Quote from: Simlasa;787735a Busby Berkeley extravaganza of death

You must have been watching very different Busby Berkeley films to me...

Quote from: Blacky the Blackball;787748You must have been watching very different Busby Berkeley films to me...

I was watching one of his spectacles the other day on TCM and it kind of reminded me a tiny bit of the scene in Logan's Run where the folks who have hit 30 do an anti-grav ballet and explode in mid air.

Quote from: Old Geezer;787729What's interesting to me is how the distribution of answers skews in the two places you have this poll up.

I'd like to see you put it up in Dragonsfoot or ODD74 or someplace like that too.

And BGG/RPGG.

Quote from: fuseboy;787688I think jhkim hit the nose on the head.  Who cares if the GM is wearing his 'tough guy' shirt if the party is up to its knees in healing potions, the system insulates from death, or the opposition is afraid of or unwilling to kill PCs?

Agreed.  Judging from the "I'm a ONE!  Yeah!  Except when I'm not," responses, I wonder whether some folks are afraid of being seen as a wimp if they don't staunchly proclaim that they throw PCs off the deep end.

For my part, I'm on the high, lonely end of the scale.  But I also GM GURPS, a much more lethal system than the D&D/d20/Pathfinder-class most of the players on this forum seem to use.  Healing potions are quite uncommon on my world, and have limited effects (something that can repair as much as a single sword wound is almost top-of-the-line).  Few players have ever played priests, and most healing involves mundane physicking.  When a character dies, that's it -- Resurrection in GURPS has a huge, all but prohibitive fatigue cost, there aren't as many as twenty people in the whole world who know it, and with but a single exception they're all priests who will only even attempt it on a fervent co-religionist -- tough luck if you're a thousand miles away from St. Aevryl's Basilica, eh? -- need a terribly good reason to do so, and is -1 to cast for every day the subject is dead.

Which is all rather moot, because in the 29 years I've been GMing GURPS, Resurrection has never been successfully cast on a PC.

I voted 1. To me it's the same as playing any other game. You make your move, you toss the dice, the outcome is whatever it is, and you play on. The playing pieces are not me. That's the beauty of it: Death has no sting in Little Wars fought with toy soldiers.

Quote from: Phillip;787784I voted 1. To me it's the same as playing any other game. You make your move, you toss the dice, the outcome is whatever it is, and you play on. The playing pieces are not me. That's the beauty of it: Death has no sting in Little Wars fought with toy soldiers.

This is right where I am.  There's nothing macho about it.  Just a game like any other. It's like playing cards, a game of hoops, whatever.  Sometimes you lose- and that's ok.

Quote from: jhkim;787678This scale makes no sense to me, in that there can be very little distinction between a 1 and a 10. Two examples here:

1) I run a dramatic horror campaign emulating high-body-count horror stories, where there are very frequent times for appropriate death. If a death was inappropriate, I as GM would for sure not allow the PC to die - but in practice I have PCs die very frequently. This is a 10 that is barely distinguishable from a 1.

2) I run a game where the world background is such that the PCs rarely face permanent death, but if they do, then I always allow it. For example, an Amber campaign where none of the enemies want to face an Amberite death curse. This is technically a 1 because they live and die by their actions, but there is very little difference from a 10.

Yea, I simply went by the actual given definition of 1. But the posts mainly seem to equate that, not with simply playing the game, but with it being always a game like playing 1st-level characters in old D&D or something.

Quote from: RunningLaser;787786This is right where I am.  There's nothing macho about it.  Just a game like any other. It's like playing cards, a game of hoops, whatever.  Sometimes you lose- and that's ok.

The plethora of "throw the PCs into the meat grinder" responses makes me wonder about the oft-stated preference on this board for making mystery scenarios easy give-aways.  There seems to be a mentality that it's okay to let the dice fall where they may and story-be-damned when we're talking about combat, but as soon as a mystery scenario comes along "immersion" goes out the window and we're spoon-feeding things to the players so they can all feel like Hercule Poirot.

Quote from: daniel_ream;787789There seems to be a mentality that it's okay to let the dice fall where they may and story-be-damned when we're talking about combat, but as soon as a mystery scenario comes along "immersion" goes out the window and we're spoon-feeding things to the players so they can all feel like Hercule Poirot.

I don't spoon feed people for mysteries.

As a result my players will create their own red herrings and flounder about looking lost. But floundering and being lost is frustrating (for them first, for me eventually) so once that has gone on long enough that it ceases to be fun to watch, then I help them by summarizing what they know, reminding them of clues they may have forgotten or neglected to pursue, and suggesting a few possible next steps. It helps to remember a clue that seems obvious when you already know the solution is often lost in a welter of data and possibilities when you don't know the solution.

But then I will summarize and list options in combat if a player seems to be frustrated and floundering.

Now if the PC is Hercule Poirot, then they probably have some skills e.g. deduction, forensics, detective career, keen observation, sense motive, or something that the player can roll on to get a clue that their character might have observed or deduced. So there is that possibility as well.

Quote from: daniel_ream;787789The plethora of "throw the PCs into the meat grinder" responses makes me wonder about the oft-stated preference on this board for making mystery scenarios easy give-aways.  There seems to be a mentality that it's okay to let the dice fall where they may and story-be-damned when we're talking about combat, but as soon as a mystery scenario comes along "immersion" goes out the window and we're spoon-feeding things to the players so they can all feel like Hercule Poirot.

Maybe they have dull players. Or maybe they have average players, and you would find 221B Baker Street or Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective or How to Host a Murder too easy to be fun.

A lot of people suck at the dungeon game - old hands who've been taught bad habits, more than newbs inclined to use common sense. Since the point is for everyone to have fun, it makes sense to gear the game to the participants.

I always enjoyed Defender in the arcades, even though I couldn't get far on a quarter. (I think it really called not only for greater talent than mine, but for two sets of hands and eyes.) On the other hand, there may be games that are just too tough for me, so discouraging that I would lose interest.

Quote from: daniel_ream;787789The plethora of "throw the PCs into the meat grinder" responses makes me wonder about the oft-stated preference on this board for making mystery scenarios easy give-aways.  There seems to be a mentality that it's okay to let the dice fall where they may and story-be-damned when we're talking about combat, but as soon as a mystery scenario comes along "immersion" goes out the window and we're spoon-feeding things to the players so they can all feel like Hercule Poirot.

I don't create "mystery" scenarios, and I think "immersion" is a crock of shit.

It depends on the genre, system and players for me. In our new D&D 5e game I'd rate it 1. In a HERO supers 4 color game I'd rate it 8+.

Quote from: Old Geezer;787823I don't create "mystery" scenarios, and I think "immersion" is a crock of shit.

In all your years of running D&D you mean that the old haunted house was never a hoax orchestrated by Old Man Withers?

1

Plot immunity is for story wankery

10.  Letting the dice fall where they may and treating characters as disposable, interchangable cogs is for boardgames.