Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:50 pm
Do you want to remove character death explicitly, or just provide a huge number of ways to avoid it?
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There are some pretty substantial differences between the way the people I know play and the way the people you know play. This is one. GM fudging and resurrection can happen but won't always.K wrote:But no one plays a game where characters die. I mean, in all the RPGs I've ever played I'd never seen a player character die a permanent death. Either the DM fudges the rules pretty blatantly or some form of resurrection is brought into play.
Yes, you can get mission failure even with no PC death. But you know what? A lot of people I've gamed with are more invested in their characters than any princess. A life or death battle which they barely escaped is great, but if their PCs couldn't actually die then it wasn't a life or death battle.K wrote:That being said, not being able to die does not mean you automatically win the mission. If the big bad runs you through with the Deathsword and pushes you off the castle wall and into the Weeping River, the princess does die and the king will put a bounty on your head for failing instead of a handsome reward. It doesn't matter that the Silent Monks then found you washed up and unconscious somewhere downstream and nursed you back to health because the princess is dead and staying dead.
The most memorable games I've had didn't include this assumption. There was a D&D 2e game we were in where a guy created a character who had an explicit code of honour about never backing down from a fight, or retreating, or surrendering and we all just stared. He said no good DM would give him a challenge he couldn't face so he was safe. Different assumptions.K wrote:I mean, in just about every game I've played success was an assumption because failure always meant irrevocable player death and the end of the campaign. Even retreat was impossible because running always meant death. Counter-intuitively, removing the threat of death actually makes failure and retreat viable options, thus making any "wins" actually meaningful accomplishments.
<insert thing here> 2: Electric Boogaloo is a common thing to describe random sequels, because it rhymes and sounds amusing.shadzar wrote:I thought the movie was called Breakin' II: Electric Boogaloo?
You going to have to explain the Elenssar thing to me.
For me, the heroic characters are the ones that earned it by thwarting death to be able to survive.
No, I insulted someone who came in and claiming shit I didn't say. I said (in the second post) that non-dying characters may be for some, but not me. Re-read the post and follow the progression involving me.Boolean wrote:I compared you to him because you both make a point of insulting people who want their characters to be the protagonists of their story.
A close battle is still dramatic whether you can die or not; permanent death just alienates players who care about their character and does nothing for people who don't care about their character.Orca wrote:Yes, you can get mission failure even with no PC death. But you know what? A lot of people I've gamed with are more invested in their characters than any princess. A life or death battle which they barely escaped is great, but if their PCs couldn't actually die then it wasn't a life or death battle.K wrote:That being said, not being able to die does not mean you automatically win the mission. If the big bad runs you through with the Deathsword and pushes you off the castle wall and into the Weeping River, the princess does die and the king will put a bounty on your head for failing instead of a handsome reward. It doesn't matter that the Silent Monks then found you washed up and unconscious somewhere downstream and nursed you back to health because the princess is dead and staying dead.
The most memorable games I've had didn't include this assumption. There was a D&D 2e game we were in where a guy created a character who had an explicit code of honour about never backing down from a fight, or retreating, or surrendering and we all just stared. He said no good DM would give him a challenge he couldn't face so he was safe. Different assumptions.K wrote:I mean, in just about every game I've played success was an assumption because failure always meant irrevocable player death and the end of the campaign. Even retreat was impossible because running always meant death. Counter-intuitively, removing the threat of death actually makes failure and retreat viable options, thus making any "wins" actually meaningful accomplishments.
I've always thought that the answer to this was to make it easier for the PCs to be defeated without actually being killed. The damage conversion variant rule seems like a good method for doing this, though it doesn't quite work in otherwise-standard D&D because of the way magical healing works. That said, the idea that characters can be knocked unconscious and effectively removed from a battle without actually being permanently killed is one that appeals to me. Virtually the only way to actually kill someone in that sort of system is to TPK -- and even that doesn't have to result in character death. It's totally okay if the party wakes up hours after getting its collective ass handed to them to find that the big bad has left them alive out of contempt for their patheticness, or that the climactic fight against the orc army has been won (or lost) after they were overwhelmed and went down, or whatever.K wrote:But no one plays a game where characters die. I mean, in all the RPGs I've ever played I'd never seen a player character die a permanent death. Either the DM fudges the rules pretty blatantly or some form of resurrection is brought into play.
YesJudging__Eagle wrote:Dying, even with no consequences, is the big "you fail" in every game.
Killing PCs, and bringing them back, will never truly feel sting-free.
For every person here who talks the talk about being okay with losing PCs, here's my question for you:
do you write backstories, and invest time in, the creation of your PCs?
do you know where you see your PCs after a good deal of advancement?
yeshave you had such PCs permanently and irrevocably die?
yes. death is a part of life. Part of many of the backstories I create is the character leaving a poor life and taking the risk of a quicker death over a slow one, and getting a chance for a better life; or being able to live life more than just being a potato farmer's son, or whatnot. Growing cabbage's can only offer so much out of life to someone.were you okay with it?
Uhmmm...no.Boolean wrote:But in general, death should be something that happens because the player wants it, not because the dice say so.
We're explicitly talking about changing the rules so those two paragraphs are completely irrelevant.shadzar wrote:You entered into the contract of allowing the dice to choose whether you live or die, once you picked them up for anything within the game. They are the random factor. Just as much as you allow them to choose the time a foe will die, they also have the power over your character to choose when it dies.
So you chose before you started playing to allow the dice that power. If you all agree beforehand on other terms, then that is a different story. But failing to set those terms then every DM should know that you choose the terms of the dice having sway over life and death.
That sums up my stance.Boolean wrote:But in general, death should be something that happens because the player wants it, not because the dice say so. The Player should have the option to die at -10 if it makes a suitably awesome ending to his character's saga, or he's just tired of that guy, and the option to cling on indefinitely if that's what he wants.
But on the other side of the coin, I played in a 2E campaign with a DM who liked tossing us in trouble over our heads. When we succeeded it was great, but after the 3rd or 4th time of hearing "In the end you were rescued by, oh, let's say...Moe." it got a little tiresome.K wrote: Most people have a basic assumption that the DM will set the difficulty to a level that they can handle. I don't know about you, but I just don't care about battles I know I can win; however, I do care about battles where I know I'm outmatched and I am trying to pull crap out of my ass to win. In fact, one of the more dramatic campaigns I have been in involved a DM who decided to run one of the more infamous "killer" campaigns and hamstring us with no clerical magic outside a few pre-set items in the adventure and it involved a fair amount of planning and chicanery on our part to sqeek by with survival.
I had much the same experience in 3.5 in a 'introductory' game someone ran at the local college for mainly new players. Almost nightly the party would be put into negatives only to be miraculously saved from death by NPCs. Often when characters should have been dead and gone. It got so ridiculous that any sense of danger was lost.hogarth wrote:But on the other side of the coin, I played in a 2E campaign with a DM who liked tossing us in trouble over our heads. When we succeeded it was great, but after the 3rd or 4th time of hearing "In the end you were rescued by, oh, let's say...Moe." it got a little tiresome.
I had that same thought a couple of days ago both do to prolific posting and general disagreements in most threads.Quantumboost wrote:<insert thing here> 2: Electric Boogaloo is a common thing to describe random sequels, because it rhymes and sounds amusing.shadzar wrote:I thought the movie was called Breakin' II: Electric Boogaloo?
You going to have to explain the Elenssar thing to me.
From what I recall:
Elennsar was a user on the board here from roughly last November to April who was generally not liked at all by anyone here, due to:
- demonstrating an utter unwillingness to learn or actually concede points even when proven objectively wrong
- sending every thread he posted in on nonsensical tangents
- denying mathematically true statements
- replying to almost every single post by anyone else such that a lot of threads were actually "Elennsar, Someone Else, Elennsar, Someone Else, Elennsar..."
- insisting the board as a whole help him on his pet project which was condemned as "you're trying to do something that is outright impossible on first principles"
- generally having not a single positive contribution to any other person on this board
You're not the only one.RobbyPants wrote:I had that same thought a couple of days ago both do to prolific posting and general disagreements in most threads.
That isn't a problem with death as a part of the game, that is just a bad DM.hogarth wrote:But on the other side of the coin, I played in a 2E campaign with a DM who liked tossing us in trouble over our heads. When we succeeded it was great, but after the 3rd or 4th time of hearing "In the end you were rescued by, oh, let's say...Moe." it got a little tiresome.K wrote: Most people have a basic assumption that the DM will set the difficulty to a level that they can handle. I don't know about you, but I just don't care about battles I know I can win; however, I do care about battles where I know I'm outmatched and I am trying to pull crap out of my ass to win. In fact, one of the more dramatic campaigns I have been in involved a DM who decided to run one of the more infamous "killer" campaigns and hamstring us with no clerical magic outside a few pre-set items in the adventure and it involved a fair amount of planning and chicanery on our part to sqeek by with survival.