What is with the entitlement? (shadzar stay out)

[Chamomile]

That works fine if you're playing Order of the Stick, but otherwise, if a new troop of heroes shows up a week after you killed the last one, the villain is thinking "man, it's a good thing I killed those other guys or else I'd be fighting two packs of heroes now!"

[Swordslinger]

From a "game" standpoint, permanent death is an improvement. You get to make a new character in ten minutes that takes advantage of any new supplements that have come out since your last creation, you get to give all your treasure to the party, you get to start with new treasure that is better suited to your character than the random crap you've found, you can start with treasure possibly better for this adventure or a character better suited to solving some current problem, and you might just lose any troubling afflictions like a curse or RP penalty that was being enforced for some past bad action.

Wait what? Now you're arguing that dying isn't so bad?

Isn't the whole point of the anti-death crowd is the fact that people are whining about dying because they feel the penalty is too harsh?

Now you're taking the opposite position and saying it's not harsh enough?

[K]

From a "game" standpoint, permanent death is an improvement. You get to make a new character in ten minutes that takes advantage of any new supplements that have come out since your last creation, you get to give all your treasure to the party, you get to start with new treasure that is better suited to your character than the random crap you've found, you can start with treasure possibly better for this adventure or a character better suited to solving some current problem, and you might just lose any troubling afflictions like a curse or RP penalty that was being enforced for some past bad action.

Wait what? Now you're arguing that dying isn't so bad?

Isn't the whole point of the anti-death crowd is the fact that people are whining about dying because they feel the penalty is too harsh?

Now you're taking the opposite position and saying it's not harsh enough?

The penalty is only the RP penalty and there is no penalty to the "game" part of the RPG. For a wargamer who is doing minimal RPing anyway and is coming to the table to "beat the game" or "defeat challenges," permanent death is awesome.

Permanent death makes beating the adventure easier. I mean, if Nick the Necromancer dies and the party also needs some transport to the Plane of Fire for the next stage of the adventure, then Steven the Sorcerer is created who just happens to have planeshift as spell known or on a couple of scrolls. Heck, he'll also just happen to know a bunch of ice spells so he can totally dominate in the next stage of the adventure.

The party also directly benefits because they get all the dead PC's loot and the new PC comes in with more loot, except this new loot is not the random trash that comes up in drops. For example, Nick's old Staff of Power can be handed off the party Rogue and for everyone else the death of Nick means they get a power-up when their share of Nick's loot is sold off. Steven also enters play with awesome level-appropriate gear and none of the random crap that adventurers tend to accumulate "in case we can use it later" like Portable Boats and the like.

The RP penalty is that the player no longer gets to tell that character's story and the party has to suffer some horribly contrived excuse for why they are accepting some new character, but if the tactical minigame is the part of DnD you find fun then having someone's character permanently die is cause for celebration.

Hell, people who get bored with their characters can suicide themselves so that the party gets a power boost and they get a new character. That's the real cost to permanent death.

[echoVanguard]

They could kill failed heroes and there'd be more heroes, or they could dump failed heroes in the ditch and the failed heroes would come back later when they feel like they can try again.

Or they could dump failed heroes in the ditch and then they later have to deal with returned heroes plus new heroes. I understand you're making an appeal to narrative logic here, but it requires that the villains act in an illogical manner instead of putting the burden on the narrative in the first place.

How genre-savvy do you expect the villains to be?

That depends on what kind of story you're trying to tell. If your campaign is high-flying swords-and-sorcery good-guys-versus-bad-guys, it's okay - great, even - for villains to be cliches who chew on the scenery while laughing maniacally. But if you want to tell a darker, grittier story where the villain is a grim, driven sociopath who's relentless in his pursuit of his goals, he's got no reason not to make an expedient disposal of any threats he comes across unless there's a logical reason for him to forebear.

I know I've said this several times already in this thread, but I'll say it one more time - the decision of whether or not player death is appropriate is a complex one based upon many different factors. In some types of games - or even some entire systems - player death in general is completely undesirable, while in others it's critical to the play experience. Imagine playing Call of Cthulhu or Dread (or Paranoia!) without being able to die - potential (or in some cases, certain!) death of player characters are intrinsic to the classic story types of those systems. The key point here is that your rules dictate to a certain extent what kinds of stories you can tell within those systems, which leads to the conclusion that any system which attempts to have a broad scope of potential story types must have suitably inclusive rules for character death.

It's okay to say "I want to play a game where my character can't die". There's nothing wrong with then designing rules to play such a game. And it's perfectly fine to find others who agree with you, and play such a game with them. But it is wrong to say that other people who don't like that game are somehow deluded, malicious, or hate fun in some manner, and it is especially wrong to say that all games should be like yours.

echo

[Swordslinger]

Permanent death makes beating the adventure easier. I mean, if Nick the Necromancer dies and the party also needs some transport to the Plane of Fire for the next stage of the adventure, then Steven the Sorcerer is created who just happens to have planeshift as spell known or on a couple of scrolls. Heck, he'll also just happen to know a bunch of ice spells so he can totally dominate in the next stage of the adventure.

Remember though you're constantly losing levels doing that. Everytime you make a new character you come in as the guy with the lowest level. So you're not going to be advancing much.

The party also directly benefits because they get all the dead PC's loot and the new PC comes in with more loot, except this new loot is not the random trash that comes up in drops. For example, Nick's old Staff of Power can be handed off the party Rogue and for everyone else the death of Nick means they get a power-up when their share of Nick's loot is sold off. Steven also enters play with awesome level-appropriate gear and none of the random crap that adventurers tend to accumulate "in case we can use it later" like Portable Boats and the like.

While that's a real issue in 3E, this is a 3E rules problem alone pretty much and not much of an argument against character death as a whole. It's a big problem with the whole magemart approach that 3E takes. But just about every other RPG I can think of (including other editions of D&D) handle it better.

It's not such a big deal in 4E Essentials, where they can only get common items and can only sell them for 20% of their value anyway. And then you can only buy common items with the gold you get. 2E AD&D didn't have any concrete system for handing out magic items. In fact, the default may have been that you got nothing.

In plenty of games like Champions or Shadowrun, items are often not lootable. Sure you can swipe the hacker's commlink, but the expensive cyber/bioware is mostly useless to you. In Champions or Mutants and Masterminds, you don't get someone else's equipment unless you pay points for it. Similarly in white wolf, looting a vampire rarely produces much of use beyond maybe a Rolex and some pocket cash.

It's a 3E rules exploit and nothing more.

[Shadow Balls]

Lets ignore the many reasons why capture is worse than death for a moment. And that is something even the no deathers admit to being true.

Ok. So you're fighting some humanoids. It's reasonable that them defeating you might not result in them killing you, as humanoids do other things to people they defeat.

But when you're fighting animals or monsters or whatever, they're just going to eat you. And if they drag you off to eat later, it will be after a throat bite. Wolf jail is a mocking term because the concept itself is mocking. It isn't remotely reasonable to have them do something else, and trying just turns your whole world to a joke. And yet, certain people insist on warping the entire world, just so people don't die.

Now it's easy to look at my mocking descriptions of basket weavers and shrug them off as hyperbole, but here are people doing the exact things I am accusing them of about 15-25 pages in advance!

[K]

Permanent death makes beating the adventure easier. I mean, if Nick the Necromancer dies and the party also needs some transport to the Plane of Fire for the next stage of the adventure, then Steven the Sorcerer is created who just happens to have planeshift as spell known or on a couple of scrolls. Heck, he'll also just happen to know a bunch of ice spells so he can totally dominate in the next stage of the adventure.

Remember though you're constantly losing levels doing that. Everytime you make a new character you come in as the guy with the lowest level. So you're not going to be advancing much.

Who cares? As long as the next lowest guy keeps getting levels, then so do you.

Heck, if he and you both die then the third lowest guy is where you set both of your levels. You can literally keep leveling as long as one guy in the party doesn't die.

Still, all of that is still immaterial since you still get to keep playing regardless of level.

The party also directly benefits because they get all the dead PC's loot and the new PC comes in with more loot, except this new loot is not the random trash that comes up in drops. For example, Nick's old Staff of Power can be handed off the party Rogue and for everyone else the death of Nick means they get a power-up when their share of Nick's loot is sold off. Steven also enters play with awesome level-appropriate gear and none of the random crap that adventurers tend to accumulate "in case we can use it later" like Portable Boats and the like.

While that's a real issue in 3E, this is a 3E rules problem alone pretty much and not much of an argument against character death as a whole. It's a big problem with the whole magemart approach that 3E takes. But just about every other RPG I can think of (including other editions of D&D) handle it better.

It's not such a big deal in 4E Essentials, where they can only get common items and can only sell them for 20% of their value anyway. And then you can only buy common items with the gold you get. 2E AD&D didn't have any concrete system for handing out magic items. In fact, the default may have been that you got nothing.

In plenty of games like Champions or Shadowrun, items are often not lootable. Sure you can swipe the hacker's commlink, but the expensive cyber/bioware is mostly useless to you. In Champions or Mutants and Masterminds, you don't get someone else's equipment unless you pay points for it. Similarly in white wolf, looting a vampire rarely produces much of use beyond maybe a Rolex and some pocket cash.

It's a 3E rules exploit and nothing more.

Even when permanent death isn't hurting the "game" part of an RPG through loot, it's still not helping. I mean, in games like Vampire or Shadowrun the difference between a starting character and a massively XPed character is so small that disposable characters are still a massive harm to the "game" part of an RPG. Killing off your own characters for profit is totally in your interest when you are burning permanent Karma or took permanent Magic Attribute loss even before you sell off-the rack cyberwatre second-hand.

In Vampire, simply killing off a character to escape a Blood Bond or curse is totally something you'd do if you wanted to have the most fun playing as a player.

So let's sum up:

-Massive RP problems because player loses all RP elements of his character.

-Small RP benefit because while most deaths will be stupid, there is a potential for rare meaningful ones.

-Massive RP problems as the story needs to be railroaded to allow a new character to come in and for the old character's responsibilities be rolled into existing characters or made irrelevant.

-Massive game issues where players use characters as disposable units or shift abilities as needed for challenges.

-Massive game issues in some games where loot of the old character is a freebie for the current ones.

-Moderate game issues where characters will diverge in power as some die, making it hard to create appropriate challenges.

Conclusion: permanent PC death is stupid considering the downsides.

[Swordslinger]

Even when permanent death isn't hurting the "game" part of an RPG through loot, it's still not helping. I mean, in games like Vampire or Shadowrun the difference between a starting character and a massively XPed character is so small that disposable characters are still a massive harm to the "game" part of an RPG. Killing off your own characters for profit is totally in your interest when you are burning permanent Karma or took permanent Magic Attribute loss even before you sell off-the rack cyberwatre second-hand.

In Vampire, simply killing off a character to escape a Blood Bond or curse is totally something you'd do if you wanted to have the most fun playing as a player.

So you're saying you don't give players a chance to make new characters if they explicitly no longer like playing the current guy they have? If their character is in a shitty situation, or they're just bored of him, they should have the option of making a new one. I can understand if you want to curtail them from farming new characters for gear, but like I said, that's mostly a rules issue.

But to tell your player, "you can't commit suicide" solely because you want him to play a blood bonded character is a pretty dick move.

You're advocating not letting people die. At all. Even if they deliberately try to get themselves killed. That's fucking ridiculous. As if you hadn't already stretched verisimilitude to its limit, you decide to take it one step further.

Damn dude. That's nuts.

Why are you playing D&D? Why not play some RPG designed to let you play cartoon characters? It's clearly what you want.

[PhoneLobster]

Character suicide.

Apparently the only way in which Swordslinger can even conceive of a player ceasing to play a particular character.

'Cause you aren't not playing that character anymore unless you personally kill it dead first.

[Red_Rob]

ITT: K continues assigning things he doesn't like negative labels, seemingly at random.

So let's sum up:

-Massive RP problems because player loses all RP elements of his character.

A character being removed from the story is a roleplaying "problem" now? What the actual fuck? I will repeat this again for the hard of hearing:

The story is not written down ahead of time. Whatever happens in the game is the story. If the story includes one of the characters dying half way through then that becomes part of the story.

There are a ton of roleplaying opportunities that come from a character not being around any more. Unresolved issues can eat away at the other characters, quests of revenge can be sparked, secrets about the dead character can come to light, any number of interesting things can happen, so stop making out like if any character dies the "story" becomes null and void. We get it, you are uncreative and cannot respond to changes in the game, stop tarring everyone else with the same brush.

-Small RP benefit because while most deaths will be stupid, there is a potential for rare meaningful ones.

Nice to see you have been even handed here. Every death creates "Massive RP problems" whilst "most deaths will be stupid". Nice unbiased opinion. So why will most deaths be stupid again?

-Massive RP problems as the story needs to be railroaded to allow a new character to come in and for the old character's responsibilities be rolled into existing characters or made irrelevant.

Again, why is a new character being introduce a "railroad"? Did you cringe when Lando was introduced in Empire? Or when Angel joined the gang? New characters join occasionally, its really no biggie. And the responsibilities thing makes for interesting roleplaying, as other characters have to decide how they will react to the death, and whether they will now fulfill the deceased character's obligations. Why is this unfun again?

-Massive game issues where players use characters as disposable units or shift abilities as needed for challenges.

This is where the disconnect comes in for me. You are saying that the pro-death crowd doesn't value RP or character attachment, and yet as you have pointed out the only punishment from a character dying is that you can't play that character any more. If this isn't a worry then yes, you are right, death is pointless. Our whole argument hinges on the fact that you like your character, and don't want to see them die. Without this death is meaningless, as you can just spec up nameless fighter no#342 and jump right back in. But people who play RPG's without engaging at all with their characters are losing much more than they gain, IMHO.

--Massive game issues in some games where loot of the old character is a freebie for the current ones.

"Some games"? Is this a way to say 3.5 whilst avoiding the fact that the WBL rules explicitly state that if the characters get a windfall, say from a character dying, the next adventure will have less treasure to compensate?

-Moderate game issues where characters will diverge in power as some die, making it hard to create appropriate challenges..

The proposed alternative failure conditions have included the PC's losing items, taking permanent injuries or losing levels. All these also create power divergence.

FYI, in our games if you die you come back as a character at the same level, with WBL treasure, because not getting to play the character you invested in is punishment enough for dying that most players want to avoid it anyway. And when we voted on this very issue at the start of our current campaign, our group voted unamimously to keep death in the game, because everyone felt that if all the players knew that the characters weren't really risking their lives, some of the excitement of the game would be lessened. If the players know that death is not possible without their say so it lessens the sense of danger and excitement that is a cornerstone of D&D for me.

They say you never feel more alive than when you're staring death in the face. I say that goes for RPG's too.

[A Man In Black]

But if you want to tell a darker, grittier story where the villain is a grim, driven sociopath who's relentless in his pursuit of his goals, he's got no reason not to make an expedient disposal of any threats he comes across unless there's a logical reason for him to forebear.

Then give him a logical reason to forebear. Give him some sort of reason to imprison defeated enemies until he can permanently dispose of them in a useful way that isn't just slitting their throats at the first opportunity, or give him some reason he doesn't want to be known as the guy who slits the throats of everyone he defeats. The first one trends really dark, the second not so much.

So even Killdeath Maimgore, Servant of the Blood God, will plan to tear out his enemies' hearts in an elaborate ritual during the rising of the blood moon, not in the middle of the victorious battlefield.

When the entire concept of Crappy Less-Lethal D&D is to give otherwise-homocidal enemies some reason not to kill PCs out of hand, then obviously you're going to give the homicidal villain some reason not to kill the PCs out of hand.

Obviously, you cannot (and would not want to) have Crappy Less-Lethal Paranoia or CoC or Dread. Those are not high-character-investment games. If you wanted to negate the metagame consequences of character death in those games, you'd have to take a completely different approach. (I'm given to understand that Paranoia has already tackled this issue.) But they also do not have a broad set of story types; all of the story types they tell are brutish and short, if not necessarily nasty.

I'm saying that if my argument is right (and I still think it is), Crappy Less-Lethal D&D would work more smoothly and make for a generally healthier hobby in general than 3e, and it would be much easier to patch lethality into it if you really wanted it than the reverse.

This is where the disconnect comes in for me. You are saying that the pro-death crowd doesn't value RP or character attachment, and yet as you have pointed out the only punishment from a character dying is that you can't play that character any more.

There's also the consequence that you can't play that game any more until you reroll and the party gets to somewhere that you can be reintroduced. While having character sheets soaked in lighter fluid is offputting and probably not good for the hobby, I've seen more than one player drift away when told something to the effect of "Sorry, you're dead, you'll get to play again when the party gets back to town." Even resurrection doesn't necessarily prevent this penalty-box effect.

[tussock]

I generally allow a new character that one level down instead

then PC death means you get to restart at the same level with a new (and improved) character

Idiot troll.

Is the 3e status quo more acceptable to you, where the raids on Citadel Impossible are punctuated by enough time to gather 25K per person or regain a lost level? ... It's just a matter of degree.

IME, players punctuate with enough levels to make sure they won't die on the next run. 5-6 bumps causes Citadel Impossible to become Castle Certainty. As you note, they go play somewhere the Risk:Reward ratio plays out better for a while.

Well, they still lose in Crappy Less-Lethal D&D. Getting dumped in the ditch is humiliating and not at all heroic.
...
humiliation plus plot setback is already a pretty heavy hammer to swing.

I try not to humiliate the PCs (in a world of murderously trigger-happy immortal supermen, sane people are fairly polite, even when they kill you for a while), and there is no plot but what we do. Those who die fighting the good fight are readily raised and praised as true heroes for their attempt. If some power-tripping Evil Cleric gets his murder on with the local village because the PCs had to run, that's not a setback to the plot, it is the new plot: NPC just became a recurring Evil mastermind, dun dun dun.

Sure, there's tools other than character death for making players feel bad, but I have mechanistic character death, and thus no need to do so. I don't even kill their characters, the dice do, following logically from their decisions.

And yes, I think we're done here. Thanks all.

[ModelCitizen]

In Vampire, simply killing off a character to escape a Blood Bond or curse is totally something you'd do if you wanted to have the most fun playing as a player.

That's kind of an extreme example. D&D rewards character death from an optimization standpoint but very few people want to do it. OWoD rewards PC suicide on an emotional level. The default game is full of power fantasy GMPCs and your job is to suck their dicks for eternity. As soon as you show a lack of enthusiasm for dicksucking they bust out some mind control power, roll eight dice at a difficulty of your Charisma + Skill You Don't Have, and then you suck GMPC dick for the rest of the campaign. In the round where that happens you basically need to make sure someone dies. Preferably them, but failing that, you. Fortunately no one who has ever worked for White Wolf can do simple math so it is really easy to kill fucking anything or go out in a blaze of glory trying.

I've never seen anyone kill a D&D character for loot, but every Camarilla game I've ever played has had at least one person try to suicide bomb the Prince.

[A Man In Black]

Sure, there's tools other than character death for making players feel bad, but I have mechanistic character death, and thus no need to do so. I don't even kill their characters, the dice do, following logically from their decisions.

Are you suggesting that players will be okay with choosing failure just because it doesn't result in death? I think your actual argument got lost in the Den's usual reductio ad absurdum, here.

What purpose does mechanistic character death serve in your game? It stops players from doing... what?

[Swordslinger]

I've never seen anyone kill a D&D character for loot, but every Camarilla game I've ever played has had at least one person try to suicide bomb the Prince.

Yeah pretty much it takes some really cheesy gamers to farm items through character creation, and I've never seen that actually happen. People have jokingly mentioned it from time to time in game, but most people have a good sense not to do that.

On the other hand yeah, trying to suicide bomb NPCs has a fairly good tendency to happen, and is going to happen all the more if PCs know they can't die. Instead of one PC trying to suicide bomb the prince, you'll end up with the whole group doing it.

The problem with K and MiB's plan of having failed mission objectives is that proactive parties set their own objectives. So long as you stick to seek and destroy and not escort missions, you can't fail it. At worst you can get a setback, but you never actually fail.

[A Man In Black]

The problem with K and MiB's plan of having failed mission objectives is that proactive parties set their own objectives. So long as you stick to seek and destroy and not escort missions, you can't fail it. At worst you can get a setback, but you never actually fail.

There are three solutions.

First, recoverable TPKs can just go. It's okay. The whole point was to ditch the one-character-dies penalty box. Getting rid of TPKs is interesting, but hardly essential.

Second, you can turn each setback into an adventure. This can strain credulity, but the players have already strained credulity by tossing themselves willfully into what would otherwise be a deadly hazard. (I still don't think the players are likely to be perverse just because they can be perverse. Do you have a lot of people drowning themselves repeatedly or jumping off of cliffs just because they can, in 3e?)

Third, you can say, "Fuck the rules," and slit the PCs' throats the third time, and then go and get drunk next week instead of playing D&D with these jerks next week since you obviously play with obnoxious assholes who are more interested in making some sort of fucking point than having fun. Just sayin'.

[DSMatticus]

Yeah pretty much it takes some really cheesy gamers to farm items through character creation, and I've never seen that actually happen. People have jokingly mentioned it from time to time in game, but most people have a good sense not to do that.

The problem with K and MiB's plan of having failed mission objectives is that proactive parties set their own objectives. So long as you stick to seek and destroy and not escort missions, you can't fail it. At worst you can get a setback, but you never actually fail.

On one hand, people usually try not to be dicks about the game, so it's okay if these rules facilitate dickery. On the other hand, if these other rules facilitate dickery, what if people are dickish? Am I seeing a double standard?

[K]

-Small RP benefit because while most deaths will be stupid, there is a potential for rare meaningful ones.

Nice to see you have been even handed here. Every death creates "Massive RP problems" whilst "most deaths will be stupid". Nice unbiased opinion. So why will most deaths be stupid again?

Luke dies by ice beast in the first ten minutes of Empire and the rest of the characters can't even blame the Empire for it. The rest die in an Imperial trap in the last ten minutes of Empire. The third movie is an entirely different set of characters.

How is that not stupid? Why would people not be throwing popcorn at the screen?

I mean, this is the quality of deaths people seem to be advocating. The flipside of the strawman "Wolf Jail" is "Epic characters with magic powers die to dumb animals who appear randomly and the story ends unresolved with everyone's time wasted."

How is that not just awful storytelling? How does it not rank up there with "rocks fall and everyone dies" as a storytelling device?

[K]

The problem with K and MiB's plan of having failed mission objectives is that proactive parties set their own objectives. So long as you stick to seek and destroy and not escort missions, you can't fail it. At worst you can get a setback, but you never actually fail.

Ouch. Seek and destroy and escort are the only two choices?

Man, you are doing this whole RPG thing wrong. I don't even know where to begin.

[echoVanguard]

Obviously, you cannot (and would not want to) have Crappy Less-Lethal Paranoia or CoC or Dread. Those are not high-character-investment games. If you wanted to negate the metagame consequences of character death in those games, you'd have to take a completely different approach. (I'm given to understand that Paranoia has already tackled this issue.) But they also do not have a broad set of story types; all of the story types they tell are brutish and short, if not necessarily nasty.

I think we're starting to reach consensus here, although I'll point out that character investment is a definite thing in CoC (although it wears a very, very different hat than in D&D) and the campaigns there are usually not short at all.

So even Killdeath Maimgore, Servant of the Blood God, will plan to tear out his enemies' hearts in an elaborate ritual during the rising of the blood moon, not in the middle of the victorious battlefield.

Again, this is story restriction. If my villain is Killdeath Maimgore, that's a workable solution - if my villain is a no-nonsense, utilitarian killer, he's just going to decapitate his enemies the first chance he gets, because making an elaborate plan to do *anything* is totally out of type for him. Yes, you could twist and shape the story so that he doesn't want to kill you because it threatens one of your alliances, but this is pure sophistry - you're scrambling to find some reason, any reason, to shove the story down a path you want instead of being intellectually honest about it. There's a term for this sort of thing in TTRPG's, and it usually involves locomotive metaphors. This is fine if everyone's on the same page and has these expectations out of the box, but again, it's not going to be for everybody.

I'm saying that if my argument is right (and I still think it is), Crappy Less-Lethal D&D would work more smoothly and make for a generally healthier hobby in general than 3e, and it would be much easier to patch lethality into it if you really wanted it than the reverse.

I understand and respect your position, but I'm afraid I really don't agree. The tools are all in place to produce a nonlethal outcome in any encounter in 3e D&D already if your DM is committed to that course of action, and they don't require you to tear out large portions of content for the sake of your cognitive dissonance (like removing wraiths or other auto-murder monsters) from the broader spectrum of play options. It is demonstrably easier for a DM to say "I don't use wraiths in my campaign" than to say "let's remove wraiths from the game". ckafrica's already gone on record saying that he never, ever kills PCs in his game using pretty much unaltered 3e rules, so it's definitely plausible that all the tools are already in the toolbox for you. And lastly, worrying about "a healthier hobby" honestly sounds a little bit creepy, and I caution you that down that path may lie K's fate of psychomoral panic.

echo

[Swordslinger]

The problem with K and MiB's plan of having failed mission objectives is that proactive parties set their own objectives. So long as you stick to seek and destroy and not escort missions, you can't fail it. At worst you can get a setback, but you never actually fail.

On one hand, people usually try not to be dicks about the game, so it's okay if these rules facilitate dickery. On the other hand, if these other rules facilitate dickery, what if people are dickish? Am I seeing a double standard?

Wait? You consider proactive PCs to be dicks? I'm not talking about PCs who do weird kinds of surprises to the DM where they abandon a quest, I'm talking about PCs who give the DM fair warning what they're doing. They tell you they're going to try to take down the firelord next session by assaulting his castle.

Or do you not allow that and just say "Fuck you dudes, you're escorting the princess through the maze of the minotaur."

[Avoraciopoctules]

The problem with K and MiB's plan of having failed mission objectives is that proactive parties set their own objectives. So long as you stick to seek and destroy and not escort missions, you can't fail it. At worst you can get a setback, but you never actually fail.

Ouch. Seek and destroy and escort are the only two choices?

Man, you are doing this whole RPG thing wrong. I don't even know where to begin.

Might be a decent starting point for a new thread. "How to make interesting adventures that can't be simplified to Fetch Quest, Seek and Destroy, or Escort."

[Fuchs]

Swordslinger excluded escort missions, and stuck to seek and destroy for his example.

[A Man In Black]

Again, this is story restriction. If my villain is Killdeath Maimgore, that's a workable solution - if my villain is a no-nonsense, utilitarian killer, he's just going to decapitate his enemies the first chance he gets, because making an elaborate plan to do *anything* is totally out of type for him. Yes, you could twist and shape the story so that he doesn't want to kill you because it threatens one of your alliances, but this is pure sophistry - you're scrambling to find some reason, any reason, to shove the story down a path you want instead of being intellectually honest about it. There's a term for this sort of thing in TTRPG's, and it usually involves locomotive metaphors. This is fine if everyone's on the same page and has these expectations out of the box, but again, it's not going to be for everybody.

Alternately, Killdeath Maimgore, Servant of the Blood God, seeks the joy of blood arcing through the air, crushing his enemies before him, etc. and slitting his enemies throats is as figuratively beneath him as it is literally beneath him. That his enemies might survive is only a benefit; another blood sacrifice for the blood god!

Even no-nonsense, utilitarian killers get distracted or interrupted or have objectives other than "Kill enemies at first opportunity." Depending on the circumstances, sticking around to murder the PCs may or may not be the BBEG's first priority or worth the risk.

But yeah. Without ditching the whole recoverable TPK entirely, the game does not support a villain who defeats the PCs and has no reason whatsoever not to slit their throats and toss their bodies on the garbage heap. I had considered that a feature, because it forces the GM to try and make villains and monsters something other than omnicidal maniacs, but I hadn't considered that people like omnicide.

[tussock]

I mean, this is the quality of deaths people seem to be advocating. The flipside of the strawman "Wolf Jail" is "Epic characters with magic powers die to dumb animals who appear randomly and the story ends unresolved with everyone's time wasted."

I don't believe TPKs are a fair assumption beyond 6th level in 3e D&D. The casters just have too many options for making an escape, even if the DMF has to stay put. But let's say for argument your 12th level party is walking the mountain pass to find their pet recurring villain and forget to not be all killed by the dragon family they find along the way.

How is that not just awful storytelling? How does it not rank up there with "rocks fall and everyone dies" as a storytelling device?

I'm not telling a fucking story, I'm running an RPG.

Ahem. Yeh, you're asking what sort of story can we tell about that game after the fact. Ever read Hamlet? He was trying to discover his father's killer and recover the throne and he figured it out and went to deal with it and then he died (and killed his own mother!). But this is D&D, an RPG, and we have the option to carry on playing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern back for revenge, or the next group in line for the throne, or an English ambassador group, or the German infiltrators: the story doesn't die just because Hamlet did. His death opens up a huge array of potential story lines.

Our 12th level group had allies, enemies, maybe some land, the BBEG is still in action, there's a dragon family looming large now, let's see where this story goes!