TheRPGSite

Prompted by http://www.therpgsite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6265

I dislike fudging, and I like action. Therefore, characters are going to die if I get my way as a GM. I don't like characters to snuff it, but if the dice say so, oh well.

I realize there are other ways to avoid fudging. Hero points. Rules that use ample discretion in setting stakes and/or evaluating the results of conflicts (Everway, Heroquest, TSoY). I might use them, too.

But what I'm looking for here are ways to cut down on the "oh, crap" when a character dies for pretty much no reason. And also to cut down on the tendency of players to be overprotective of characters--to not roleplay them as strongly as they might for fear of losing them. These are products of what I think of as "overinvestment in character".

I've thought of a few tools/techniques, and I've collected a few more.

• Have chargen which is mechanically fast.
• Minimize decisionmaking during chargen (not quite the same thing); this can be accomplished through templates or ample use of randomizers.
• Don't require lots of backstory for beginning characters.
• Give players bonus points when their characters die.
• (Not quite appropriate for the list, but worth considering nonetheless): build in game-world methods of recovering dead characters through resurrection, cloning, brain chips, etc.
• Have a fairly shallow experience/development curve; losing a character you've played a long time hurts less if a beginning character isn't much less powerful. This can be combined with the "bonus points" idea.

What can you add?

So you want players to care less about their characters?

Surely if players are less invested in their characters, then they're less likely to show up regularly, on time, and pay attention to what's going on? All of which make the game... less fun?

Kill them left and right. When they know there's little chance of coming out of the session alive they're much less likely to make characters they care about.

Play Paranoiaesque games, where death is expected but mostly just a road bump.

Have the first session be the generation of 5 characters for each player and have them all gain XP at the same rate.

Have a Hackmaster-like protege system where players have secondary characters waiting in the wings that are NPC underlings until the main PC dies.

Have them seek death by making it something to be valued in both the setting and the system. For example, an honorable and heroic death in an oriental samurai setting might have the replacement character come back with more XP then the guy that just died. When dying is a means to mechanical character generation it likely that roleplaying concerns may fly right out the window in pursuit of "the perfect build, if only I had one more level."

Tell the players up front, "I don't cotton to any of that 'liking your character' BS. You're going to die, and you're going to die often, so get used to it or get lost."

Some of those may have a deleterious effect on your table attendance. :)

In the StarCluster System, I use a potent combination of techniques.

A shallow progression, so that a new character isn't vastly less able than an older character, and can be a productive party member.

A "life spiral" wound system, where it's easy to get stunned and incapacitated, but hard to kill a person without cold bloodedly walking up and offing them as they lay helpless.

Heavy use of abstract cover and abstract tactics, so characters can run away or hide, or ambush, or otherwise use their brains to succeed where they should have been killed.

Thus I always roll in the open but very seldom kill characters. The players can be defeated without killing them, without fiat.

-clash

JimBob--

Eh, it depends. If people enjoy fighting, they'll come back. If not, I guess I'll play a different kind of game altogether. Heck, I wouldn't mind if my game were the opening act for someone else's deep roleplaying.

I also like to think that some players might get as much out of the setting and continuity as they do out of their characters.

Really, I don't necessarily want a game where there's a PC death/session, or even close to that, especially for characters who've been in the game for a while. I'd rather have more continuity than that, and I'm aware of ways to reduce the chance of death without secretly fudging. On the other hand James has a good point: frequent death right out of the gate is a good way to habituate the players.

James, re: the multiple chars/player and protege system. I remember droog suggesting something similar and it's good to add it to the list in one place here. (I believe he brought it up regarding Pendragon, so I think there's a connection to the "setting investment" I just alluded to.)

Clash, thanks. Reducing character death by mechanical means is helpful even though the central issue is finding ways to deal with death directly.

Another technique I remember John Kim bringing up a while back, now that I think of it, is to have the player come up with a flaw for their character. At least the way I interpreted this, it helps distance the character a bit from the player while giving the player something to dig into, a bit of characterization to enjoy going over the top on, instead of worrying about protecting the character.

I don't see how there can be continuity for me if my characters keep getting killed. There's a reason actors got paid more and more each season to stay in Star Trek or Friends - the show was the characters, it was nothing without them.

My experience is that players only get something out of the setting if their character's tied into it in some way. If their characters die frequently, their characters will be less strongly-tied to the setting, and the players be less interested in it.

For example, if the setting is the historical European middle ages, and the PC is a Catholic monk in the entourage of a bishop who's an advisor to a Crusader King, the player will be more interested in Catholicism and the Crusader kingdoms than if the PC is a pagan mercenary from the Kazakh steppes. PCs need to be connected to the setting for players to be interested in the setting, generally-speaking.

I don't understand this idea that if you give your character a flaw, you'll be more distant from that. I find the opposite, that players who give their characters flaws more quickly become fond of them. "Poor Aldfrid, he always panics when people start swinging swords, he's so useless in a fight, I love that guy." It's hard to be fond of flawless people.

JB, it's a given that the game will not be fudged and will therefore run a risk of meaningless character death. There are ways to modulate that as I alluded...but mistakes happen on both sides of the screen and dice are inherently unpredictable. Again, if people don't like it, they can just stop playing or never start, and then I'll try a different sort of game. But I'm not asking questions about that game right now.

About your last paragraph, I understand what you're saying, but I think it can work another way. In short: look at your character with a cold eye, play him or her "in the moment" without regard for consequences, and see what happens. I think that choosing a flaw which you can enjoy portraying, especially if it's something you don't personally identify with or idealize--perhaps, if you think of your character as a bit of a loser--can simultaneously make the character entertaining to play and ultimately not so valuable that you get upset if he croaks.

(Or, if I broaden the scope of interest for a moment: the idea might be that a character who lasts long enough to be regarded affectionately, warts & all, will also by that time have acquired enough "experience" or metagame resources that the likelihood of meaningless death will recede.)

Quote from: JimBobOzIt's hard to be fond of flawless people.

There are popular characters who are flawless; Mary Poppins and Jeeves come to mind as examples of this.

Come to think of it, many action movie heroes have no flaws to speak of.

Quote from: hgjsThere are popular characters who are flawless; Mary Poppins and Jeeves come to mind as examples of this.

Come to think of it, many action movie heroes have no flaws to speak of.

Yeah, but the best ones, the ones that get remembered, are the ones who don't.

'Course, I say that 'cause my favorite action hero was John McClane in Die Hard.  He wasn't flawless, nor was he invincible.  By the end of that film, the son of a bitch is damn near dead for crying out loud.  

There was a great action hero.

Quote from: Elliot WilenBut what I'm looking for here are ways to cut down on the "oh, crap" when a character dies for pretty much no reason. And also to cut down on the tendency of players to be overprotective of characters--to not roleplay them as strongly as they might for fear of losing them. These are products of what I think of as "overinvestment in character".

I've thought of a few tools/techniques, and I've collected a few more.

• Have chargen which is mechanically fast.
• Minimize decisionmaking during chargen (not quite the same thing); this can be accomplished through templates or ample use of randomizers.
• Don't require lots of backstory for beginning characters.
• Give players bonus points when their characters die.
• (Not quite appropriate for the list, but worth considering nonetheless): build in game-world methods of recovering dead characters through resurrection, cloning, brain chips, etc.
• Have a fairly shallow experience/development curve; losing a character you've played a long time hurts less if a beginning character isn't much less powerful. This can be combined with the "bonus points" idea.

#4 is one that appeals to me that I honestly don't see enough. In fact, in the D20 spate of games, it seems like some designers (and players) really expect you to start a new character 1st level / 0xp, a notion that I dislike.

But this is a point of dissonance for me. I don't want players to WANT their PCs to die, and I do want to use character death as a behavior modifier and mood influencer. I find that over the course of a campaign, if there are no character deaths, there is less of a feel of tension and excitement in supposedly life-threatening situations.

I think a workable compromise might be to impact group resources but not to punish one player too much for having their character die. That way, the player with the dead PC doesn't suck too much, but still, nobody wants anybody to die.

Disinvestment of player in PC is not the way to go, definitely not for me. A better way would be simply for the GM to be circumspect about the number of meaningless-instant-death rolls per session. If there are three sheer mountainfaces/hour to climb, something's out of whack.

I endorse Caesar Slaad's post and would add that, in campaign play, to work your way up from L1 to L5, then die and start a new PC at L5, is itself a usefully undesirable kind of experience. 5th level or not, your new guy simply doesn't have the "depth" of the others. He may not start at zero mechanically, but certainly in terms of roleplaying. For me, that makes me want to keep my original guy alive by any means.

BTW, one thing I do do is try to avoid the perception that a pc death is meaningless when it happens. What this typically means is that I save my "big guns" (encounters situations that have a significant chance to nix a PC) for what I consider to be "dramatic junctures".

In fact, this is why I got away from rolemaster style crit charts and really embraced D20 style HP. When any random mook has a real chance to ace an experienced character, you are just opening the possibility that such a meaningless death will occur.

Incedentally, this is another thing I like about Spycraft. In Spycraft 2.0, missions/adventures are split into scenes. Dramatic scenes are resolved differently in mechanical ways that make them more threatening than standard scenes.

For many of my campaigns, I very much agree with the Original Poster's position.  I would add that the more a game system allows for quick and easy chargen, the more one can feel free to have a high-level of "deadly" in your campaign.

I don't buy the nonsense that EVERY campaign has to be all about the characters themselves, or even that having a high-mortality campaign is going to make players automatically care less about their characters.  WFRP is certainly high mortality (in fact, it fits the system description of the OP to a tee), but in my WFRP campaign (where all but one of the Players is already on his second or third PC), the players very quickly got connected to and invested in their characters.  They just recognize that its a brutal setting, where its very likely their characters will end up dead.  If you have good players, that doesn't mean that they won't give a shit about their PCs, it means that they'll try to live those PCs to the fullest while they're around.

Call of Cthulhu is probably the very best example of this kind of game, and I will note that in my CoC campaigns, where its usually very unlikely that your PC will last more than 4 sessions, not only do my players create complex stories and personalities for their PCs, but it also makes that much sweeter for them when they manage to have a character live to session #5, and of course, if they can beat the "world record" (which, in any of my Cthulhu campaigns, has been 7 adventures, and counting).

I think you can actually argue the opposite position as well: that making it obvious that whatever the Players do, their character stands very little chance of actually dying, can often create a situation where the players won't value their character as much.

Again, a lot of this comes down to having good players (or developing good habits in your players), and having good GMing skills.

RPGPundit

Yep, WFRP and CoC are two games I think of as fostering this style of play. Unfortunately, I've never played or read either of them. (But this account (http://www.criticalmiss.com/issue8/jameswallisruined1.html) sure makes WFRP sound like my kind of game.)

Some of Caeslar Slaad's suggestions are along the lines of "how to let players decide when death's on the table"--a feature also formalized in The Shadow of Yesterday (as well as a bunch of other Forgie games, but TSoY is pretty traditional). Helpful even if not precisely what I'm aiming for.

QuoteA better way would be simply for the GM to be circumspect about the number of meaningless-instant-death rolls per session. If there are three sheer mountainfaces/hour to climb, something's out of whack.

I'd never do that unless it was the PCs' decision...in which case it probably wouldn't be meaningless. I'm thinking more in terms of what can happen due to critical hits and high variances in combat. I don't want beginning PCs to be as brittle as 1st-level AD&D 1e, but I also don't want experienced PCs to have a huge a attritive reservoir of HPs as with high-level D&D-type games. In short when it comes to combat I'm thinking along the lines of TFT, GURPS, BRP, Dragonquest.

There is a solution to the dilema. its called Paranoia.

In Paranoia character generation is not that quick, player do identify with their characters and there is a death every 20 mins or so...

Of course it helps that each player have 6 clones, but in a world where you can vapourised by an automatic energy cannon for trying to buy an umberella...

There are games where you can throw action at the characters and not have them die on you. Vampire is a good example (haven't palyed the 2nd edition ...). A good sword swing can take a player straight down, but becuase of blood healing recovery is close at hand.

Seriously if you enjoy games that are all about combat and action and there is no room for character investiture then maybe you ought to play Quake or Halo?

Quote from: jibbajibbaSeriously if you enjoy games that are all about combat and action and there is no room for character investiture then maybe you ought to play Quake or Halo?

There is character investment in the video games I play...it's just that by being able to restore to a saved state, I don't have to hate it so much when my character dies.

Seriously, I'm not looking for all combat all the time, I just want to make it easier to incorporate dangerous situations without fudging and without having someone freak out when the inevitable occurs. There are a number of strategies, some of which entail making the inevitable more avoidable (so they're kind of begging the question, but that's okay). Some of them "change the subject", e.g. subsituting some other kind of "losing" for "death". Those are cool, too. But here I'm trying to see what can be done with death, real death, the big sleep, "that is an ex-PC", etc., etc.

A method on a par with bonus points for dying is to tie those bonus points into the characters themselves. 2 line background? "I was born on the streets and had nothing. I will have riches if it kills me." tell the PCs that they must include something in their background that they are willing to die for. If they die in pursuit of that, then they gain 'bonus points' for their new characters. This way, you get a wierd kind of character improvement, but through the proxy of several removed characters. This sort of swings things into the territory of dying being the point of the game though, so YMMV.

I know these suggestions won't directly help you but as ideas to deal with death...  

1.  The player continues on in some form when they die.  i.e. they become a ghost or somehow possess another body or object.  it could lend a new direction to your campaign or at least give them something to do for the session.

1b.  Related to that idea, death can be a way to introduce them to another world or even another game.  Possibilities include reincarnation or just being able to reach new areas in the new state you are in.  

In other words, you could let death change the game if you want it to.

Quote from: Elliot WilenThere is character investment in the video games I play...it's just that by being able to restore to a saved state, I don't have to hate it so much when my character dies.

What about giving your players save spots at various points in the game?

Ayup. Borderline (but who am I to say since I hinted at the idea myself) but certainly relevent to the larger topic.

A while back I suggested that people should have to toss a dollar into the pizza pot or whatever every time their character needs a "reset", or even suffer a physical penalty (e.g. being required to drink a shot of Uzzo)...maybe not really practical except in very limited application. But basically, the idea is to ensure people take death seriously even if doesn't end their ability to play their character. (In video games you get this by "punishing" the player with spent effort and the need to redo a set of demanding maneuvers.)

In the now classic rpg Bushido, characters gained both XP and Hon for their actions, Hon being a measure of honour.

You had to have both to advance, XP and Hon.

Now, the interesting bit was chargen was points based for stats, and your first starting character was given enough points to buy a precisely average member of his class, nothing more.

But, if you died, you got a portion of your Hon added to your points for buying stats for your next character.

So, you played appropriately, you valued your life less than your honour and you were mechanically rewarded for that.  Dying well meant a better character, albeit less advanced, dying poorly could mean just being less advanced with nothing to show for it.

Really quite brilliant IMO.

Legend of the Five Rings does something similar. You're still better off staying alive and spending your XP, but it takes the bite out of death if you've tried to act like the quintessential samurai should.

Wouldn't that make meaningless death even MORE of a bummer? Not only do you lose the Character and the XP, you also miss out on the bonus for your next character.

I think Blood Bowl had a good solution. Most players recover from injuries but some are crippled and a few die. The threat keeps the coaches on their toes, but the low risk keeps teams from being slaughered to a man.*

*Unless they elect "grudge match" v.s. Dwarves.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen(Not quite appropriate for the list, but worth considering nonetheless): build in game-world methods of recovering dead characters through resurrection, cloning, brain chips, etc.

Nobilis has a slightly different take on rebirth as a way of ensuring continuity in the game: instead of following a single character's fate through several lifetimes, each player potentially controls a succession of different Nobles in charge of the same Estate, which in itself is more important than any of them and must outlast them all. When a PC dies, his soul usually vanishes into the cycle of reincarnation, unless he has made other arrangements during his life or some higher entity has taken an interest in what happens to it. At the same time, the shard of divinity that grants Nobility and the power over the Estates leaves him and moves on into someone or something else, which then inherits its powers and becomes the next PC. Since the shard is guided by the will of the Imperator from which it has been splintered, it's quite possible to designate a specific heir or even a clone as its future vessel well in advance. In addition, since the shard may also carry memories from the past, it's up to the player to decide how much of a blank slate the new character really is.

Quote from: Elliot WilenBut what I'm looking for here are ways to cut down on the "oh, crap" when a character dies for pretty much no reason. And also to cut down on the tendency of players to be overprotective of characters--to not roleplay them as strongly as they might for fear of losing them. These are products of what I think of as "overinvestment in character".

I agree with you. Though I understand the importance of people investing in the PC, people should not be afraid to have them killed.

QuoteI've thought of a few tools/techniques, and I've collected a few more.

• Have chargen which is mechanically fast.
• Minimize decisionmaking during chargen (not quite the same thing); this can be accomplished through templates or ample use of randomizers.
• Don't require lots of backstory for beginning characters.
• Give players bonus points when their characters die.
• (Not quite appropriate for the list, but worth considering nonetheless): build in game-world methods of recovering dead characters through resurrection, cloning, brain chips, etc.
• Have a fairly shallow experience/development curve; losing a character you've played a long time hurts less if a beginning character isn't much less powerful. This can be combined with the "bonus points" idea.

I agree and use all of those points but the second-to-last (methods of resurrection). I would add to have some cool NPCs handy whih can be used by the players.