Quote from: Bren;834069I'm trying to free up some global Internet bandwidth. I'm running H+I over Skype tonight and I thought it might help.

Hey, if it's in the interest of running H+I, I'm all for it:D!

Quote from: AsenRG;834024Pre-written story, you mean? Because many of the storygame RPGs don't support pre-written story:).
To me, character death is part of the character's story, whether it's dying in his bed from old age, or by more violent means;).

yes. i am not anti-story gamer. that is why i juxtaposed story and emergent narrative.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;834051Sometimes you can't really narrate a heroic death. Suppose a goblin or a gelatinous cube kills them. What are they going to do? It's still a goblin at the end of the day.

I can relate to that, especially when it takes some time to generate a character.

One memorable occasion was in a GURPS game. First scene, literally first few seconds of action, my fantasy pirate swinging across to board gets skewered by a skeleton that was probably pathetic but very lucky.

How this came about was the understanding that we were going to get into this fight because that's what the gm had prepared, with corollary expectations that it made sufficient sense for our characters and was going to yield more payoff in play than a one-round game.

Had another character been at the ready, so I wasn't excluded from participating, the loss of the figure would have been less of a drag. In old D&D, I could roll one up in a few minutes. Maybe greater familiarity with GURPS would have made the process quicker and easier, too.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;834051Sometimes you can't really narrate a heroic death. Suppose a goblin or a gelatinous cube kills them. What are they going to do? It's still a goblin at the end of the day.

You know, this is one thing that peeved me once and that the OSR sort of helped me to understand. Once you calibrate you frame of mind to see D&D dungeon crawls as forays into a mythic, cthonic underworld with the aesthetics of a 1970s drug-fueled nightmare (from Lovecraft and Leiber to Harryhausen and Hammer), getting shanked by a tiny misshapen humanoid or digested alive by a giant cuboid amoeba makes perfect sense in its lack of sense.

Quote from: ostap bender;834134yes. i am not anti-story gamer. that is why i juxtaposed story and emergent narrative.

Yet there's more than a binary choice between prewritten story and wide-open emergent narrative. In the early game--and if necessary I'll appeal to the pre-publication history--death wasn't limited to narratively significant moments.

However, I wouldn't say story/dramatic/narrative concerns were the sole reason for the shift away from PC death. I think earlier in the thread I mentioned that my friends in the mid-80s just didn't like it because they liked their characters so much, even identified with them.

This is something that I'm not sure has often been explicitly addressed in rules or scenario design; it's just become an unwritten assumption or at most a dirty little secret in GMing advice that says not to kill PCs. The evolution of Challenge Ratings in 3e through 4e seems to have reflected a desire to meet this requisite without giving up the shape of a game of tactical challenges.

About the only games I can think of that formally free the GM from having to fudge if they never want PC death are The Shadow of Yesterday and Dogs in the Vineyard. I think I outlined the former's concept of Bringing Down the Pain; anyway the rules are free if you google TSoY or The Solar System. In DitV you can basically always retreat from a mortal threat instead of "taking the blow".

In games with hero points the players can run out of points and then if they continue, they can't retroactively decide not to push their luck.

Where am I going with this? I guess hero points, which came in with Top Secret, were the first explicit attempt to keep characters alive for their own sake, but that goal was handled much more by GM fudging overall, and the hero point method wasn't improved on as a formal mechanic until later.

This still kinda leaves open how & why it became commonplace for people to want to take PC death off the table in the first place. Right now I'm thinking it was a bit of a natural evolution once "character identification", as a key strength of RPGs, came into contact with a wider audience who weren't as hard-nosed as the wargame hobbyists who were the first generation of RPGers.

(Incidentally I would still prefer hero points in the general case, or a system with some other kind of buffer like D&D's hit points, to the "take the blow" of DitV.)

Yeah, I had a player who made clear that at least some of his characters should keep coming back if he was to be happy. Back in the '70s, he told me, he had a magic-user who kept getting resurrected because he (the player) would be a pest until it was accomplished.

I think that actually messes with the game balance in old D&D, in which mages are supposed to die in droves. Guaranteed (or just not hard) survival tends to make the other types less attractive.

As a player I prefer my character not die, but if he does I will take it if with a better opponent, a lucky shot or my own being stupid. I generally hold to this as a GM too.

Quote from: Phillip;834246I think that actually messes with the game balance in old D&D, in which mages are supposed to die in droves. Guaranteed (or just not hard) survival tends to make the other types less attractive.

It doesnt mess with the balance so much as it messes with the flow sometimes.

I play flimsy magic user a-lot and I have lost a-lot of them. I have also had a few brought back. I NEVER demanded that and I never even asked. If the other players could pull it off. Fine. If not. Then I roll up another and hop in when I can.

The group making an effort to recover a fallen comrade is perfectly in keeping with the setting and tone of D&D. The PCs being handed a free raise dead out of the blue. Not so much so unless you are playing Crushed. In which case you have no choice. Which is the whole point of that setting.

And in some cases the group might desperately need the flimsy wizard back on his or her feet so blowing a raise dead, scroll, or backtracking to find  a temple is the only option. Or for the really desperate. Reincarnate. enter one fireball tossing otter. Which was one of those cases where the group was in a situation where not getting the wizard back was likely going to mean defeat as there was no way to backtrack or wait for a "walk in".

Situational and YMMV as usual. But personally I hate just being handed a free raise. If I am coming back from the dead it should come at a cost, take some effort or be for a good reason.

Here's a list of mechanics that in my view make death less appealing:

• Greater options in character creation extending how long it takes.
• Non-viable characters being extremely easy to make.
• Quicker levelling which makes the divide between characters even greater.
• A greater focus on the setting and making characters appropriate the game setting.
• A greater focus on a story beyond that encourages players to invest in their characters.

Here's how OD&D got around these:

• You picked a race and maybe a weapon. That was it.
• Characters had ability score pre-requisites that you had to fit or else you couldn't play it. Higher ability scores also had less of an effect on the game.
• Much slower levelling.
• There was no game settings back in the day. Or if there was it was a couple of books not numbering more than 60 pages and many of those were taken up with mechanics. What passed for settings was "You can't play race X, Y and Z" and maybe "class X, Y and Z" for later editions.
• The focus of the game wasn't on exploring a world or a grand story. It was on challenging the players and everyone enjoying the challenge and either overcoming it or failing and suffering the often lethal consequences.

Quote from: Skarg;833851Hmm, yes... but I wonder where the expectation to not risk death or loss comes from?

Is it just that game companies have pandered to crybabies enough for it to become a standard feature and box which people tend not to break out of?

Games have become more involved and prolonged. An expert player can finish an old arcade game within a day. An expert player (who doesn't skip through all the movie sequences) can't finish a modern day game within the same time it takes to finish an arcade game. The more you invest into the game, the harsher the penalty of "you die. Start at level 1" becomes. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to create a character in D&D 3.5e. So people, as a general rule, normally don't want OD&D style deaths. OD&D on the other hand it'has extremely quick character creation rules.

When you look at one variable "People don't die anymore" and don't look at the context it exists within then sure, it's easy to conclude that people are simply cry babies. When you look at the whole picture, you see a different story.

It's also important to note that OSR games with old school character creation and old school death mechanics do exist and do get played. However they're not as popular as say Pathfinder which has very forgiving death mechanics and presents structured and level appropriate challenges along with an intricate story. You can speculate as to why these OSR games aren't more popular, but it's a fact they're not played anywhere near as much.

Just as I wouldn't expect the son of Darth Vader to be killed 5 minutes into the first movie or to have R2D2 and C3PO captured and pulled apart for scrap parts before they got managed to deliver their message, nor do modern day gamers expect to invest heavily in a story, learn about the game world, create a setting appropriate character and then have that character die in the second battle because the DM rolled 00 on their random wandering monster roll.

You can say "I'm running a good old fashioned high grit game" as much as you want. Unless you communicate that to your players and tell them something like "For god's sake don't create a 10 page backstory until at least level 5, don't bother naming them before level 3 and definitely don't build out your character to level 12 because it's likely a waste of time" then you're not managing their expectations.

Quote from: Skarg;833851For me, it's also akin to all the action films where even characters who have no particular survival skills are shown (often with CGI physics-bending magic) to do amazing gymnastic dodges and physical miracles to survive over-the-top eye-candy danger scenes

Dunno. I don't generally find action movies entertaining and thus don't watch them (with the exception of the Marvel movies, but then again I don't expect superhero stories to have real-to-life physics).

Quote from: Nexus;833875I feel like its also part of what makes rpgs a distinct and interesting venue from movies or novels.

That's great. But it would be just as equally valid for me to say "Back in my day we didn't have any of this non-combat mechanics stuff. We had attacks. We had spells and we had saves. If we wanted to do anything else we had to say what our characters did and if we weren't explicit enough then we got a death trap to the face. And we all laughed because we knew we deserved it. That's what makes RPGs a distinct and interesting venue from other forms of entertainment." Chainmail and OD&D had a lot of base assumptions in it. Over time those assumptions have evolved and some of them have been discarded. Depending on when you got on board RPGs and what your induction was like  will determine which elements you're more likely to identify with.

Quote from: Nexus;833875Nothing's set.

Some things are set. You're going to fight monsters. You're eventually going to get items that were better than what you started with. You're definitely going to interact with the world around you. You can have a game where death isn't on the table and still have a DM who has no idea what's going to happen by the end of it.

Quote from: Skarg;833944(It seems ironic to me, as it strikes me that artificially aiding PC's to be legendary, to my mind is like robbing them of the game of trying to actually be legendary. :-) )

Some would question your idea of legendary if it includes hobos that go around murdering sentient creatures simply to get their magic loot. Now put on a story with some stakes beyond not getting the shiny and you start to make things more legendary. Of course the more you focus on the story and the more you get the players invested in their characters and the story, the less appealing a "you rolled a nat 1 on the death trap. You die" becomes.

Quote from: AsenRG;834055Our DCC game lost quite a few PCs to goblins.

DCC is a great example. It perfectly manages expectations right from the first page. It doesn't present itself as a modern game. It's all in black and white with hand drawn and inked artwork. It tells the players to make multiple characters because they'll be lucky if more than 1 survives. DCC can be a lot of fun. When I turn up to a DCC game I've signed on to play a game in the style of DCC. When I play in a Fate game, I've signed on to play in the Fate style. When I play in Traveller I've signed on to potentially have my character not even survive character creation. If I'm playing Call of Cthulhu then I've signed on to die a horrible and grissly death and am simply trying to prolong that experience for as long as possible.

The only legitimate problem I can where people aren't just saying "I don't like other games and I think people who play them are wrong" is D&D. It started out with a game like DCC where people hired lots of henchmen because they wanted to have a backup character available, and over time (especially up to 4th ed) it was presenting huge epic stories that span multiple dimensions and worlds as the default way to play the game. D&D has changed with the times and hasn't managed expectations well. There is a vocal segment of the gaming population that want OD&D but are playing with groups (or with rules) that are aimed at the Pathfinder/4th ed crowd.

Quote from: Phillip;834212One memorable occasion was in a GURPS game. First scene, literally first few seconds of action, my fantasy pirate swinging across to board gets skewered by a skeleton that was probably pathetic but very lucky.

There is no way you could ever get me to play GURPS in that style of game unless I had a pregen someone handed me.

Quote from: JohnLynch;834726Here's how OD&D got around these:

• You picked a race and maybe a weapon. That was it.
• Characters had ability score pre-requisites that you had to fit or else you couldn't play it. Higher ability scores also had less of an effect on the game.
• Much slower levelling.
• There was no game settings back in the day. Or if there was it was a couple of books not numbering more than 60 pages and many of those were taken up with mechanics. What passed for settings was "You can't play race X, Y and Z" and maybe "class X, Y and Z" for later editions.
• The focus of the game wasn't on exploring a world or a grand story. It was on challenging the players and everyone enjoying the challenge and either overcoming it or failing and suffering the often lethal consequences.

1: And spells if a magic user, cleric or elf.
2: In OD&D they did not. That did not come until AD&D.
3: That is debatable as EXP was mostly garnered from treasure and the EXP requirements in OD&D were less at the higher levels than in AD&D. There was though a limiter on EXP you could get per adventure. Only enough to level up once.
4: Actually there is zero setting info in both Greyhawk and Blackmoor. Race restrictions is not setting detail. That was core to the game. Not any setting. In fact there is far as I could discern zero setting detail in OD&D. The start of the Men&Magic mentions the Great Kingdom, Greyhawk and Blackmoor. But only as what the writers groups played in. OD&D is more of a blank slate than BX.
5: Not sure on that. Geezer and others accounts seem to lean more to exploration. Story. Dont know. But stuff was certainly going on. That whole Egg of Coot adventure sounds alot like an ongoing tale? Probably others I am not aware of.

The boons of OD&D and BX is that chargen is absurdly fast even for the caster types (or those distributing points in BX) as there were no restrictions on stats-to-class (and finite limiters on point swapping in BX). That and even if you had to restart you were probably not a total drag on the group if the gap was not too great.

And that seems to be some later players reluctance to character death. Starting back at level 1. Especially if the rest of the group is way ahead at the time. There was an older thread here on that with various opinions on the values of starting at zero or at some higher level. AD&Ds DMG even points out that chaperoning a replacement level 1 character can be a drag and to consider either some level bumps or a level comparable to the surviving members.

I have tried both and there are times when yes. Starting at level 1 is not really a viable option. Then again even in OD&D some of the players kept around henchmen as a sort of pool of backup characters it seems.

Quote from: Omega;8347311: And spells if a magic user, cleric or elf.
2: In OD&D they did not. That did not come until AD&D.

Yeah, I'm more familiar with AD&D and assumed pre-AD&D was fairly close to it.

Quote from: JohnLynch;834736Yeah, I'm more familiar with AD&D and assumed pre-AD&D was fairly close to it.

Overall they are. AD&D is OD&D with the magazine articles collected and some adjustments for reasons unknown. Like adding in the stat requirements for classes.

OD&D though everyone had the same type of hit dice. It was the number some classes had that was the factor. Though Greyhawk introduced some changes like differing types of hit dice based on class.

Quote from: ostap bender;834134yes. i am not anti-story gamer. that is why i juxtaposed story and emergent narrative.

Sure, but I'd question whether your juxtaposition has any value to it, since a lot of, if not most of the story-focused games are actually all about the emergent narrative.
Seems to me you can easily have both. Story continuity can be preserved even in the case of a TPK, too. You just need some GMing skill, but I've been there, and almost had to do that:).
And since you can have both, it's obviously not a juxtaposition;).

Quote from: JohnLynch;834726DCC is a great example. It perfectly manages expectations right from the first page. It doesn't present itself as a modern game. It's all in black and white with hand drawn and inked artwork. It tells the players to make multiple characters because they'll be lucky if more than 1 survives. DCC can be a lot of fun.

Indeed.

QuoteWhen I turn up to a DCC game I've signed on to play a game in the style of DCC. When I play in a Fate game, I've signed on to play in the Fate style. When I play in Traveller I've signed on to potentially have my character not even survive character creation. If I'm playing Call of Cthulhu then I've signed on to die a horrible and grissly death and am simply trying to prolong that experience for as long as possible.

Apart from my understanding of some of those games differing from yours, I just wish more people were doing exactly that:p!

QuoteThe only legitimate problem I can where people aren't just saying "I don't like other games and I think people who play them are wrong" is D&D. It started out with a game like DCC where people hired lots of henchmen because they wanted to have a backup character available, and over time (especially up to 4th ed) it was presenting huge epic stories that span multiple dimensions and worlds as the default way to play the game. D&D has changed with the times and hasn't managed expectations well. There is a vocal segment of the gaming population that want OD&D but are playing with groups (or with rules) that are aimed at the Pathfinder/4th ed crowd.

Admittedly, I don't think it's a problem that hits only on D&D. There are people that want Fate, but are handed WoD games, because that's what everyone else is playing.
(I've solved this issue by getting new people to try RPGs, and presenting them their first example of RPGs as "the game I wanted to run anyway". I just wish more people would take that approach! IME, after the first campaign ends, people are ready to try something else. In the end we'd just have more people playing RPGs.)

QuoteThere is no way you could ever get me to play GURPS in that style of game unless I had a pregen someone handed me.

What else do you think templates are for:D?

Quote from: AsenRG;834863Sure, but I'd question whether your juxtaposition has any value to it, since a lot of, if not most of the story-focused games are actually all about the emergent narrative.

...within more or less constrained parameters.

Quote from: Arminius;834927...within more or less constrained parameters.

Yes, but that only moves the constraints from the GM's set-up to the rulebook, so I don't see it as a meaningful difference in the context of a discussion of "emergent narrative" vs "pre-planned story".