Quote from: Christopher Brady;831739The issue here is that some people are coming off as their way is the only way to play.

And I want to reiterate that in my case at least it isn't, there's no right or wrong here to my eyes.

You say that, but here's an exchange where you do something almost exactly the same as saying your way is the only right way, namely that other people's experiences that may not match your own never happened or didn't occur.

Quote from: David Johansen;831590I like lethal combat because it encourages problem solving and roleplaying over combat.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;831592Uh, no it doesn't.  It means people over-think every little detail, often to the point of dragging the session down.

Good game design encourages problem solving and roleplaying over combat.

Now if someone didn't autofill in 'In my Opinion", "In my Experience", "for me" etc when they read your reply, what you said seems pretty One True Wayist.  You're directly contradicting a statement someone made which he started with "I like" by using unequivocal language implying an objective statement not a subjective one.

Did you mean he was wrong, and that his perceptions are actually an illusion he's telling himself?  No, of course not, but your sentence surely reads that way going on just the words, since you added no language of subjectivity there.

So when you read a similar sentence by someone else, are they being "One True Wayist" or are just writing in the same way you did?

When people say "Roleplay" even within the context of the tabletop hobby, the definition of what exactly they mean by that differs, sometimes drastically and fundamentally.  This difference of mindset and frame of reference leads to a great deal of the Sturm und Drang on forums about topics like death, realism, genre emulation and other literary elements, etc.

If two people are coming from different frames of reference, of course they could easily experience the exact same thing differently.  Comparing apples to oranges and all the confusion and misplaced assumptions that come from such an exercise become a lot more prevalent when the person talking about apples and the person talking about oranges are both using the noun tomato to describe them.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;831738Is this something innate to the player though or is it the way they were taught to play?

Seems innate, with a dash of background.

Some players just really click to it all and grock a certain style of play like it was second nature. The idea of the character getting offed and having to make a new one is perfectly fine. They love the random element and may even look forward to playing something new each time.

For others though it creates an intense disconnect. Usually if the frequency his a certain threshold. Past that and they stop investing in the characters anymore as it is obviously pointless. Seems to happen more with DMs who really are playing to "win" by racking up a body count.

Others invest in a character quite a bit. Its a-lot more common that some expect and death of a character like that does not come lightly. For one of these its not that death is a problem. It is pointless death that is a problem. They wont mind if they go out in a blaze of glory, or at least doing something heroic or fitting to the character. The disconnect is vs pointless death. Frequency may even not phase them as long as it isn't pointless.

Then there are those who invest possibly a liiiitle too intensely in a character and for whome any sort of character death is a game breaker. They do not want a new character. They like the one they have and that is that. Some you can work with and weave that into epic "quest the afterlife." adventures to get them back. Or other things that make the characters death enguaging or not the end. Others seem not to be able to take even that.

Being a frequent player of AD&D and BX magic users I was VERY used to dropping if something so much as looked my way. But even I have my threshold where I start to disconnect.

I agree PC death rate should fit the genre emulated and the players should understand what that means pre-game.

For me, I like running fast paced, lethal games. PCs die thanks to bad dice or bad decisions, and my players really enjoy when they dodge the bullet thanks to smart decisions or lucky dice.

However, my Superhero games or Big Damn Hero style games are low-lethality BUT high risk of failure because I play my villains smart. In that genre, the "pain of loss" is failure against the villains, not PC death.

Quote from: Omega;831775Actually rushing the guy with the gun used to be pretty common in film and still gets used. Apparently it is also a valid combat tactic under certain circumstances.

I don't think it is a very smart tactic though. My understanding from reading on police and FBI shooting data is that it works if the shooter hesitates or misses. It may result in both people being wounded or killed if the charger is motivated and the bullet (and any follow up attacks) doesn't stop them or drop them. Otherwise you end up with corpse clutching a knife. in his cold dead hand.

QuoteAnd the wheelock example is probably valid. The ball probably wont kill you because your character knows just enough of how the things work to get outside of its effective kill point.

Outside wheellock range is well outside stabbing range though. If you are closing on the shooter you are moving into range not out of it. To be too close you'd have to be wrestling.

What I would expect PCs to do is to go along for now and wait for or engineer a distraction, if they can't get a distraction then go along and hope the situation changes or that the reason they didn't already shoot you is because the want to talk to you (a staple action of all sorts of adventure fiction), and only in the last resort would I expect them to go for the high risk strategy of charging a ready shooter.

There's a saying, "Charge [or rush] a gun and run from a knife." Happy to say I've never had to put the theory to the test, though I've had a gun pointed at me a couple times. (I took the third option, give the guy my money.)

Quote from: Arminius;831797There's a saying, "Charge [or rush] a gun and run from a knife." Happy to say I've never had to put the theory to the test, though I've had a gun pointed at me a couple times. (I took the third option, give the guy my money.)

You can't outrun a bullet so it makes sense if you think they plan to kill you. But as you can attest, killing people isn't the only reason someone points a gun. Charging that person may just initiate that killing thing you were ostensibly trying to avoid.

To come back to the point I was making, I don't enjoy players whose only response to someone threatening their character is combat. It's often unrealistic. And usually it's boring.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;831592Uh, no it doesn't.  It means people over-think every little detail, often to the point of dragging the session down.

Good game design encourages problem solving and roleplaying over combat.

One or two serious fatalities and even the worst hack and slashers start to look for other options or leave the group which generally suits me just fine.

I also like slow and detailed character creation because people are more attached to their character if they don't want to spend two hours making another one.

I also like social skills and rules because players faced with DM fiat blocking will generally turn to killing everything they see.

And yeah, I DM just about every Saturday, so that's working just fine for me.

Quote from: Gabriel2;831668Back to Arminius's comment about players abusing their script immunity...

Something happened recently in the game I play in that might have qualified for this.  I decided to ask my friend/GM what he had thought about the situation.

What happened was my character turned around to see four gunmen with M-16s trained on him.  Surrendering would have meant abandoning all my goals for the whole episode.  Ultimately, it would probably have led to my character being implanted with a mind control parasite, as well as other unpleasant things.  Despite all the guns, I didn't see surrender as a viable option.

My course of action was to knock the gun of the nearest gunman out of aim.  This caused him to fire wildly and the other gunmen to duck in order to avoid friendly fire.  I also tried to use the gunman I just attacked as cover against the other three.  Then I attempted my escape.  It succeeded, and my Dodge skill was good enough that I only got tagged by one bullet on my way out which luckily rolled low damage.

So, last night I asked the GM if he felt my actions were flaunting my script immunity.  He replied that the thought never occurred to him.  He told me that he just wanted to see how I'd deal with the gunmen.  In fact, he felt I took the hard way out.  See, the gunmen were all mind controlled by parasites, and I knew this.  I could have tried to use my assault rifle to blow them all away (they were unarmored).  Instead, I tried to find a solution where I didn't kill my attackers so they could be cured of the mental control later.  He felt that it was overall a good event which showed my character was trying to be heroic.  He didn't see it as out of character, or particularly reckless (no more reckless than anything in an action movie type thing).

I mentioned to him how people online felt that since there was no chance of my character getting killed, then there was nothing I had to lose in that scene, and there was no point in him GMing it.  He replied that it was a good thing those people didn't play in our games, and found their fun elsewhere.  He asked if I didn't feel there was anything at stake in that scene, and I replied that I definitely felt there were things at stake there.  He pointed out that I took a little extra time to come up with my course of action in that scene, and that I was clearly thinking, weighing my options, and taking it seriously.

So that's my anecdote.  That's the way we look at it and how it works for us.

It was a great scene. As player or GM, for me it would have been so much better if there was a real risk of PC death. My heart would have been pounding with excitement. Everyone at the table (or in the game chatroom) would have been on tenterhooks. If the PC survived it would have been one of those memorable moments that went down in history, not just another encounter.

Quote from: Omega;831775Actually rushing the guy with the gun used to be pretty common in film and still gets used. Apparently it is also a valid combat tactic under certain circumstances.

It used to work pretty well IRL - high risk, but you'd often hear on the news about shooters being disarmed by unarmed civilians. You don't hear it any more (since about 2000?) IME - either civilians have been trained to be passive, or guns & gunmen have got a lot more reliably deadly. Twenty or thirty years ago something like the Fort Hood Jihadi massacre probably wouldn't have happened, someone on the base would have disarmed Major Hassan after he had killed a few people, typically 4-6.

Re 'charge a gun, run from a knife' - the effective accurate range of many pistols (especially snub-nosed revolvers) is or was so low that running (with an initial zig-zag, since DAR revolvers have a hard pull it takes a moment from 'decide to fire' to bullet exiting barrel) would often be quite an effective tactic. It's not likely to work with an assault rifle or (probably) SMG at short range though; you're generally not going to survive those whatever you do.

Quote from: Old One Eye;831323If they die, they die.  (Kudos to Drago)

PCs do what they want.  I try to have the world realistic-ish.  I roll in the open.  If dice say a lone goblin cuts off your pecker and you bleed out, so be it.

What a visceral way to describe your games haha. But, yeah I agree. We like more realistic settings. I want my players to be attached to their characters, knowing full well that they can't just be gungho all the time and expect their actions to have no consequences.

So when a player death does occur, it means something and is felt by the party. This can occur randomly, because the player made a really poor judgment decision, or sometimes even planned.

Either way in a role playing setting, death is part of the experience and can truly add depth to campaigns.

When it comes to dealing with death, I actually like what was written in this article: http://www.madadventurers.com/setup-for-success-dealing-with-death/

Again it's to ensure that death is not trivialized but cherished in a way.

Quote from: David Johansen;831815One or two serious fatalities and even the worst hack and slashers start to look for other options or leave the group which generally suits me just fine.

I also like slow and detailed character creation because people are more attached to their character if they don't want to spend two hours making another one.

I also like social skills and rules because players faced with DM fiat blocking will generally turn to killing everything they see.

And yeah, I DM just about every Saturday, so that's working just fine for me.

I play the same type of game, and I go through periods where we lose a character every third session.  My main online game now is a low fatality scenario, but the one before was higher fatality, 17 PCs lost in 140 sessions.  So, mileage may vary.

The thing is that there are things you can do with good, experienced players and there are things you can do with groups where the experience and skill of the players is very mixed and there are things you do with groups of utter newbies.

I've mostly been running games for teenagers at my store lately and they're extremely sensitive to failure and character death so we've played a lot of Heroes Unlimited.  They're also like D&D5e better than any other edition or version we've tried But bit by bit they're rounding out and we might be able to advance to something more of "a thinking man's game."

Quote from: David Johansen;831896The thing is that there are things you can do with good, experienced players and there are things you can do with groups where the experience and skill of the players is very mixed and there are things you do with groups of utter newbies.

I've mostly been running games for teenagers at my store lately and they're extremely sensitive to failure and character death so we've played a lot of Heroes Unlimited.  They're also like D&D5e better than any other edition or version we've tried But bit by bit they're rounding out and we might be able to advance to something more of "a thinking man's game."

What about the idea that you could run games with death to desensitize them from the failure?

Quote from: David Johansen;831896The thing is that there are things you can do with good, experienced players and there are things you can do with groups where the experience and skill of the players is very mixed and there are things you do with groups of utter newbies.

I've mostly been running games for teenagers at my store lately and they're extremely sensitive to failure and character death so we've played a lot of Heroes Unlimited.  They're also like D&D5e better than any other edition or version we've tried But bit by bit they're rounding out and we might be able to advance to something more of "a thinking man's game."

I have faith in your ability to read them; that can be a tough audience.

This was me and my friends playing with the college kids back in 76-78.  And we did die more than they did; but it is true we had some older players do make us feel better about our losses.  

But that online group has all levels of experience, so don't give up hope.  Every PC deathterrified me i'd lose a player, but they all came back from those.  Even the near TPK with the green dragon.

I like my risk of death real. However I try to make sure people are aware of the dangers. And that DOES include orc #11 rolling a 3 and then a great critical hit which adds up to some PC's death.

It doesn't happen often at all. In the games I've run with full roleplaying (as opposed to combat games), I don't think any PC's have died to pure fluke bad luck. Few have died at all, and they were being pretty stupid or extremely foolhardy or reckless. I did have one major ally NPC die due to a missed climbing roll during an unarmed escape attempt leading to hand-to-hand combat on a ladder up a very tall shaft - that sucked, but was also dramatic and made the risk of death real, which is what I want. If I were playing a game supposedly about weapons and violence, but really the main characters were going to be shielded from real risk of death thanks to GM intervention - that would remove much of the point of why I'm playing that kind of game.

I really like the GURPS injury system with advanced optional bleeding rules for this. It makes the risk of death much more of a calculated risk, with escalating degradation of abilities, as opposed to games where hitting zero means death, but all damage before that has no effect on anything.

This preference has thankfully kept me from wasting too much time on computer RPGs which expect you to savescum when you die. I tend to play those until I die once, and then decide I lost and stop playing.