Quote from: Arkansan;1113520As a GM I think high lethality helps keep players grounded, it's been my experience that players in these sorts of games treat the game world more seriously.

True for some players, increasing lethality will make them pay more attention to the setting.

Other players treat the game world seriously regardless of lethality. Usually because they are interested in the particular setting or because they like exploring settings or interacting with NPCs in general. For them, increasing lethality doesn't give you any bang for the buck. And for some subset of those already engaged players the severing of connections when their character dies or the fear of that loss will make them pay somewhat less attention to the setting since it seems impermanent.


And for still other players, lethality has no effect on their attention to the setting. Because they never pay attention. Of course many of those players are twits.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;1112962I'm sure some of you think that's a good idea, or at least funny, but honestly the message it sends to me is "I enjoy killing characters and find it amusing, regardless of how you feel about it."

I need that T-shirt!

Quote from: GnomeWorks;1112962Now obviously the GM is running team monster, which means he necessarily has the goal of killing PCs, when in that mode. But there is a world of difference between RPing team monster, and generally just being an assclown about PC deaths.

Exactly. I fully agree.

I don't make things more lethal for the PCs. I just make a lethal world and run it accordingly. Considering the PCs are not mook commoners, but badasses in their own right, it's an equal fight. But equal fights mean sometimes the PCs lose.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;1112962If I'm going to invest time and effort into putting together a reasonable character concept, I'd expect that you respect that enough to not pull crap like "you die, no save."

A reasonable character concept takes 5 minutes. Maybe 15 if you're daydreaming or really trying to think out of the box. Unfortunately for many games, it takes far longer to make the character mechanically than their concept.  

I consider lengthy backstories to be fan-fic wankery, so that gets no respect from me. A player wants be a novelist? Great, they can write their novel and maybe I'll read it when its published. But until then, I just want a handful of bullet points about how their PC fits into my setting so we can get cracking with the actual play.

Quote from: EOTB;1112964Kids simply don't care about all the RPG conventional wisdom dedicated hobbyists are convinced is important.  They just want to have fun.

We know girls just wanna have fun, but what about the boys?

Quote from: Spinachcat;1113609We know girls just wanna have fun, but what about the boys?

Boys want "to crush [their] enemies -- See them driven before [themselves], and to hear the lamentation of their women!" :mad: ... until they get regularly laid enough that this urge subsides to manageable levels.

Most boys just want to kill things and take its stuff.

Boys want to kill it and then take its stuff.  Girls want to take its stuff and then kill it.

I admit that functionally there is often little difference in these approaches.

In my experience, there's very little difference between how boys and girls roleplay. MAYBE, the most you can say, is that boys are a little more interested in their character being "powerful", while girls are bit more interested in their character being "interesting". But even that is a gross generalization.