Lose Something?

Player: I’m going to light my torch.

GM: You look for your torch and realize that it’s missing.

Player: What? You can’t do that!

GM: You just got sucked up in a tornado.

Player: So?

GM: And then were dumped into a river with raging rapids.

Player: So?

GM: Don’t you think something could fall out of your pack?

Player: No way, I always tie my pack up securely. That’s not fair.

There are certain things that traditional RPGs just don’t handle very well. One of those things is losing equipment. Even the smallest coin seems like it should be safe no matter what happens because it’s written on the player’s character sheet.

Now usually it would be bad form for a GM to arbitrarily declare that a player just suddenly doesn’t have something. For one, it impacts the player’s agency. They feel like their influence on the game is reduced and even if they understand why the story is benefited by loosing an item, it still seems wrong.

What if the GM has a great story that would be based on an item being lost and the players trying to retrieve it? What if the item is effecting game balance and it really needs to go away? What’s a GM to do?

The Bargain

The nice thing about being a GM is that you can make your own rules when you need to. You don’t want to disregard rules, but players don’t usually mind a new rule especially if they think it benefits them.

One way to structure a rule to have a player lose something is to have it happen because of player agency. You will allow the player to choose to lose an item. It’s just that you don’t have to present it that way.

Player: Arg! I missed my roll by 1! The dice hate me!

GM: I’ll give you a plus one to that roll but it means you’ll suffer a disadvantage. (Trying not to grin too broadly)

Player: Wait, what does that mean?

GM: You’ll have to find out. It means you’ll pass your roll though.

Now the success of this bargain depends on how important that roll is. The player knows that an open ended bargain with the GM is trouble but if they really want success they may bite at your bait.

The next important step is to really give them a nice reward for choosing to go with your bargain. Narrate how passing that roll ended up being important to the group. This way when you spring the result of your bargain on them they’ll remember their success and say “Well at least it was worth it, I did save the group.”

If the goal is that you just want an item to go away, it may even make sense to say that it was damaged when the character used the bonus to their roll and that’s what made the bonus possible. Maybe they swung extra hard and the sword broke, they fired too long and the barrel of their gun melted, they passed their defense roll because the attack hit the item and destroyed it or whatever works with the situation. Be creative with the situation, this is an open ended opportunity to make something memorable happen.

Experienced or paranoid players may need a bit of reassurance to take the bait. They know that things can go wrong when they aren’t defended by the normal rules of the game. Don’t be dishonest about it, try to let them know the stakes without giving away the game. If they reject your first offer, sweeten the pot a little. Give them something else, like a situation that goes really well for them in a fight. If this second attempt fails, it’s likely that player is just spooked by the idea and will not take it.

One way to fix that situation is to show why they’d want to take the bargain with a different player. Offer a similar bargain to someone else, play up how useful taking the bargain was and give them a reasonable disadvantage later on. It doesn’t have to be losing an item, in fact it may help to come up with several different somewhat serious impacts that the player that took the bargain could have to deal with. They have to be reasonable though or no player will ever take the bargain again.

How would you deal with this situation? Have you ever needed to have a player lose something? Would your players take up a bargain like that? Let us know in the comments.