interrogate them to pull out some info – of course, our PCs have no idea about it. After some pointless discussion, guards admit, that their worst fears are true and our PCs have drunk potion of amnesia, that totally cleared their memory. But they have a chance to regain it, by simply remembering every aspect of their past few days together, and tell this important info. Otherwise, if PCs don’t want to cooperate, guards can simply torture them before their memory regains or before they change opinion about cooperation. Lying is pointless, one of the guards is an inquisitor (or sort of) and can detect lies. So, PCs actually have no way to avoid cooperation, and then a real story starts.

Real story starts in a week before imprisonment, like a normal quest. But, if players would try to use their knowledge about future (“Why don’t we abandon our new quest? Why don’t we find a way to avoid drinking amnesia potion?”), guards in reality would tell them that it couldn’t happen, because they are already in this situation. Plus, if somebody dies in battle (TIME PARADOX), guards would say: “No way, he sits here. He is pretty much alive, so obviously your story is a fake, you try to fool us. Maybe some torturing or breaking part of your equipment would make you feel more obedient”, then we roll dice, penalty goes and after some humiliation PCs can replay battle.

So, in this game PCs can’t die, but every fight they would feel real fear about losing their staff or even losing their parts.

So, the question is:
1) What do you think about my idea? What weak sides can you see?
2) Are there any modules or storylines with the same story structure?
3) Are there any forums or discussions about similar story structure? Every time I tried to search “pathdinder/dnd story interrogation/amnesia” words I found nothing appropriate.

I hope I didn't violate any rules of this forum, sorry if something is out of joint.

[W E Ray]

It's not uncommon.

Immediately (Like, right now before you read the post) check out volume 1 of the Strange Aeons Adventure Path, "In Search of Sanity." It is AWESOME. The PCs awaken from a nightmare locked in a cell, stuck an insane asylum with complete amnesia. They have to get out of their cells and explore the (recently overrun by monsters) asylum. At some point in their exploration of the asylum they can find records of how they were admitted to the hospital -- and their names -- but their histories remain a mystery. The Adventure Path that follows does include their histories a bit. Think of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall.
In Search of Sanity on the Wiki
In Search of Sanity on Paizo to Buy plus comments

Another AP to consider / take-a-look-at is Gatewalkers in which the PCs -- and many NPCs -- lost their memories when they mysteriously walked into magical Portals that appeared not long ago. Everyone who stared at The Lights from the Portals lost their memories and was missing off the face of the world for days or weeks and is marked with a birthmark-like tattoo. It's medium-okay as Adventure Paths go -- but can give a DM some ideas for designing something similar. Or, you know, used as-is.
Gatewalkers

Finally, there is a Great adventure from when Paizo first started Pathfinder after WotC killed D&D and cancelled the Magazines. It's 3.5 but it is Spectacular! It's called "Hangman's Noose" and takes place in Absalom. The PCs awaken in an abandoned, ruined courthouse courtroom with a few other PCs. The place is haunted. And the PCs have to figure out what's going on. It's not an amnesia situation but there is still a very interesting mystery regarding PC backgrounds that must be solved.
Hangman's Noose

Hope this helps!

And WELCOME To The BOARDS!

[W E Ray]

Volume 1 of Tyrant's Grasp AP, "The Dead Roads," opens with the PCs -- and a whole village -- awakening from death in Limbo, awaiting their Afterlife to begin. The PCs have no idea how they (and the whole village) died. At first they're not even sure that they're dead. The Dead Roads

In the past handful of years I had a Player design his Paladin PC with amnesia -- his PC was found in the Jeggare River floating into Korvosa. He thought it'd be fun to play that PC.

I ran a PC in a Temple of Elemental Evil campaign a couple years ago who was sent to ToEE from the Lawful Evil Empire (The Great Kingdom of Aerdy -- sorta original Cheliax) to fight the CE Demons in ToEE. So my backstory was that when I was just on the outskirts of where the campaign begins my PC saw a lady frolicking in the river and, as a LE PC I told her she had to pay a Toll to frolic in the river. The lady turned out to be the Paladin goddess Mayaheine (exactly the same goddess as Iomedae but in Greyhawk) and she zapped me down from 10th Level to 1st and erased my memories and took all my magic items. I liked the backstory and we had to come up with something to explain why I have so much knowledge of ToEE -- my PC's flashbacks and occasional fragmented memories -- I mean, I've DMed and played through ToEE quite a few times since the 1980s so we had to come up with something. Even with the DM changing quite a bit of the adventure details and such.

Also, something I've done a few times over the decades is have the PCs awaken in a closed box, unsure what's going on. They break out and realize they're in coffins in a tomb. They have no idea how they were buried alive or what's going on.

So yeah, not uncommon. Lots of ways to play with the idea. And it can make for VERY fun gaming!

[LunarVale]

So to restate your intended "loss" mechanic in a different way:

If the PCs fail to achieve victory (or get pushed into a situation where one of them dies in a way that they can't save them), then you intend to impose a penalty and then make them redo the fight they just "failed."

This seems like a bad recipe. If the battle is relatively even, then it is, of course, possible that even if you impose a penalty on the PCs, they'll still be able to achieve victory due to a combination of dice variance and foreknowledge of the fight, but is redoing the same fight (and with less power as a "punishment") actually enjoyable in any way?

This goes against both my instinct and my mentality as a GM. The punishment for losing a fight (regardless of whether that's a TPK, a single character death, failing to protect something, or any other number of complex objectives) should generally be that the fight is lost. You are still removing consequences from the equation. Like, let's say the party repeatedly wipes/dies, so you keep imposing penalties. Now they're in a state where you either need to make the fight easy enough to win (showing that the penalties you imposed mean nothing and were as arbitrary as they appear to be), or you can just end the campaign (and if you wanted to do that, you ostensibly wouldn't be running it in the first place).

It feels like you're intentionally setting yourself up for a players vs. GM scenario, the kind of thing you should never be trying to do. If you're telling a story like this (especially where the outcome is that the party must reach a predetermined outcome that you decided), then it's extremely important to have the mental and emotional buy-in of everyone else at the table. No amount of "logical failsafes" are going to protect you from players wanting to be disruptive to that goal if the players don't like it and don't want to work toward it.

Having made those critiques, every table is different, and it isn't like I personally know your table. Many GMs make unlikely campaign gambits succeed...but I personally see parts of your setup as being inadvisable, or would at least recommend rethinking how they're presented. The amnesia introduction doesn't feel like a bad hook, but the specific implementation of trying to "force" them to return to that point feels very bad to me. If I were trying to run a scenario exactly like this (though I think I probably wouldn't), I'd tell the players straight up that in order to make this campaign work, they need to be willing to "complete the story" and connect the beginning to the end, and get a feel for what everyone thinks of that idea, and if they have any concerns. If everyone is having fun, then it's a successful campaign at the end of the day.

[W E Ray]

There is also the adventure from Dungeon, "Zenith Trajectory." It is closer to the specific 'Railroad' you're describing in that the PCs are captured by Kua Toa and imprisoned in their Underdark city. The adventure is intended to be a thematic and exhaustively atmospheric homage to Apocalypse Now and I certainly went all-in on that atmosphere 20 years ago. "Zenith Trajectory" is like, chapter 3 or 4 of 'The Shackled City' Adventure Path so it's like, issue 102 or 103. There's no amnesia element but it does have the other elements you're going for -- 'Put the PCs away without equipment.' Of course, for that *specifically* one goes back to the original A4 from 1980. Anyway, keep us up to date on your thoughts and plans.

[q556]

WOW, so many answers, thank you!)

W E Ray wrote:

Anyway, keep us up to date on your thoughts and plans.

Thank you for so many examples!) In Search of Sanity and Hangman's Noose – checked, The Dead Roads in progress, Gatewalkers and Zenith Trajectory in plans.

In that modules there are plenty ideas how to work with amnesia, but there is another aspect – according to my idea, PCs would spent most of the time telling their story. So, have you seen any modules with a storyteller? Like a narator, who tells a story, when PCs are just characters?

LunarVale wrote:

If the PCs fail to achieve victory (or get pushed into a situation where one of them dies in a way that they can't save them), then you intend to impose a penalty and then make them redo the fight they just "failed."

Like, let's say the party repeatedly wipes/dies, so you keep imposing penalties. Now they're in a state where you either need to make the fight easy enough to win (showing that the penalties you imposed mean nothing and were as arbitrary as they appear to be), or you can just end the campaign (and if you wanted to do that, you ostensibly wouldn't be running it in the first place).

Well, my idea works in a different way: PCs are sitting in a prison on an interrogation and discuss their past to regain lost memories step by step. For players it looks like a normal game (“I go there, I do this, I say that…”), but if some PC dies, PCs jump from their memories to a reality and guards put penalty on a PC in a prison. So, these penalties won’t make battles more complicated, they would affect PCs after the end of an interrogation (at the very end of a campaign). This way, PC can’t die during walkthrough, but they would always be afraid to meet really tough penalty.

It’s like in TV show True detective – two retired cops are giving interview about their service, the whole plot is their story, but at the very end interview ends and then real action goes.
Sorry, if my previous post caused misunderstanding of some sort.

LunarVale wrote:

This goes against both my instinct and my mentality as a GM.

It feels like you're intentionally setting yourself up for a players vs. GM scenario

Actually, same with me, and that’s one of a reason I started this thread.

I understand, that it would be pretty harsh on a players, but there were two reasons behind it. First of all, I wanted to try some new ideas with plot structure. I can jump between past and reality, asking PCs additional questions or giving them additional info on an interrogation that would affect their experience and provide additional feelings to a story. Guards can drop lines that would be spoilers for PCs, to make players more intrigued. I can make additional subplot, where our PCs have some free time between interrogations and trying to break free from prison - anyway, the more I think about it, the more ideas I can see.
Second reason was mentioned above – our PCs act like they are completely invulnerable.
I felt that something goes very wrong when I heard a phrase from my player: «We meet enemies. We fight them. We kill them. If we can’t kill them, It’s DM’s fault that we can’t».
Then I spent plenty of time explaining, that their victories/loses is a result of their planning/tactical thinking/dice rolling/and choices who they want to fight. And there are options to give up/surrender/run away/ask for mercy – this would also work. And this world doesn’t revolve around you, if you decide to cross your line with someone out of your level – you will be dead.
Anyway, we have passed hard part and went forward, but I’m not sure everyone understood it. That’s why, for my opinion, some “players vs. GM scenario” wouldn’t hurt this party.

[LunarVale]

q556 wrote:

WOW, so many answers, thank you!)

LunarVale wrote:

If the PCs fail to achieve victory (or get pushed into a situation where one of them dies in a way that they can't save them), then you intend to impose a penalty and then make them redo the fight they just "failed."

Like, let's say the party repeatedly wipes/dies, so you keep imposing penalties. Now they're in a state where you either need to make the fight easy enough to win (showing that the penalties you imposed mean nothing and were as arbitrary as they appear to be), or you can just end the campaign (and if you wanted to do that, you ostensibly wouldn't be running it in the first place).

Well, my idea works in a different way: PCs are sitting in a prison on an interrogation and discuss their past to regain lost memories step by step. For players it looks like a normal game (“I go there, I do this, I say that…”), but if some PC dies, PCs jump from their memories to a reality and guards put penalty on a PC in a prison. So, these penalties won’t make battles more complicated, they would affect PCs after the end of an interrogation (at the very end of a campaign). This way, PC can’t die during walkthrough, but they would always be afraid to meet really tough penalty.

It’s like in TV show True detective – two retired cops are giving interview about their service, the whole plot is their story, but at the very end interview ends and then real action goes.
Sorry, if my previous post caused misunderstanding of some sort.

Nah, don't worry about it. The confusion was on my part, anyway. With this explanation of the exact mechanism and the thought process behind it, I can say that I can get way more behind this. I think that I'd enjoy playing in such a campaign, but it does have one major stumbling block that I'm seeing now. In a sense, it's not that bad of a problem, but if you normally allow your players enough freedom to "get into trouble" and make their own decisions, this often means that they can get into situations with no possible good outcome. From the way you describe it, I get the feeling that this isn't a normal situation in the group you play in, but my point is, whatever point you rewind them to after they fail and the interrogation progresses, you need to make sure that you give them enough room to make reasonable choices to get out of their current situation. You don't necessarily need tightly-balanced encounters, but for example, if they accidentally awaken a sleeping ancient dragon at 3rd Level, restarting the fight isn't going to be enough to help them; you'd obviously need to wind back to before they ever woke it up (or before they made a social faux pas, if it wasn't planning to attack them, etc.).

Personally, I don't agree with the mentality of the players at your table, and I think it's fairly unlikely I'd derive much deep enjoyment out of GMing for them, but just because I don't share that philosophy doesn't mean they're playing wrong. It isn't something I like or encourage, but it isn't expressly my job as a GM to tell other people the "proper" way to enjoy the game. Maybe you will try, and you will be effective, and everyone will be better for it (if no one even attempts to change course, it can never happen, right?), but it could also end up in a disaster in which you are trying to provide an experience they just aren't interested in. I can say that with your additional explanation, though, I'd personally be up for it as a player. I think it sounds fun, and the mentality you're describing at the end of your post is exactly how I prefer to GM — but I also acknowledge that every table forms a unique group of players, and every unique group of players needs a slightly (or significantly) different touch from the GM to bring out the best possible sessions.

Editing in an afterthought as I reread my post: I know I suggested it before, but I still think the best way to accomplish this goal is to talk through this with your players and open up a discussion about what you think is valuable in the game, and why you think the way they presently go about things isn't ideal. You aren't particularly likely to change anyone's mind by "punishing" what you consider to be the wrong approach to tabletop roleplaying. But you could instead choose to explain your perspective and why you think that a change of course would do everyone good and help establish stakes and meaning in the story. Players at my tables will run away from 20-30% of all the combats they get into (and generally favor avoiding combat whenever possible), but they understand I don't pull punches and they savor that. If someone doesn't agree with or like that kind of game, though, they're just going to think you're ruining their (and possibly everyone's) fun for no reason. There are games of all kinds of difficulties in the world because there are people who like to experience all ranges of opposition, from the extremely easy and simple to the ruthless and cruel with permanent consequences.