World Ending Game, and Losing

World Ending Game is an RPG about what it says on the tin. It is, quote: “a falling-action game. Many existing game systems excel at climactic final battles or big-stakes adventures, but don’t allow you to sit in the aftermath, thinking about all that has come before and imagining what could come after. World Ending Game is a tool to let you do just this.”

The game is mostly comprised of minigames, called Endings. They allow the players to narrate and resolve the overarching story. It gives the players time to say goodbye, rather than deal with the abrupt smash-cut ending that most campaigns provide. World Ending Game is the denouement session to everything that came before it.

This brings up the interesting point that World Ending Game starts with a concrete assumption: it assumes that you won the game, whatever that means. It assumes that your players reached a climax of a sort, that the whole party didn’t die halfway to the bad-guy’s castle, or that their ship didn’t break apart due to an errant cloud of spaceship-acid.

When talking about Mothership I brought up the idea that death could be the “easy way out” of punishing a player, and there were a lot of ways to portray failure without ending the player’s ability to play the game…but what if they just lose?

Some RPG players scoff at even asking the question, similar to how we laugh at the idea of “winning” in an RPG. You don’t “win” or “lose” the same way as you do in other games. It’s not about winning or losing.

In a very real way, you can’t lose.

In The Property of Hate, by Sarah Jolley, the character RGB tells their companion how they started their journey to find a Hero to save the world of dreams in which they live. They found one, brought him back to the world of dreams, and the hero failed.

But RGB did not give up, and they explain why with a simple story of a great monster. “Many tried to defeat the monster and failed,” the story goes, until a hero comes and slays the monster once and for all, and here the story ends. “But what of the others who tried and failed?” Do their stories not matter? Because there is one truth that RGB knows above all else, and that is the story doesn’t end until the hero succeeds.

A macabre idea, isn’t it? But surely, that’s all that survivor’s bias is; the story only pays attention to the one who survives.

But you might fail. That’s the point of a game; you might win or lose. If the players win the game, there is no conflict: the story and game end in tandem. But if the players lose, then there was no story. If the player’s can’t lose, there is no game.

This puts RPGs in an impossible loop, and I think goes far to logically proving a perfect blend of story and game is impossible; that one side must always win out. If we are playing a game, then the story only matters insofar as it’s a framing device; a means of contextualizing all the die rolls and stat-bonuses that pervade our chosen hobby. On the other hand, if we’re telling a story then the game is only there to limit us and provide structure for our ideas, to say “no” when we improvise a solution or try and implement our first plan. For those who know improv games, dice are the perpetual “new choice” of RPGs.

So, as bizarre a question as it may seem, I honestly think one of the most important questions you can ask your gaming group is: Can we lose?

Perhaps you can. Perhaps your players will feel just as satisfied at losing a game as winning it, so long as the process itself is fun. Perhaps they enjoy the tension that rises from not knowing if all their effort might be for naught. Consider the people who enjoy difficult perma-death games like hard-core roguelikes. Grimdark games have a tone that almost demand the ever-present threat of your corpse rotting on a desert plain.

Of course, there are ways of making this kind of risk easier. RPG campaigns tend to be long affairs, lasting anywhere from twenty to forty sessions or even more. That’s a lot of time to invest in something and I have no judgment for those who want that kind of investment to amount to a satisfying conclusion. Death in a shorter adventure, say no more than two or three sessions, might not seem like as much of a loss.

At the same time, “losing” an RPG is a bit of a squishy concept. If one or two characters die, a GM can have the players create new characters and bring them into the adventure next session. They haven’t “lost,” per se, just inconvenienced.

What happens if everyone dies? A bad die roll sends everyone falling into a bottomless pit…and then what? A new band of adventurers walks out of the mists with the same clues and important keys as the dead party? If the party fails to stop the Foozle from completing the ritual to summon the Immortal Deathbringer that then stomps them all flat…

If it was a video game you would reload, because permanently losing in a video game is usually not an option. At best, you might get a “bad ending” and strong encouragement to try again. RPGs don’t have that; there are no save-states and certainly no incentives to play the same adventure again and again to “get it right.”

So what about the alternative? What about those people who want to tell a story destined for success? Is there still enjoyment to be had in playing a game you know you have no option but to win?

Of course there is. Stories are never just about the destination, but the journey. Much like the difference between “good” and “bad” endings in a video game, lossless games can still have major differences between endings.

Consider the story of thwarting the Foozle where now the entire land is laid to waste, with disordered bands of monsters ravaging the poor peasantry. Or perhaps the Foozle’s threat was the only thing keeping the fragile alliance together, and now the power vacuum is escalating tensions. Or the Foozle kills one of the party. Or the Foozle dies quickly and cleanly. Or the Foozle escapes. There are thousands of ways that games with clear and inescapable endings are allowed to have scales of victory.

One of the more interesting experiences in games of all kinds is the pyrrhic victory; a victory which causes more damage to the victor than the vanquished. In strategic games it can manifest as a gnawing regret, a sense that “though I won the game, I don’t feel good about how I won.” It could mean success because of luck rather than strategy, or a tactic that worked but utilized a valuable asset inefficiently. It could even be something as simple as “I never got to cast my super-spell.”

This can manifest narratively as well. Perhaps the hired mercenaries all died, the hometown was crushed, or a beloved’s heart is broken. If the game must end with a victory, there is nothing that says the journey must also be riddled with them.

And all of this is predicated on a narrative structure with an ultimate goal. You can’t “lose” a sandbox game, really; there is no “final boss,” only a wide horizon and a multitude of challenges. You might fumble a combat or fail at a challenge, but the only “losing scenario” is when the players decide the game is over, either astride a slain dragon or looking out over their kingdom.

There are a lot of different ways of ending a game, intentionally or otherwise. As always, a careful conversation between your players will help make sure everyone walks away happy.

And sometimes that means an extra session. Giving your players time to let go of the world and the characters can be a helpful come-down from the climactic high, letting them dwell for a moment in the slowly falling action. They may learn a few final things, tie up a few loose ends, finally learn if they-will-or-they-won’t, and come to a singular final resolution.

But if you lose, then the story wasn’t about you, was it? As RGB says, “Stories do not care about heroes. All you need is one more hero to keep the story alive.”

That’s the narrative answer, at any rate. What about the system answer? What happens when the dice decide the game is over?

Next time, we’ll look at a game that does exactly that.