This is a spin-off from the "the youth has gone soft" thread.
All you story-connosseurs:

Explain to me:

What good does it do to your game, when you favor the players according to the time they invested in the game and the character?


I´m tring to understand your way of playing.

You're talking about mainstream games, right?

Basically, yes.

But AFAIK even most thematic games have rather harsh and dire consequences based on die rolls, don´t they?

A point for not rising to the bait.

Yes, you could say that. There's an ethos around the Forge that the chips fall where they may. On the other hand, there's been a lot of thought about how to make the game fun for players even while hosing the characters.

As to your original question: it depends on several factors. Are you playing for the challenge? Or are you playing because you want to explore the world and see the growth of the characters?

I was stuck in this trap myself some years ago. We had characters in RQ that had been around for almost twenty years. Seeing them die would have been like seeing the death of Conan – almost unthinkable. It would have finished a game that had been part of our lives since we were 18. But it felt pointless to me to be fudging, and it made the players boringly careful.

My solution was to convert the game to a system which didn't allow for random death, and where failure didn't necessarily mean the destruction of fun (HQ). There was nowhere to go any more in the old system, where the stakes were life or death.

So tell us about HQ. It´s  sort of the Immortals set to RQ, isn´t it?

Quote from: SettembriniSo tell us about HQ. It´s  sort of the Immortals set to RQ, isn´t it?

What is the Immortals?

HQ as it stands is just a very flexible chargen/resolution system attached to Glorantha. You can play it low- or high-power. But actual death-of-character always requires an active decision.

Ok, I´ll bite:

What is so great about that?

It makes them less paranoid and more willing to take risks.  Those are the up-shots for me.

If there are still consequences, but those consequences don't involve the players losing investment in the game or sitting on their hands while others play, then I find everyone has a more enjoyable time.

There are other methods than taking death off the table, of course...  such as that "adventuring company" idea on the other thread.  But this solution's working well enough for me.

Quote from: SettembriniOk, I´ll bite:

What is so great about that?

It depends on what you want from that particular game. Let me note here that when I ran Pendragon, it was a game where a character death or more a session was not unusual. That was why I developed special techniques for handling it.

PD is a game about the larger context of Arthurian Britain – it's not the individual chr that counts, it's the flow of the game as history. Which includes "Remember how Sir Aeddan got squished by that giant?" At least, that's the way I ran it for about five years.

When you use a game like HQ, what you're looking for is the story of an individual chr. Random death (and note that doesn't mean no death) has been removed from the equation. What the game concentrates on is consequences, and the consequences of losing a debate can be as severe as losing a fight (in purely mechanical terms).

Quite recently I ran a game of HQ in which I was surprised to find that nobody used violence as a solution once. It wasn't my doing – I simply presented situations with open-ended resolution. The players chose to tackle problems in ways other than fighting.

That, in my opinion, is a function of HQ's highly flexible contest system, in which any ability may be used as long as it can be justified. It certainly wasn't because the chrs could die in combat.

So I think it's a very complex question. Removing random death is only one part of the puzzle.

Cheeky fellow, having a title like this.

Quote from: SettembriniExplain to me:
What good does it do to your game, when you favor the players according to the time they invested in the game and the character?
I´m tring to understand your way of playing.

Sorry don't have a detailed answer except, for me it's all about player investment in the campaign and their characters. I'll use different systems for different campaigns depending on the kind of tone/atmosphere/genre etc I want. It doesn't mean (using different systems) I'm going easy on the characters - which is what the title implied (and thankfully you posted an actual question) - but that I'm hoping for a specific type of play experience.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: SettembriniWhat good does it do to your game, when you favor the players according to the time they invested in the game and the character?

I´m tring to understand your way of playing.

Uh, that's pretty much what standard D&D 3.5 does.  First, the CRs are balanced so that an encounter where the CR is equal to the party's level (with 4 characters) will deplete 25% of the party's resources.  Thus the standard encounter greatly tilts the odds in the favor of the PCs.  Second, hit points increase as the players invest time in their characters and level.  This makes it harder to kill their characters in one shot the longer they are played.  Third, once the characters reach a certain level (i.e., after a sufficient amount of time has been invested in them), the characters often gain access to spells that let them reverse character death with with increasing flexibility and decreasing penalties.  

So if you want to understand a game that favors the players according to the time they've invested in the game and character, just take a look at D&D 3.5 because that's exactly what it does.

Quote from: SettembriniSo tell us about HQ. It´s  sort of the Immortals set to RQ, isn´t it?

Just to clear up a point of confusion, at one time the RQ community believed that a game called Heroquest would be produced which was aimed at allowing highly experienced characters to engage in epic spiritual quests or something. (A "heroquest" in Gloranthan terms is if, I'm not mistaken, a way that a hero could reenact the events of some myth, and then acquire powers related to the quest.) The game never materialized although I think you can find on the net at least one attempt to extrapolate what it might have looked like, as an expansion to RQ.

Heroquest as it actually turned out is a revision of Hero Wars, but HW was so named basically because "Heroquest" was the trademarked name of a boardgame at the time, and I'm sure it would have been called HQ from the start otherwise. The game is essentially Greg Stafford's attempt (with Robin Laws) to capture the feel of Glorantha as he envisioned it in his writings and the board games White Bear and Red Moon/Dragonpass, and Nomad Gods. In short he wanted something that had a much more sweeping, epic feel, as opposed to the gritty feel of RQ.

Basically, HQ is Clash of the Titans to RQ's Troy (if you ignore the qualitative difference between the two films, that is).

Quote from: SettembriniWhat good does it do to your game, when you favor the players according to the time they invested in the game and the character?

Well, for me, I'm a big fan of epic adventure in the vein of real world mythology -- and we all know that Perseus, Heracles, Odysseus, Beowulf, Sigfried, and the like didn't get shuffled off the mortal coil with great frequency (in fact, repeatedly cheating death is a large part of what makes such figures legendary).

Now, that said, Heroes of legend did suffer numerous, crippling, setbacks (from the deaths of loved ones to having their kingdoms usurped) -- but they weren't marked for death until their desitiny had been fulfilled. The key is that such setbacks provide motivation for action, where death stops the action cold (because the protagonist is dead, duh).  

From a literary standpoint, random death is a blunt instrument that serves, not to raise up charcters to hero status, but to ensure that they remain nameless bodies in some forgotten grave. Social stigma, financial ruin, a broken heart, paranoid delusions, or the like all provide an opportunity to overcome adversity. Death, by comparsion, only provides the opportunity to create a new character.

If classic literature and folklore read like most people play RPGs, we wouldn't have sagas and novels, as heroes would never live long enough to accomplish anything of note. This is why accomplished authors save protagonist death for the endgame or, at the very least, dramatically appropriate moments -- because most people don't find heroes who are every bit as frail and susceptible to death as common peasants to be very heroic.

So, to answer your question, heroic adventure in the vein of folklore and classic literature benefits immeasurably by taking death off the table (at least until it is dramatically appropriate).

I've never played a game without some kind of challenge.

Even Katamari Damacy (that game where you roll up stuff into a giant ball for the PS2) is a challenge at times.


I think games that are originally extremely difficult are no fun. There has to be a learning curve. But at the same time, if you've been playing the same game for over a year, you really do need some way to have a tactical and strategic challenge.

It's one reason why I really hate World of Warcraft, for example. World of Warcraft has no increased challenge. Your characters have the same hardships at level infinity that they had at level 1.

In the same vein, this is why D&D is such a great game. There are so many different ways to make battles harder for characters -- and there are a glut of ways that characters can prepare for those battles, especially at higher levels. Hell, you could scry on each person in the enemy's army if you really wanted to, but at the same time, your enemies could do the same thing back to you.

So you want to emulate heroic myths?

What is the enjoyment you get out of that?
You dwell in a fantasy world without achievement, total escapism?

You don´t want to be bothered with a close scrutiny of your performance?

Is it that?