How do I keep my players from investing too much time in their doomed characters?

Question

I'm designing a campaign for a group of friends. One of the main plot hooks is a bunch of mercenaries that want to bring them to an oracle which gives them the first indication of the Big Bad. When they first encounter these mercenaries, I would prefer the players to trust them implicitly rather than have them go through three sessions determining if the mercenaries are lying this time.

I plan on having them start out in prison with secondary characters of their own. Their actual (campaign)characters would also be in this prison and be led away just before something happens to the prison. The players (as the secondary characters) would see this and when everything goes sideways, they meet the mercenaries who arrive too late to save the primary characters.

The players would have to try to get out of the prison, but it would be impossible for them to survive this -- thus these secondary characters perish -- after which they continue play as the primary characters.

This scenario gives them the chance to get to know the mercenaries under distress, which hopefully allows implicit trust when they meet them again later on. I know this is pretty railroady, but I prefer to DM that way in my first session of a new campaign, in order to make the setting clear.

Getting my players to make two characters is easy, but I would hate for them to spend the better half of a week making meaningful decisions about their character's backstories (they tend to do that) and then have them killed off in the first half of the first session. But, telling them that they don't have to bother, however, will spoil the whole story immediately since I tend to be pretty adamant about good backstories. That would cause them to not give a damn about the first character and the worst prison escape attempts are the ones where the person just rolls over.

How do I get them to invest enough time that they'll try hard enough to survive that they get to know the mercenaries, but little enough that they're OK with the character surviving less than a session?

The system is Starfinder and the setting is very loosely built on the one found in the Core Handbook.

Answer 1

Tell it to them straight

I see no reason not to just say: "These characters won't be around long, don't sweat the chargen too much". You can go hush-hush all you want, but it will all go down in the first session anyway.

You do not even give out spoilers with this. You do not have to say what happens to them or why. Revealing it will also let them know why do you not require as long a backstory for them as you do for other characters. And knowing this allows the players a bit of freedom too, to go overboard with personality quirks and such. You don't want to play a character with a stutter for 2 years, but it might be fun for 1-2 sessions.

Answer 2

Forget the disposable characters

“You have a long and trusting relationship with the Flaming Skies Mercenary Company. Here’s a summary of them. Work it into your backstory.”

Answer 3

Do you really have to kill these characters?

Since the players are already invested in them, it seems a shame to waste such a powerful hook.

Rather than killing them, putting them into some sort of long term peril rather that the main characters have to rescue them from gives you a ton of leverage for adding drama.

They'd still be removed from the game midway through the first session, but you'd hint to the players that if they play their cards right later in the story, they might be able to rescue them.

If it was me, I'd use them in little vignettes alongside the main campaign to drop contextual information to the players that their characters don't have.

Answer 4

Use Pregens

Pitch the doomed party as a 'session 0' of sorts and provide the players with pre-generated characters. You want to invest your time in a tangent to establish trustworthiness of an organization? Invest your time, not your players' creativity.

Players won't develop as much of an attachment to pregen characters and you can ensure that none of them have a spectacular way to escape (or that they do if you don't mind the pregen becoming an NPC, possibly a new recruit of a certain mercenary group?).

Answer 5

The issue you have is that you want them to be prepared to lose characters, but don't want them to know that they will be losing characters. By what little I can infer, your group rarely suffers from character deaths, so it would probably be very safe to say something like the following:

"This campaign will be a lot more dangerous than previous ones I've run, so character deaths will be much more likely."

This should readily prepare them, without you explicitly telling them that you're going to kill their characters. The difference in difficulty posed by having a more deadly world could also justify getting a TPK in the first session as well, meaning your players may never need to know that you intended for it to happen. Finally, it gives some further justification as to why you want them to prep multiple characters.

Answer 6

In a similar vein to Racheet's answer: I'm running a one-shot prior to a main campaign starting, which will culminate in some PCs "waking" the BBEG and (probably) getting killed/turned in the process. This is mostly to test my worldbuilding (it may be a non-starter) and give myself some hooks to get writing, but also for all of us to get comfortable in DnD 5e before embarking on a full campaign. To that end I've been up-front with the players and said:

"Look, these 4 PCs aren't intended to survive this one-shot so don't get too invested in them. They could survive and could return as NPCs/PCs, but if they do we'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

That way I've tried to give them some hope for the future without devaluing their time creating the PCs. In addition, this way I could have a survivor of the expedition the "main" PCs try to find for help, or some of the "throwaway" PCs ending up joining the BBEG, or some flee and become part of the "main" part forming when the main campaign starts, or a number of things I can work off later in the game. If the players still go off and spend weeks crafting an elegant backstory and then complain I'll point to the fact I was totally honest about my intentions (and the main campaign won't be as lethal), though admittedly I would feel bad and be more inclined to try and spare them somehow.

If you can work it so it is possible (but highly unlikely) for them to survive it may help motivate them if you decide to be open about it.

Answer 7

Have them make multiple sets of characters.

Then tell them you'll be having them switch characters from time to time, and you don't expect extensive backstories for each character, as they'll be making them as they go along.

Suddenly, you kill them! And then they switch to another set.

This way, the investment into their characters isn't a problem, because there isn't much investment!

Then take the extra characters and sprinkle them around your world as flavor or something?