Quote from: AsenRG;884401Or you can work by assuming that Tarzan dying early doesn't preclude the game from producing anything.

Sure, but if Tarzan dies, then there's no Tarzan story anymore. Yet, if you make a PC Tarzan, it's not unreasonable to believe that the story will be about your PC named Tarzan, since you're expected to identify, and dare I say, immerse in your character. It's a catch 22.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;884400No way. He's a great supporting character, but killing off Rick would be very jarring. I am pretty sure that something similar to what happened to the X-Files when Dogget came in would happen here.

I wouldn't be so sure. The original TWD comic book uses same formula - introduce a character, kill a character, reintroduce killed character, only now he is of opposite skin color, repeat. I wouldn't be surprised if the TV show would follow same steps.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;884400I think that the fact it's being debated in TWD shows how hard it is to pull this off. How many movies and books have successfully done it? IMO, it's a hard trick to perform, because it messes with the audience's identification with a protagonist-- when she dies, like the heroine in psycho, you now have to look for someone else to identify with.

I don't think it is that hard. Rick dies and the focus shifts to the rest of the group (maybe focusing on Michonne and Carl or something). Plenty of stories and movies have more than one protagonist, where you could easily have one die and it doesn't affect things (an adventuring party is arguably this sort of arrangement). But if you were trying to do something more narrative you can still achieve that if characters die. I just re-read CHildhood's End the other day, and while characters don't suddenly die in that, the book shifts characters over a long period of time. So say your party dies in a total party kill at the entrance of the Tomb of Al-Ansar Al-mayta, just roll up new characters and have the death serve as the backstory for the the upcoming storyline (the return to the Tomb of Al-Ansar Al-mayta).  

QuoteMaybe here lies the way for how to do it in an RPG, but I'm not sure, because then, if you're looking for a "good" story, you can't really think of it as the story of your PC. You'd have to pull back and look at it the way you might look at a multi generational saga where there isn't a single character you identify with-- but this is kind of weird when playing an RPG where I think you're supposed to identify with your character, not an NPC or your buddy's PC.

There is nothing wrong with pulling back and looking at it as a multi-generational story though. If you want to give characters plot immunity, you can. But it isn't the only option. Death tends to lead to drama. I think the key isn't to make sure characters have a good death, it is to make sure people are reacting to the death.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;884404I wouldn't be so sure. The original TWD comic book uses same formula - introduce a character, kill a character, reintroduce killed character, only now he is of opposite skin color, repeat. I wouldn't be surprised if the TV show would follow same steps.

The comic has had different protagonists? Interesting...

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;884405I don't think it is that hard. Rick dies and the focus shifts to the rest of the group (maybe focusing on Michonne and Carl or something).

The problem is going to be keeping the audience. That didn't work so well for the x-files, as I mentioned before.

QuoteThere is nothing wrong with pulling back and looking at it as a multi-generational story though. If you want to give characters plot immunity, you can. But it isn't the only option. Death tends to lead to drama. I think the key isn't to make sure characters have a good death, it is to make sure people are reacting to the death.

Yup, but I never said it as the only way, or something wrong. Just something that isn't done well very often. Death can lend drama, but death of a protagonist can also be very jarring and kill your interest in a story if there was never any sort of arc completed relating to that character. the story basically wasn't about that protagonist, because that protagonist's story never went anywhere.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;884403Sure, but if Tarzan dies, then there's no Tarzan story anymore. Yet, if you make a PC Tarzan, it's not unreasonable to believe that the story will be about your PC named Tarzan, since you're expected to identify, and dare I say, immerse in your character. It's a catch 22.

Yes, but that's if we say it's a Tarzan story:).
I prefer saying that it's, say, S&S*, or S&P, or swachbuckling, or wuxia, or whatever. Then I drop you in a foreign world. Now that you're no longer in Kansas, what do you do;)?
Maybe some PCs will die, but if the PC Tarzan survives to the end...then it's a Tarzan story! Not before - before that you can only hope it's going to be a Tarzan story.


*The genre merely acts as a shorthand for the kind of mandatory chargen guidelines I'm giving you in order to get the kind of PCs I want to see. If it's swaschbuckling, I want to see nobody who can't fight a duel: you're nobles, it's just going to happen. If it's wuxia, I want you to know kung-fu...or something reasonably close, doesn't need to be a formal school. If it's swords and sorcery, I want to see tough and capable combatants. If it's sword and planet, I want you to be passionate, honourable and ready to take risks...but not be reckless. And so on, and so forth.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;884400No way. He's a great supporting character, but killing off Rick would be very jarring. I am pretty sure that something similar to what happened to the X-Files when Dogget came in would happen here.

One of the reasons I tune into the Walking Dead and why I became a fan of the comics is I am never sure who is safe (and that includes Rick). In the comic books they address this question directly (who lives till the end) and while some of the characters are optimistic they make it to the end, I think the reader is meant to be much less certain. The storyline in the comics becomes almost biblical, and I think at some point they will have to kill Rick to keep it going. I don't see Rick as someone who should survive the entire run of the show or the books. I see him as one of the first of many great leaders in the new world they are establishing.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;884406The comic has had different protagonists? Interesting...

Nope. Still, Rick faded to the background every now and then, and I think that Jesus might become his future replacement (providing he wasn't killed already - I stopped reading this crap).

Repeated from the earlier comment - you were 2 fast 4 me.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;884403Sure, but if Tarzan dies, then there's no Tarzan story anymore.

I agree, but just for the sake of discussion: meet... MARZAN! The son of Tarzan and... well...

It worked (to some extent) for CRKrueger:

I've lurked for 41 pages...

I agree with you BedrockBrandan about GOT.
Most books have protagonists, you expect them to survive, and if they don't then the author is doing it for effect.
With Game of Thrones it cleverly follows a number of different lead characters, any one of which may or may not die. So in this respect it feels like a traditional RPG - you can have a TPK (The Red Wedding) or a lucky escape from death. Death of the characters doesn't end the book, just as it doesn't end the campaign. This gives the illusion of reality - it's still all controlled by the hand of the author but it feels far more real.

The second observation I've got is that simulationist in this thread was a good short hand for a class of RPGs, which clearly included D&D. But then it was suggested that simulationism => realistic and hence a simulationist game cannot be a game where high level characters can't be one-shotted by a bow, hence D&D cannot be simulationist. But it follows from this that no game is 100% realistic and no game is simulationist. The fault lies is taking a word used to describe something, divorcing the word from the thing it is describing, honing the definition into some quasi-academic definition, and then reapplying the term and finding it doesn't fit what it was originally describing. The canonical example is "D&D is not a role playing game". The terms have then become entirely useless.

Quote from: AsenRG;884408Yes, but that's if we say it's a Tarzan story:).
I prefer saying that it's, say, S&S*, or S&P, or swachbuckling, or wuxia, or whatever. Then I drop you in a foreign world. Now that you're no longer in Kansas, what do you do;)?
Maybe some PCs will die, but if the PC Tarzan survives to the end...then it's a Tarzan story! Not before - before that you can only hope it's going to be a Tarzan story.

Sure. But until you happen to have a PC that survives to complete a full story arc, all that play with your PC is a whole bunch of nothing that ends up being little more than preamble or background color to the actual story.

If I was looking for techniques, I'd want a guarantee of a story happening with the PC I'm actually playing. adding techniques that achieve less than that would seem a bit half-assed, but that's just me.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;884409One of the reasons I tune into the Walking Dead and why I became a fan of the comics is I am never sure who is safe (and that includes Rick). In the comic books they address this question directly (who lives till the end) and while some of the characters are optimistic they make it to the end, I think the reader is meant to be much less certain. The storyline in the comics becomes almost biblical, and I think at some point they will have to kill Rick to keep it going. I don't see Rick as someone who should survive the entire run of the show or the books. I see him as one of the first of many great leaders in the new world they are establishing.

To me, killing Rick would necessarily mean the start of another story in the same universe. Like the difference between the first trilogy of Star Wars and the prequels. If they killed him a way that does not give closure to his story, that would suck, IMO.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;884414To me, killing Rick would necessarily mean the start of another story in the same universe. Like the difference between the first trilogy of Star Wars and the prequels. If they killed him a way that does not give closure to his story, that would suck, IMO.

To me that isn't it at all. The story hasn't been about Rick. It has been about Rick and his group of Survivors. I think their story ends when the group is extinguished. There are plenty of people who could pick up the thread and the story would continue. It wouldn't be the end of the story, it would just be a new section of the book. It isn't like going from prequels to the original trilogy. It is like going from the original trilogy to the day after the Battle of Endor (except Luke or someone got killed at the end). That won't always be comfortable for viewers, but it doesn't mean the story is over just because the person they've invested their focus on is dead. Whether it is a new story doesn't depend on Rick, but on whether the overarching plot around the group changes. I think this is particularly the case with a show like walking dead where part of the promise is 'no one is safe'

Quote from: AsenRG;884408Yes, but that's if we say it's a Tarzan story:).
I prefer saying that it's, say, S&S*, or S&P, or swachbuckling, or wuxia, or whatever. Then I drop you in a foreign world. Now that you're no longer in Kansas, what do you do;)?
Maybe some PCs will die, but if the PC Tarzan survives to the end...then it's a Tarzan story! Not before - before that you can only hope it's going to be a Tarzan story.

The example Gronan commonly uses is "The Tower of the Elephant". If Conan had rushed ahead and got killed, it could instead have been the tale of "Prince of Thieves" Taurus of Nemedia.

In some of Clark Ashton Smith's "sword & sorcery" stories, and some of Lord Dunsany's, the adventurers come to dire ends.

The heart of adventure is thrilling peril. Those who survive can tell the tale, and perhaps venture more. But the failures are the context that makes the successes remarkable. If getting through the Potentially Plausible Planetoid Patch or Malicious Magical Maze of Monsters were easy, who would brag about it?

Quote from: JesterRaiin;884410I agree, but just for the sake of discussion: meet... MARZAN! The son of Tarzan and... well...
 

Haha, sounds like a bakery product.

But let me see if I can better illustrate some of what I'm thinking about:

So, let's say we've got Tarzan, and after we've established an antagonist and a problem, all of a sudden, in the middle of what would have been the Tarzan story, he dies, which is anticlimatic. That's hardly a story in the sense that people use the word.

When Marzan comes into the picture, and solves the conflict, sure we've now got the story of Marzan. The whole overlong bit with Tarzan would be something that most would criticize as excess fat, because in a "good" story it would have been handled in a more condensed fashion, since the actual story is Marzan's. Tarzan is just pre-amble.

This is the sort of problem I would see with trying to get a "good" story out of roleplaying. I mean, you can tell a good story afterwards by condensing the more irrelevant Tarzan stuff, but while you're dicking around with your Tarzan sessions which go nowhere, it's like "nothing happens." All that effort would feel wasted if my goal was to get a 'good' story.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;884415To me that isn't it at all. The story hasn't been about Rick. It has been about Rick and his group of Survivors. I think their story ends when the group is extinguished. There are plenty of people who could pick up the thread and the story would continue. It wouldn't be the end of the story, it would just be a new section of the book. It isn't like going from prequels to the original trilogy. It is like going from the original trilogy to the day after the Battle of Endor (except Luke or someone got killed at the end). That won't always be comfortable for viewers, but it doesn't mean the story is over just because the person they've invested their focus on is dead. Whether it is a new story doesn't depend on Rick, but on whether the overarching plot around the group changes. I think this is particularly the case with a show like walking dead where part of the promise is 'no one is safe'

The point here is that it's primarily the story of Rick or Luke . They are the clear protagonists in each series. If either of them were to get killed in what is primarily their story, it would need to be in a fashion that close their story arcs satisfactorily. They can't just be killed by a random mook or at a random moment before their reason for being in the story is somehow resolved (whether they fail or succeed). Their stories would still need closure.

Quote from: Phillip;884416In some of Clark Ashton Smith's "sword & sorcery" stories, and some of Lord Dunsany's, the adventurers come to dire ends.

Really dire ends.

In one of Smiths stories not only do the heroes fail to save the day, they fail to save the earth, and the solar system, and the human race may have come to an end. Few others didnt end well for the protagonists either. (Still working gradually through stories as find them.)