As Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard, you have guided your unlikely flock through several adventures, from shootouts at The Citadel to scaling Peak 15 at Noveria. You’ve gotten to know them. Maybe even flirted a bit.
Then you set out for the assault on the bad guy’s base on the planet Vermire. At the end of the mission, the game gives you a heart-wrenching choice: two of your crew, Kaiden and Ashley, are each in mortal danger and you must choose which to save.
This type of narrative choice became my guiding light through the endgame of my last campaign – but it took me a while to get there. Here’s how that happened and what I learned along the way.
The campaign, for Dungeons and Dragons, was set in Eberron. For the last arc I introduced a demon invasion in the city of Sharn, home to hundreds of thousands of people.
Just prior to this I had bought Band of Blades, another RPG, after our group had taken a detour though the magnificent Blades in the Dark, which shares similar mechanics. Band of Blades has a mission system that gives players serious choices right off the bat.
They are given three possible missions, each with their own rewards for success and penalties for failure. One, they tackle themselves. For the second, they send some allied troops and the mission is resolved with a dice roll off-screen. The third mission is an automatic fail.
At first this seemed like a perfect way to tell the story of a demon invasion – since Band of Blades has you on the run from an undead army, all I had to do was tweak the tables, right?
Not quite. Band of Blades has several mechanics the tie into the mission rewards and penalties to do with managing morale, supplies and time in the face of pressure from the undead. Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t have that – so to use the tables I had to reflavour and repurpose them.
The first time I used this system was, to use a Monster of the Week reference, a mixed success. It did work, which was gratifying. The players had to make a fun, meaningful decision on whether to save the train station, save the police headquarters or investigate a strange portal. (They picked the portal.) I kept the locations and encounters simple and had the same roster of demons to pick from, to avoid massive over-preparing.
Then … it started to get complicated when I was preparing the next batch of three missions. I realized that I was going to have to homebrew a lot of rules and mechanics to account for everything Band of Blades brings to the table. I wanted to make things easier, not harder.
Then I remembered Virmire.
I stripped away the three mission structure with the off-screen mission automatic fail mission. Instead, I presented two missions – the players would go on both, but would pick which to do first. That would then influence the range of possible outcomes. The one they went on first had better odds of being a complete success, while the second one would come with complications even if they completed it.
If they chose to rescue Insp. Lestrade first, he would be alive. If they went to rescue him second he wouldn’t survive, but the players would still be able to foil the demons’ plans that required the information he had.
If they investigated the train station first, they’d have better odds rescuing one of the fallen paladin’s leading the demons from the mind flayer. As it turned out, they secured the train station – but the mind flayer escaped, consumed the paladin’s brain and would show up later to cause more problems.
As board game reviewer Quintin Smith has said, the hallmark of any good game is interesting choices. If you want to give that to your players without having to prepare a whack of extra content you might not use, my advice is to remember Virmire.
Into the Fray 