(This post has spoilers for Rotted Capes episode 16: The Vault)
There are lots of words to describe Goldshot. Cat burglar. Fashionista. Misanthrope. Selfish. Loyal. But perhaps number one is survivor.
Really, most characters in Rotted Capes deserve that term – after all, the whole pitch of the game is to play the super powered survivors of the zombie apocalypse, but sometimes it feels like Torchlight, Shepherd, and Sentry (or whatever he’ll call himself now!) survive in spite of themselves. Those three run into danger because they are heroes, and survive because they are good at their jobs.
Goldshot actively runs away from fights that aren’t in her favor. She hides resources. She splits the party!
Goldshot is not a good hero. And so while it was tons of fun playing a street-level cat burglar surrounded by people with legit superpowers (or magic mimicking powers), the time finally came to retire her for good.
I’ve been thinking about retiring Goldshot for over a year now. She just increasingly didn’t feel like she fit with the story of the other characters, and the last thing I wanted to do is end up playing the asshole and defending it by saying, “I’m just playing my character!†So Jesus and I have been looking for ways to write her off for awhile now.
When we sat down to play The Vault, I actually didn’t know how it would go. I told Jesus this would probably be Goldshot’s swan song, but didn’t want to go in with that being a foregone conclusion. I wanted her send-off to feel earned, and Jesus did in fact set it up perfectly (though oh man it would have been hilarious if Billy had never used that mirror to reverse her. That was an excellent artifact to put in front of Goldshot).
Playing a character whose whole ideology is essentially at odds with the rest of the party is a difficult needle to thread. Maybe it’s a bit easier if you lie about it for a year (David, I’m looking at you), but openly being antagonistic to the goals of the group is hard! You want to tell a compelling story for your character without standing in the way of everyone else’s. And ultimately, it was going to be difficult to continue to tell a compelling story for Goldshot when her goal was “stay put, don’t take risks.â€
That’s not what PCs are about, after all.
So I’m very happy Goldshot got one last adventure, and then sent off to a peaceful world without magic or zombies or anything weirder than cosplayers and baseball teams sponsored by Jack Stallyn. Selling off those magic-less precious gems from the skull is going to give her a nice nest egg to get started in this strange new world, but I’m sure that she’ll get back to her old tricks soon enough. She wanted to be safe, not boring after all.
Both the comments on the last episode and our Patreon Discord have been filled with excellent character suggestions for me to pick up next. I wish I could use QUINN’S facility to clone myself and play all of them! But since I can only play one, I’ve already statted out the new character (that’s a date night for Billy and I these days!), and can’t wait for you to meet her. I think she’ll introduce a fun dynamic to the party, and she has an ultimate goal that really couldn’t be more different than Goldshot’s.
In the comments, I’d love to hear about your beloved characters who retired before the end of a campaign! What happened to your character, and why did you choose to change it up?
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I would like to say that I really enjoyed how you played Goldshot. I think she was a fantastic character. That being said I understand that sometimes a character would not continue in a game because it is not in their nature.
For me that character was my cleric of Fflangan (I am sure I have spelt that wrong) the god of luck and travel in the Greyhawk campaign.
I was playing this cleric in the Living Greyhawk campaign, (really the first time not playing in a home campaign, but at cons and such). This was the old D&D 3e rules and I was interstate at a con at a big RPGA convention in Australia playing the special.
Well things was not going well and I could of run, but when a PC got themselves trapped behind the big bad, I stayed, because thats what you do as a hero.
We died.
It was at a con and the table was on of the specials, so we had a lot of onlookers. They are all going, hey, all good just get a raise dead. They could not understand that as a Cleric of the god of Travel I was not coming back. I have travelled the living world, not it was time to travel the multiverse with my god.
Although it meant loosing my 9th level character and starting again at 1st level in a organised play campaign, it is what my cleric would have done. It felt right.
Anyway again that’s for the fun we got to listen too with Goldshot. I hope she enjoys her retirement and look forward in seeing who her replacement is.
Dean