One truth about drama and good storytelling is that it allows its characters to run the gamut from lows to highs. As a GM of a TTRPG like Dungeons & Dragons, be sure to have your characters run that gamut–multiple times, if possible.

This idea applies to both emotions and abilities. Be sure to give the heroes awful news, crushing defeats, and shocking revelations on the way to great triumphs and glorious victories.

Put the Heroes in the Moment

For example, it’s one thing for your heroes to hear about a manor and village being destroyed by a fire-breathing dragon, but it’s something else to make them helpless 1st- or 2nd-level heroes while it happens around them. Their challenge for that adventure can simply be surviving and perhaps rescuing a child or heirloom. Now the heroes have a possible long-term goal: rise in power to take on that dirty dragon.

Similarly, let their victories be magnificent. This works best when things look bleak. Perhaps the 6th-level characters are fighting fire giants, the leader of whom wields a powerful–and appropriately huge–sword. The heroes are losing because they are over-matched and low on resources, but if the leader drops his sword on a natural 1, the ranger Dame Drianna may drag it away so the giant has to switch weapons… only she finds that the giant’s enormous sword shrinks to just her size. Now she has a magic sword and he doesn’t! The balance has suddenly shifted.

The Right Tool at the Right Time

Such things don’t have to be permanent. Potions and magic scrolls can give characters temporary abilities to defeat a villain or overcome an obstacle in grand style. Potions are good if you want it to be clear they need to use it on this adventure (if you say they expire), while scrolls last forever (almost), so you can seed the solution ahead of time and let them realize (with a hint) that they’ve got the solution already. (Altho it’s best if there’s a reason for that potion to exist apart from enabling the heroes to win.)

It’s actually better for the drama if such things are only temporary and become available (or obviously useful) at just the right moment. Again, you don’t need to force this to happen; just allow for the possibility enough times, and it will eventually happen thru happenstance and die rolls. Don’t try to tell a dramatic story so much as make it possible for a dramatic story to happen.

Likewise, a villain may use magic to make himself or herself temporarily unbeatable, and the heroes have to flee. (Make it very clear to the players that this is their only option or they may end up fighting to the death in a state of denial.) Then have the villain destroy the prize the heroes were after or carry if off or whatever. Wreck their hopes and dreams.

But…

In nearly every great story, the moment of hopelessness (at the end of act 2) is followed very quickly by a ray of light: a solution, a realization, or a secret key that unlocks the mystery or that otherwise sows the seeds for the heroes’ ultimate victory. Often, the two are directly linked: a once-trusted ally is revealed to be a spy… but knowing that simultaneously gives the heroes the information they need to find and defeat the villain. (“That’s why she was visiting Corvindale so often!”) Or the heroes discover the secret of the villain’s power and therefore how to disable it.

This mitigates the natural anger they’ll feel toward you for causing all this chaos and despair. If you go too far, they may mutiny. Finding when to pull back and give them a little victory in their darkest moment is not easy, so ramp up to it.

In Your Defeat There Lies a Secret Key

This technique is used regularly not just in movies but in computer games. Early encounters allow you to discover how things work. Later encounters require to use what you’ve learned and items you’ve gathered. Your first tries will usually fail, but they’ll allow you to realize why you failed… and therefore how to succeed. For example:

• You encounter minions of the Purple Priestess. But each time, their leader teleports away with a magic cloak.
• You eventually find letters and snippets of overheard conversation and figure out that the cloaks always take the user back to the Purple Priestess’ teleportation chamber.
• You finally encounter the Purple Priestess in her temple fortress, but she teleports away and turns the room into a death trap.
• You escape the death trap and rush to her teleportation chamber and catch her off-guard. Congratulations: you’ve used your hard-earned knowledge to give you an edge that will allow you to beat the villain even when things seem darkest.

Beat Them Down & Raise Them up

You can have such a thing depend on an “incident” die rolled in front of the players between adventures: a natural 1 means a disaster soon occurs. Or you can set it up so the heroes’ own action or inaction triggers the disaster, so the players have only themselves to blame. Or you can just ask the players directly to vote on a disaster to eventually befall them. Then you’re a little more sure to avoid hard feelings. But leave them guessing as to what, exactly, will cause the ruination.

• Their home city is sacked or destroyed by raiders, humanoids, or a dragon.
• A relative or mentor is kidnapped or killed by a noble, black knight, or vampire.
• The thing they’re protecting or seeking is lost to or destroyed by the villain.
• A place of beauty or refuge is destroyed.

Hollywood does this sort of thing so often that the most popular ones have become cliches. But if you never use them, you miss out on the very things that are timelessly popular. Worse, your players miss out on role-playing those moments and directly experiencing those feelings they normally only get vicariously when watching movies and TV.

You need to set these moments up properly for them to pay off. The heroes need a town they call home, a shady ally they like, a relative they’re obligated to. If you’re going to burn down their home, they need a tree they once etched their initials in that they can later find a smoking stump.

And you should foreshadow the disaster with sightings of a dragon, rumors about raiders, and so on.

Legendary Adventures

But what you do to them won’t be the things they remember most.

The most talked-about and remembered moments in RPGs are when the heroes come up with some crazy idea and carry it out to a wild conclusion. Consider it your job to enable those moments by setting them up to potentially ride dinosaurs into battle or have a chase on flying carpets thru a giant redwood forest or try to escape an enormous temple crumbling around them by rolling a natural 20 before you do in a high-speed, high-tension roll-off.

But those moments need to feel like they thought of them and drove them. They don’t want to ride your amusement park ride. They want to (at least feel they helped) build it, but you need to give them the tools.

And make those highs all the sweeter by fueling them with emotions of righteous vengeance for wicked wrongs against them personally. That orc horde burned down their home or, as mentioned previously, that dragon ate their dad. That vampire kidnapped their sister. That beholder killed their favorite NPC.