Recently, while I had played through a majority of the fantastic video game Alien: Isolation, I had never quite managed to complete it. Not wanting to play all the way through it yet again just to see the last hour or so of content, I decided to watch someone else do it on YouTube. Imagine my surprise to find that, while I thoroughly enjoyed the mechanics, story, plot of the rest of the game, that the ending went 180 degrees back in the other direction and I hated it.
What does this have to do with RPGs? Upon seeing the ending, I realized that as a DM, I need to make sure I don't give my PCs the same short stick of an ending, as well as warning my fellow DMs away from same ending. Don't get me wrong, the ending of A:I is fantastic... for a book, or a movie, or a TV show, especially one that you want to leave a cliffhanger to grab everyone's attention before you continue the story at a later date. I guess it would work for an RPG as well, but you better have the next part of the story ready to tell your players or you'll be facing an empty table.
I've been talking about the ending of the game in vague generalities of A:I's ending, but now it's time to slap on a big old *SPOILER WARNING* and get down to particulars. If you haven't finished the game yourself, or never played it, you are the daughter of Ellen Ripley, our heroine from many of the good Alien movies, and some of the so-so ones as well. As Ellen's kid, you haven't heard from her in 15 years and everyone thinks she and the crew of the Nostromo are lost to the depths of space. A corporate flunky from Weyland-Yutani (company that sent the Nostromo to LV-426 to find the xenomorphs in the first place) brings word that your mom's flight recorder had been recovered and is at a remote outpost on the edge of civilization. You head out there to find the outpost (a space dock hovering above a gas giant, where they are mining the clouds for useful materials) is in ruins and hardly anyone aboard her is alive. You make it onto the station to find that not only did they find your mom's flight recorder, but they also found the xenomorphs, which have been rampaging around the outpost, killing almost everyone. Oh, and the artificial intelligence running the outpost has been corrupted by Weyland-Yutani, and is working to feed as many humans to the xenomorphs to make more alien nasties.
With me so far? So you fight through the humans who don't trust you as an outsider and want to kill you; fight through the AI robots trying to kill you to protect the xenomorphs; and avoid the xenomorphs, cause you can't kill them, they're too tough and nasty. Finally, after crawling through, and over, and around, and past all of the above, you manage to send the outpost into the gas giant, narrowly escaping back to the ship you came out here on, way back at the beginning of the game. You breathe a sigh of relief and head for the bridge, not even bothering to doff your EVA suit. Of course, when you reach the bridge, one last xenomorph is there to greet you. Here's the part that I think makes it a bad ending - the game makes you do little button presses, quick time events is what they're called, as you back away from the alien. This doesn't matter a bit, you either fail to do the button presses and die, or succeed in doing them, only to get blown into space where you are dead. Or alive. Because that's where the game ends - Ripley the younger floating in space, her status questionable. Lights out, scroll the credits.
Fantastic cliffhanger, don't mistake me, but if there is never any follow up, even just to tell us that character is dead, it's a bad ending. And that is what we you get with this video game, as the creators expected it to sell like gangbusters that they could make a sequel or some DLC to continue, the game never sold well enough for that. So that is your reward for playing all the way through the game, an uncertain fate for your character. When failure is the only option (the ending of the game, as it stands, is you failed, you struggled your hardest and the best that got you was a slow death while your oxygen runs out in the vacuum of space), you could have ended it at any other point. Empire Strikes Back is arguably the best of the Star Wars trilogy, but it would have been the worst if there never was a Return of the Jedi to follow on its heels. Don't get me wrong, you have to have danger and potential for failure, but when your two final options are death or possibly dead with a side helping of ambiguity, why did we do this again?
Of course, this brings me back to the other side of the spectrum, where the only options are utter success with a side of tickertape parades and fame, fortune and all the rest, or success with a pat on the head and a hearty "good job!" If there is no chance for failure, why did we do this again? This, actually, is a lesson I'm teaching the players in my 5e game, and it is a hard set of ideas that I am having to pound through their skulls.
At the table, you have to balance these two extremes - you can't just kill off the party (so easy to do as a DM/GM/what-have-you, just throw everything in the Monster Manual at them at the same time, and they will die), but you can't throw underwhelming forces that the party easily overcomes without any real work on their part, either. That is the dilemma of the modern DM, and why the CR system in 5e being broken and unreliable is so frustrating. Not, really, that the 3e/3.5 CR system was much better, so maybe this is harder than we first imagined it to be.
One last note before I go - A:I does have a continuation coming out. Dark Horse Comics is releasing later on in 2019 a sequel comic book series entitled Aliens: Resistance. So we do know that at least Ripley the daughter survives the jettison into space. See? Suddenly A:I doesn't look all that bad with its ending, but it takes the follow on story to turn a bad ending into a good one. Be good to your players, Masters of Games, and don't kill them off too easy but don't let them win too easy, either.
