What is with the entitlement? (shadzar stay out)

[Damocles]

If character death is to be truly impossible, what is the point in giving PCs hit points; or really, what is the point in ever making a defensive-style character?

Permanent character death should be impossible. Getting knocked out of a fight is just fine.

This I can agree with, though basic resurrection is also kinda bland and boring. If people could come up with awesome story reasons and flavor for their characters' resurrection, my world would be a happy place.

[Red_Rob]

No Damocles, you are misunderstanding. K's position is that at no time should a character die for any reason. Characters are only removed from the game when the player decides they are. They are never killed by monsters, traps, spells, foolish player actions or any other reason. If this would happen, the character is knocked unconscious, flees, is "miraculously saved" by an event, or some other method is used to denote the player has "failed".

[Doom]

And then only if the player is OK with that.

[Damocles]

No Damocles, you are misunderstanding. K's position is that at no time should a character die for any reason. Characters are only removed from the game when the player decides they are. They are never killed by monsters, traps, spells, foolish player actions or any other reason. If this would happen, the character is knocked unconscious, flees, is "miraculously saved" by an event, or some other method is used to denote the player has "failed".

Well, player 'failure' is fine with me, but once you get up there in levels (8+ in 3x, 11+ in 4th), you most likely have some sort of heroic story entwined into your character, where, more often than not, that story gets trashed should your character die. I don't like the idea of a multitude of stories becoming garbage of the past because air elementals are dbags and I didnt have a weapon to properly combat them, and our wizard had ADD for the fight.

As long as resurrection is around, and players can be good enough storytellers to give a cool heroic flavor to their PCs barely hanging on, or coming back from the grave, I'm entirely supportive of permanent death being nonexistent.

[echoVanguard]

What I find most confusing about this entire thread is that the core concept of K's argument is not without some merit - ways to end combat decisively without removing a player's character from the game are definitely a welcome addition to any system, and our game uses Luck Points to ensure that players have a healthy amount of control over whether or not their characters die from hazardous outcomes. What baffles me is the corollary he appears to put forth: that all permanent character death, and by extension, all effects that stop a player from playing, are intrinsically without meaningful worth and should be removed from the game at the design level.

echo

[CapnTthePirateG]

Server blew up, double post.

But I'd like to point out that by appealing to probability, you're still comparing the two actions. If I called the cops and told them you'd kicked me in the nuts or murdered my friend, they'd arrest your ass. If I called the cops in tears because you killed my imaginary elf, cruelly ending the story of the farmboy who was going to join an ancient order of knights wiped out by a tyrannical regime (where do you keep coming up with these original ideas?), the cops would probably laugh at me.

When I said that you missed the point, did you feel the need to go back and maybe recheck it?

It doesn't seem like you did, so now I will explain it to you like you were a child.

Regardless of the odds, when you do something over and over you approaching certainty that it will happen. This was the drug-use example, the crime example, and the third one. This was to demonstrate that a pattern of risky behavior in other activities also leads to inevitable conclusions, just like small chances of character death lead to character death as time goes on.

Earlier, I made mention of a series of exaggerated dickish actions that would ruin a friendship, drawing an analogy because character death is a dickish thing to do to someone. If you thought that they weren't exaggerated for the purpose of making the analogy, I don't know what to tell you because failing to understand a simple exaggeration for effect is a serious failure of abstract and contextual thinking.

I'll just point out that you should probably go play a MMO and leave the RPGs to people who care at all about character and story and aren't looking for a "fantasy universe simulator." The fact that you value all the things a MMO does well and value none of the things a RPG does well means that you probably should just be playing a MMO. Trying to shoehorn an RPG so that it plays like a more realistic version of an MMO is an activity that is going to put you into direct conflict with people who want to tell a story or explore a character, or just want to have fun.

The enlightened thing to do would be to not inflict yourself on RPGers, so I suggest that you take that into consideration.

Oh, no, I understood the exaggeration. My point is that it's FUCKING RETARDED. I got your appeal to probability, but the fact is you exaggerate it WAY TOO OVER THE TOP for killing an imaginary elf. Seriously, it's more "You stub your toe once every 3 months. You should never walk again, it's too dangerous." But hey, you know, if you get that broken up about the death of an imaginary elf, I suggest you see a therapist.

You also claim to be advocating player fun, but then turn right around and claim that if a character dies, they must wait for TEH STORY as though it's some work of art. As you do not seem to understand this point, I will explain it to you. I would rather sacrifice the story to bring in a new character so I can have an actual risk of failure, because if there's no risk of failure*, why the fuck did I learn all those combat rules? Why can't I just point to my script immunity? Can Mister Teddy have more tea?

Lastly, I would point out that sandbagging is fucking stupid, on either side of the table. My power-hungry wizard holds the ice assassins back..why again? Why is the balor retarded enough to keep using fire on the fire immune guy? The game actually has rules for what to fight when, and if we don't follow the rules, why are we playing the fucking game? I used to be a theater person. I like interesting characters. I almost never see interesting characters who are fleshed out, and that saddens me because I like characterization and story. I just never see them, and in the end, ITS A GAME and that's how we should see it. Perhaps you really did have an interesting story for your elf - work it into the next character. Maybe your dwarf follows the same cause as the elf and the elf was a martyr. There are about a zillion ways to do this, it's really not hard.

*I really, really don't want to be rescued, captured, or in some way saved by the DM. People can tell when heroes succeed due to awesomeness and skill, and when they get Deus ex Machina'd. I hate that shit in my literature, get it out of my D&D.

[echoVanguard]

So you expect basically a full party turnover every 2 levels. What sort of cohesive story do you expect with that kind of death rate?

I had been thinking about this one, and I realized that there was an excellent example in literature.

Glen Cook's The Black Company series is about a mercenary company that loses nearly all of its members over the course of the plot. By the time the series ends, literally every major character from the beginning of the story has died and been replaced by a new recruit, but the story has a cohesive plot because the real main character is the Black Company itself.

This shouldn't be taken to mean that I advocate such a thing - obviously 1 permanent character death every ~7 encounters is far too high, and systems without resurrection should make character death more rare accordingly. It's also true that permanent character death isn't necessary to have a compelling story.

Not one of the major characters from Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series of books die permanently over the course of some 13 books, although a few supporting characters do. However, Brust's world is unique in that it has magical post-mortem revivification as a widely-available part of its setting.

echo

[Damocles]

A bunch of stuff.

Don't use that argument. People that yell out 'ITS A GAME OMMMGZZ' are stating the obvious in an attempt to insult someone who 'takes it too seriously'. It makes you look like an ass, quite frankly.

As far as taking it too seriously, its a role-playing game. When you spend as much time as you do fleshing out a character, you kind of HAVE to take it seriously, otherwise you're probably like a bunch of people I know.

Those people don't talk between characters in game, there is no roleplaying, and they're amused by people shouting the word penis, or saying 'DocWagon!' in a southern accent.

Perhaps you really did have an interesting story for your elf - work it into the next character. Maybe your dwarf follows the same cause as the elf and the elf was a martyr. There are about a zillion ways to do this, it's really not hard.

This is all crap. Situational crap. Most of the time, when you're on a personal quest that coincides with your parties interests', you're not publicizing it to the world. A new character that suddenly has the same life goals and knowledge of the situation as you doesn't make much sense.

For instance, I've a half-elf who is the bastard son of a King. His goal is killing him and ascending the throne, for reasons I dont feel like typing out. Should that character die, permanently, my magical dwarf wont also be this king's bastard son. Sure, the dwarf could want to kill him for other reasons, but not for the same story I had before.

If a character is to die, and that death is permanent, it should be against their greatest goal. In this case, if my half-elf were to be slain by his father, the king. Perfectly acceptable.

Should he be slain by orcs throwing rocks off of the opposite a cliff, rolling a one, falling backwards and causing cartoon-like snowballing down the hill, crushing a PC? Fuck no.

Edited for clarity.

[CapnTthePirateG]

So why bother to play out the combat if all the orcs miss because it's not a story encounter? Why not just handwave it?

[Shadow Balls]

So, what's the main topic of interest here..? I can tell people are arguing whether characters should die in RPGs or not, but are you arguing the how, or the fact they died to begin with?

It's getting derailed a lot by sidetracks of alternate lose conditions and people complaining when anything bad happens to their character but the original topic is "Stupid players build stupid characters, stupid characters die, blame DM for their own mistakes." With a side of people dying through no fault of their own due to random chance, or being overwhelmed or whatever the case might be and generally being fine with it, but others not liking that.

A PC should never, under any circumstance, be told 'you're dead' unless they died as a direct result of combat. Sure, this may bring mentality such as 'Y U NO ROLEPLAY, CHARACTER COULDA BEEN DETH PENALTYZ' Except, that seems like the perfect adventure for the remaining PCs to rescue said PC on death penalty, 3 Musketeers style. (winning!)

A PC should never be walking down a corridor and die, without warning, to some bullshit trap. Maybe if you're playing a campaign of a bunch of schmoes who never advance past level 1 and aren't heroic, that sort of thing is acceptable. Building a character through the levels, advancing a story, and being awesome are things that shouldn't be taken away by the invisible pit trap, that's just extremely anticlimactic, and unheroic.

The thing is, traps aren't that deadly. So not deadly in fact that the best way of dealing with them is to dash right through them. So if you die to one, it's a sign that you have seriously done something wrong. To the point where the trap was just saving the combat encounter the trouble. It's easy to blame the trap here, but ultimately if you die to something that weak the real problem is that you are not level appropriate, so you cannot deal with things that are level appropriate. Alternately you're running around at 20% health.

Since people are using the term 'DM', I'll assume D&D, which, in every edition, was described as heroic fantasy, granted our views of 'heroic' changed over the years.

Yes, this is mainly about D&D. I presume the same concepts apply to other systems, just with different standards of competence to meet and different mechanics to meet them.

[FatR]

This thread, even taking into account that K's posts are trolling, convinces me more and more, that the original poster is mostly correct. And, like him, I disagree with people who feel that failure with actually unpleasant consequences (never mind that severity of these consequences is wildly exaggerated by anti-death crowd here) should be eliminated from RPGs. While not as unseemly, as, say, dropping from a long-commitment strategic game halfway through because you've screwed up or got shafted by RNG in an important battle, this is ultimately the same sort of sentiment, the desire to be coddled. If character death is removed, it will simply be re-aimed at imprisonment, losing gear, losing support characters and whatever, until outcomes of success and failure are functionally identical (more quests).

[Damocles]

So why bother to play out the combat if all the orcs miss because it's not a story encounter? Why not just handwave it?

Thats not how DnD works. They dont all miss, I was giving a hypothetical reason for a character to die...

The orcs were throwing boulders down the opposite side of the hill, then rolled 1's, making them tumble and fall down our side. Wasn't even an encounter.

Was one of those 'And you turn the corner.. and die' scenarios.

Anyways, you don't handwave it because over the course of the fight, something could, and should happen to either a) benefit the party or b) inform the party of something.

No encounter should be meaningless, there should always be relevance. Also, only the character should fear dying, there should be implied threat of dying. Like, an illusion, you know? It's a cooperative story-telling game, not a DM vs PC slugfest to the death.

[echoVanguard]

If a character is to die, and that death is permanent, it should be against their greatest goal. In this case, if my half-elf were to be slain by his father, the king. Perfectly acceptable.

Should he be slain by orcs throwing rocks off of a cliff, rolling a one, falling backwards and causing cartoon-like snowballing down the hill? Fuck no.

This might be what you personally prefer, in that type of campaign and for that type of character. But what if the campaign's tone is different? More importantly, what if I don't feel the same way about my character?

I often fondly remember my only 2nd edition character, an elven mage/thief raised by humans who hated elves. He died right in the middle of an epic adventure by botching a resurrection of a scroll to bring back the party's cleric, and got turned to dust and permanently killed. And I was ecstatic, because it fit perfectly with the character's nihilistic worldview and the campaign's gritty, you-are-a-statistic tone.

My point is that people have different preferences in different situations. Sometimes a person wants their character to survive to the end of the adventure, and that's ok. And sometimes a person wants their character to live or die by the dice, and that's ok too. The forcing of either preference onto a player who does not want it is a regrettable and unwelcome intrusion - but it's not utterly antithetical to the core tenets of tabletop roleplaying as some here are advocating.

echo

[CapnTthePirateG]

So why bother to play out the combat if all the orcs miss because it's not a story encounter? Why not just handwave it?

Thats not how DnD works. They dont all miss, I was giving a hypothetical reason for a character to die...

The orcs were throwing boulders down the opposite side of the hill, then rolled 1's, making them tumble and fall down our side. Wasn't even an encounter.

Was one of those 'And you turn the corner.. and die' scenarios.

Anyways, you don't handwave it because over the course of the fight, something could, and should happen to either a) benefit the party or b) inform the party of something.

No encounter should be meaningless, there should always be relevance. Also, only the character should fear dying, there should be implied threat of dying. Like, an illusion, you know? It's a cooperative story-telling game, not a DM vs PC slugfest to the death.

My bad, I assumed the orcs were making ranged attacks in combat and they killed you.

I am well aware of the illusion theory, however, it kinda fails because if I know its an illusion, it stops being interesting. If there's an actual risk to my character, it makes me care about combat. Otherwise, to quote Lago: "I waste it with my crossbow! Until the end of time!"

[Damocles]

If a character is to die, and that death is permanent, it should be against their greatest goal. In this case, if my half-elf were to be slain by his father, the king. Perfectly acceptable.

Should he be slain by orcs throwing rocks off of a cliff, rolling a one, falling backwards and causing cartoon-like snowballing down the hill? Fuck no.

This might be what you personally prefer, in that type of campaign and for that type of character. But what if the campaign's tone is different? More importantly, what if I don't feel the same way about my character?

I often fondly remember my only 2nd edition character, an elven mage/thief raised by humans who hated elves. He died right in the middle of an epic adventure by botching a resurrection of a scroll to bring back the party's cleric, and got turned to dust and permanently killed. And I was ecstatic, because it fit perfectly with the character's nihilistic worldview and the campaign's gritty, you-are-a-statistic tone.

My point is that people have different preferences in different situations. Sometimes a person wants their character to survive to the end of the adventure, and that's ok. And sometimes a person wants their character to live or die by the dice, and that's ok too. The forcing of either preference onto a player who does not want it is a regrettable and unwelcome intrusion - but it's not utterly antithetical to the core tenets of tabletop roleplaying as some here are advocating.

echo

I agree entirely, actually. The tone of the campaign should play a huge part in how likely a character is to die (permanently), and even moreso, the player of the PC should be able to choose how likely it is they'll die as well.

As far as the guy above you, saying how if someone dies to a trap, theyve done something wrong, etc, I kinda agree there too.

If someone is making terrible mistakes as their story-driven character, like running around at 20% hp, or charging head-on vs 5 dudes, its a sign they really dont care too much about that character. If they did, they wouldnt be so damn dumb. So, if they dont care, let'em die. If the player realizes his folly, and promises to play like the opposite of an idiot, then let him come up with some resurrection story.

My bad, I assumed the orcs were making ranged attacks in combat and they killed you.

I am well aware of the illusion theory, however, it kinda fails because if I know its an illusion, it stops being interesting. If there's an actual risk to my character, it makes me care about combat. Otherwise, to quote Lago: "I waste it with my crossbow! Until the end of time!"

I understand that bit too. It's a careful balance of things really, if the PC is in real danger, the player is on the edge of their seat. If they're not, the PC gets bored, despite the character thinking he could die.

Should an entire party somehow die in an encounter, theyre dead, no matter what. Like, yeah, they all died. The whole hope is that the discussion of death being an illusion never comes up within the group, and the DM is skilled enough to down people and challenge them enough to where the players really think theyre going to die.

[Gx1080]

And what's wrong with talking this with your group beforehand again?

Fuck the "illusion theory". Pretending to be capable of killing characters but not going through it is bullshit.

[Damocles]

And what's wrong with talking this with your group beforehand again?

Fuck the "illusion theory". Pretending to be capable of killing characters but not going through it is bullshit.

A good DM doing the whole illusion thing is very capable of killing any given person at any given time. Once someone is downed though, you typically move onto someone who isnt, so they dont stab you. Like I said before, the DM shouldn't be out to kill everyone, it should be a cooperative storytelling experience. With a challenge.

I'm going to edit this though, as we all know once a party hits moderately high levels, they dont die anymore anyways. So just assume I'm speaking mid/low range.

Though, too low, and resurrection is kinda pointless, probably wont be much story entwined around you yet.

[Orion]

You know, people play diceless games and gameswhere dice are only used to resolve disputes between players. I think it's pretty clear that randomly-generated character death is not a requirement for a satisfying game.

[souran]

Player death is only an issue when players don't have a way to resolve it. In D&D they have made the level at which death is no longer an issue level 9 because thats when raise dead enters people spell lists.

That simply way to high. raise dead ought to be a level 2 spell, level 3 at worst. It should still come with a setback (like losing a level or something real) but it should come with some caveat that most people can't be resed and that it only works on heroes/important people who have "left something unfishinshed" or something like that.

Seriously, building level 1-2 characters is not the issue, but higher level characters are an issue. The level at which players really start getting upset about player death (3-5 in my experience) needs to be the level at which death becomes an obsticle that doesn't have the potential to derail the game with the sort of stuff we see in this thread.

Death isn't that big a deal in D&D, there are "cures" for it and the only real problem is that curing it is beyond the reach of certain characters but still a possibility.

It is unlikely that you would create a monster with "permanent" stat drain before the characters had acces to the ability to get that stat drain removed, or a monster with a gaze that turns people to stone without having access to flesh to stone.

So why do we let most of the game have the threat of "death" hang over players when really our game already treats death as little more than a status effect.

screw that, just have raise dead be available at an earlier level and then this whole conversation goes away. Raise dead as a level 2 spell as opposed to a level 5 spell is so freaking obvious to me now that its amazing that it has not been done.

[K]

No Damocles, you are misunderstanding. K's position is that at no time should a character die for any reason. Characters are only removed from the game when the player decides they are. They are never killed by monsters, traps, spells, foolish player actions or any other reason. If this would happen, the character is knocked unconscious, flees, is "miraculously saved" by an event, or some other method is used to denote the player has "failed".

I have no problem with resurrection magic as a means of negating permanent death.

I don't think anyone's character should be be removed from play permanently unless they want it to be. It's a punishment for the player and not the character, and serves little purpose considering they'll just roll up a new character.

[K]

*I really, really don't want to be rescued, captured, or in some way saved by the DM. People can tell when heroes succeed due to awesomeness and skill, and when they get Deus ex Machina'd. I hate that shit in my literature, get it out of my D&D.

I'm going to have to reiterate that you should not RPG for the simple reason that in every RPG the DM is setting the difficulty of all challenges so that you can succeed. That you think he isn't doing that is both adorably naive and hilariously deluded.

The battles exist to influence the narrative, not to beat objective challenges. There are no objective battles in RPGs, just various amounts of DM agency at work.

RPGs can't give you what you want, so I hope you don't take it as a personal insult that I'm suggesting that you'd be happier somewhere else like Warcraft where there is no DM to steal your hard-earned victories or ever make you suspect that your winning was not always in the DM's plan.

[CapnTthePirateG]

*I really, really don't want to be rescued, captured, or in some way saved by the DM. People can tell when heroes succeed due to awesomeness and skill, and when they get Deus ex Machina'd. I hate that shit in my literature, get it out of my D&D.

I'm going to have to reiterate that you should not RPG for the simple reason that in every RPG the DM is setting the difficulty of all challenges so that you can succeed. That you think he isn't doing that is both adorably naive and hilariously deluded.

The battles exist to influence the narrative, not to beat objective challenges. There are no objective battles in RPGs, just various amounts of DM agency at work.

RPGs can't give you what you want, so I hope you don't take it as a personal insult that I'm suggesting that you'd be happier somewhere else like Warcraft where there is no DM to steal your hard-earned victories or ever make you suspect that your winning was not always in the DM's plan.

Oh, sure, he does. But there are rules about "you fight CR X creatures at X level", and I can kinda tell that when our party is being hailed as heroes when when we defeat 3 human warrior skeletons at level 3, we suck ass.

[souran]

RPGs can't give you what you want, so I hope you don't take it as a personal insult that I'm suggesting that you'd be happier somewhere else like Warcraft where there is no DM to steal your hard-earned victories or ever make you suspect that your winning was not always in the DM's plan.

Actually warcraft is an interesting game to use here:

World of Warcraft the mmo assumes that players will be able to beat the encounters they face with either sufficient practice and or upgrades from other encounters.

Warcraft the RTS campaign game has its dificulty set to basically assume that the player is giong to win every map. The various difficulties acting mostly to determine how aggressive the computer is and to what degree the computer is allowed to out and out cheat compared to the player.

So unless you mean warcraft rts played against a human opponent as a wargame then even warcraft doesn't meet your requirements because they also have "game master" agency at work.

K has a really valid point here.

[CapnTthePirateG]

I'm fine with "this is a challenge you should be able to win". I'd just rather have my challenges faced with the threat of actual failure, not "the situation changes and you continue to do different quests".

[Damocles]

I'm fine with "this is a challenge you should be able to win". I'd just rather have my challenges faced with the threat of actual failure, not "the situation changes and you continue to do different quests".

Except you can and will fail if you don't play smart. A challenge means if you play your best and to the best of your abilities, and 'just' come out ahead. If you do so, you shouldn't ever actually be in danger of dying.

If everyone plays smart, and to the absolute best of their ability, and still dies, then what the hell, that was too hard. If that was always the case, be smart and still die, the game wouldn't be challenging, it'd be unfair.