Aghori wrote:
Naveh, if you are still familiar with the Hârn setting.
Sure I remember Naveh. And all of Hârn, very fondly so.
Aghori wrote:
Maybe he has to sacrifice himself to kill the mage.
Yes! That’s the — or at least one – way to go!
Doomed can come in many shapes and guises, I was just talking about having the Devil out to drag you screaming down to Hell as this seemed appropriate for your case. And as the
PC had already scored some victories I was not talking about avoiding the doom – I felt he has already have had enough success – but only about dying, for sure.
When you have the Devil, or Naveh, as it were, out to get you, you don’t play for killing Naveh, that’s just a preposterous idea. The Devil™ simply is not killed, and when your Doom is of that kind you strive to avoid the Devil and run from the Devil and somehow appease the Devil or hide from him permanently, but that’s as good as it gets. And the Devil may well destroy you before you manage any of those goals – but when he does, you can go down gloriously, defiantly. I’d say that the chance for being undone by this kind of Doom should be no less than
50%, the referee should really not just make it hard for the
PC to evade the Devil, but hard to an unfair, overwhelming degree.
Another kind of Doom, and related to that and your idea, may be sacrificing yourself to achieve something. Like any kind of Doom, this needs to be discussed at chargen between player and referee. You can reach an understanding that the character has a decent chance to achieve some normally impossible task – say, killing, forever and for good, Sauron –, but that he will not survive it. Then you play with this ultimate goal in mind, guiding the plot communally to this opportunity to sacrifice yourself to slay Sauron.
One player of mine had a somewhat lame Doom, but as it sprang from a cool backstory I’ll share it nevertheless: He was inspired by Elric of Melniboné, and like Elric, his character had played a (
the, actually) key part in completely obliterating his native nation and culture and people. About
1% of his people had survived and those ten thousand or so survivors were now scattered in a diaspora all over the world, and howling for the
PC’s blood. Cool background, but lame Doom, but an example for a Doom that is survivable, even though with difficulty.
Another basically lame Doom is the mortal sickness. It becomes truly lame when the
PC is racing against time to find a cure for it, even though this would still qualify as a Doom, if the referee plays it really mercilessly. Better is the version where the
PC races to accomplish some other task before he dies, and I have had a very successful game like that, that revolved not around escaping death, but about using the remaining time well. The way I run something like this is like that: After the third and every subsequent session I openly roll d
12, informing the player what it is for. If it comes up
12, the
PC will die the next session.
The coolest Doom I came about ever was when one player really wanted to play a truly vile bastard, the rightly infamous captain of an infamous mercenary company, a bastard standing out even among other bastards. As playing a vile fleck of phlegm might be fun for a time but isn’t in the long run the player made the most of it by “Dooming” the character. He wanted a Doom where the
PC would be killed by a survivor of an atrocity he had committed, and stipulated that the killer either had to be a cripple, a person in his dotage, or a child or young teenager – in other words somebody who is no match for the
PC. And so the big bad bastard whose name was used by mothers of disobedient children all over the world as the bogeymen was undone by a thirteen year old girl, and we all thought that it was no more than he deserved – and that, too, was an application of “Doomed”.