The Gaming Den

Some settings involve brave men (and/or women) facing hard odds and dying in droves, and hopefully a few will make it through to complete the mission. Warhammer, Myth, the Explorer's Society of 7th Sea, and so on. Those stories have their own appeal, and I'm looking for a method to game them without having the deaths be a damper on the fun.

Things this involves:
• Low-investment chargen: Characters need to be created in a few minutes at most; so either really simple altogether, or templates with only a few choices to make.
• No player elimination: Dead characters don't keep players from playing the game. A dead character is replaced by some ability to affect the conflict, with enough flexibility and options to keep a player engaged, but less powerful than an actual character, so there's still a sting to death. That last guy on the squad's tough to take down.
• Plausible replacements: Nobody wants to play Obi-wan's disembodied voice for very long, so there has to be a plausible way for players to get new characters after the immediate crisis has resolved, but before they get bored with granting re-rolls or whatever.

I'm not thinking of any particular game system right now, these are just some issues of concern no matter what the underlying mechanics are.

Thoughts?

(P.S. Can someone help me out with the Latin for 'We die for the glory of others?')

What you actually could use here is oldschool basic D&D, rules cyclopedia style. Roll 3d6 straight down, pick one of four classes or one of the three nonhuman races, roll hp, and you're done with your character. Roll up several, and take them all with you on the adventure. Players can run several at once, or have the others be mercenaries/hirelings/followers until their main character bites it and they switch.

Paranoia style. There's a squad, which has some finite but substantial number of guys in it. One of them is the "Point of View Character" and if he dies, you jump to another character for POV. You could even have it so that POV would hop under other circumstances as well.

Best for a narrative like Game of Thrones.

-Username17

So a kind of 'Magic Jar: The Possession' ?

Yeah, except it would be the player and not the character Magic Jarring (that should be a verb).

I like the idea of running A Song of Ice and Fire game like this.

Leveling up could work something like this:
- Some of your mooks are replenished and your maximum mooks increase (your mooks are like your squad's HP in a sense)
- If your squad fulfills a quest or story objective, then everyone in the squad gets minor boosts in power.
- The squad as a whole also gains 3 Story-Relevant events, that can be used while in any character's point of view. For example, you might be playing as a squire, and you summon one of your Story Relevant events to find out he's one of Robert Baratheon's bastards. Or maybe he trips over a Valyrian steel weapon in a battlefield. Crap like that. This works because it gives the squad as whole an increasing array of narrative relevance, but no mook in particular has world-bending power.

Your faction (that's the name of your squad) as a whole picks up people everytime it completes a famous story objective, and it picks up plot points every time it completes a secret story objective.

And you can just lose main characters. It's tragic, but not game ending.

-Username17