Because, with Tactics you learn a lot when you lose. Death, in an RPG is a surefire way of letting the players know that they F'ed up. Unless you are playing in a "game" where the GM fudges die rolls.

Case in point, when the Military(any of them) teaches tactics, there are Wargames in which you "Die". In RPGs letting players get away with any lame-brain idea and them not dying will teach them nothing other than how to get over on a weak GM.

Quote from: greylond;318517Because, with Tactics you learn a lot when you lose. Death, in an RPG is a surefire way of letting the players know that they F'ed up. Unless you are playing in a "game" where the GM fudges die rolls.

Case in point, when the Military(any of them) teaches tactics, there are Wargames in which you "Die". In RPGs letting players get away with any lame-brain idea and them not dying will teach them nothing other than how to get over on a weak GM.

There are fates worse than death...

I see what you mean, of course. But there are plenty of games, including RPGs - and even the odd atypical campaign, using systems most commonly played in "death mode" - in which character / avatar death is either not going to occur, or it's very unlikely. Presumably, other endings - or, indeed, "stumbling blocks" in some cases - replace death. It strikes me that tactics could still be learned just fine in this environment.

Something to point to here would be the genre of horror - not all fear is the fear of death, and all fears can be (more or less, admittedly) equal, when they are YOUR fears.

/ devil's advocate

So yeah, I don't _really_ know, because my players always have [their PC's] death hanging over their heads.

Ok, by "Death" I mean, anything that ends the playing of a Character, which is pretty much as close to "Losing" in a RPG that you can get. Sure there's other ways to learn Tactics, but nothing teaches better than when you lose, IMO.

Well, except that one time I played Call of Cthulu and my character died before he went Insane and I considered that a "Win"...

Quote from: greylond;318509No, that last example is a case of a Bad GM. How are players expected to learn tactics if Death isn't a factor?...

Sure, but that's exactly my point, it's all relative and the ability and stlye of that makes it relative.

I was commenting on the above quote which suggested MMO suck because death is meaningless and treating that as some sort of absolute.

In my view, it all depends on the context and the above all the people involved.

If you have ever been in a good team in a MMO in and suddenly things go horribly wrong and the team's tanks tells the rest of the team    

When the team's tank sacrifices himself to allow the rest of the team to get out of the dungeon after things have suddenly go south, it's dramatic and far from meaningless. Yes, you know he will get better, but trust me , your heart is pounding and you feel extremely grateful, if nothing else becasue you know he has given up for you hours, days or even weeks worth of XP.

Sure there maybe players so jaded and so cynical that you don't feel the drama of  the moment. But then again, you can get kind of attitude same in tabletop, the classic "crap, the thief just got killed, let's go back to town and recruit a new one" sort of game. That's so cold.

Hence, my point, it's all relative.

Quote from: greylond;318537Ok, by "Death" I mean, anything that ends the playing of a Character, which is pretty much as close to "Losing" in a RPG that you can get. Sure there's other ways to learn Tactics, but nothing teaches better than when you lose, IMO.

Well, except that one time I played Call of Cthulu and my character died before he went Insane and I considered that a "Win"...

In my superhero campaign random deaths in combat are really is not on the cards. It doesn't fit with the genre and the player know this. That said there is a lot at stake in the fight.

If the players lose a fight it means that whatever they wanted to achieve by the fight does not succeed. So the guy they wanted to arrest get's away or the people they wanted to rescue stay unrescued - all of which could invalidate sessions of investigation work needed to get to this point.

It also means they do not earn Karma (sort of like XP and Fate points used in the Marvel Super Hero game). Technically the cold even lose Karma for failing, but I don't tend to apply that rule assuming the party have made an honest attempt to win, chances are burned up a lot of Karma in the fight anyway.
 
Finally, there i san issue of pride. Both ic and ooc, they do want to succeed, not succeeding is a punishment for failure in its own right.

It all depends on the campaign and genre conventions as how best to deal with character death, there are no absolute rules that apply to all games.

Quote from: Soylent Green;318552I was commenting on the above quote which suggested MMO suck because death is meaningless and treating that as some sort of absolute.

It wasn't a value judgment on the mechanic. Quite the opposite -- in MMOs I feel it's absolutely necessary. An MMO in which your character died permanently and lost all the gear you spent forty game hours grinding would not be fun for me. (Although Diablo II had "Hardcore" mode which did exactly this. Fun for some, certainly, but not me.)

I was poking fun at it because everyone being immortal in a game leads to a certain lack of weight to anyone's actions. A three-minute run to your corpse upon dying is not a meaningful "death". To me, neither is losing a few hours of XP. Doesn't mean it's bad or not fun.

I want to play World of HackCraft(tm), if it were ever made real... Other than that? Nah, not interested after trying them a few times...

Quote from: greylond;318517In RPGs letting players get away with any lame-brain idea and them not dying will teach them nothing other than how to get over on a weak GM.

Eh, that depends on what the group wants to get out of the game. If they want to do a bunch of shit and always have it work out, more power to them. I could see how that could be fun, at least for a bit.

Not everyone has the same goals in playing an RPG.

They may like it once or twice but eventually, just like letting Children do whatever they want, eventually, they'll get bored with the game. IMO, there has to be a SERIOUS Consequence to players F'ups...

And I do agree with what someone posted before, in a Superhero game I can see this not being Death, but then again, I'm not interested in those kind of games anymore. Other than that though, I'm of the opinion that whatever game/genre it should be Death or Perm Losing the Character, however you want to define it...

Quote from: greylond;319047They may like it once or twice but eventually, just like letting Children do whatever they want, eventually, they'll get bored with the game. IMO, there has to be a SERIOUS Consequence to players F'ups...

And I do agree with what someone posted before, in a Superhero game I can see this not being Death, but then again, I'm not interested in those kind of games anymore. Other than that though, I'm of the opinion that whatever game/genre it should be Death or Perm Losing the Character, however you want to define it...

Almost half of the games I run have sad endings or TPKs. I also have really edgy players that believe that the game is heavy when they play.

Oh, and here's a starter suggestion:  Pets and crafting that don't suck.

The irony here is, the pet concept comes from D&D originally, but the animal companions available to most D&D classes blow donkey testes, largely because of the discrepancy in power between mundane animals and later level monsters.  In any MMO with pet classes, the pet is expected to be a valuable and contrubuting member of the group in many ways.  My Hunter is as dependent on his pet as he is his gun, and that pet grows and learns with him to become an invaluable ally.  In a sense, he and I are split halves of the single powerful whole.  

Crafting meanwhile, is deliberately designed to be unpalatable to the player in D&D (though in fairness crafting varies in usefulness from MMO to MMO as well), laying down harsh cash outlays and even XP loss for daring consider to make anything more than a mundane weapon, and really, unless your GM's a raging stingy cock, you're just flat better off working out him to get something if you want something specific.

Properly done, you could make an adventure out of getting the materials for a custom crafted awesome sword or piece of armor, something that add a very fun touch.  Last night in WoW, I ventured deep into a cave deep at the core of an ancient mountain, and slayed ancient fire elemental hounds to skin them for leather.  Now, looked at from one angle, that's just standard farming for some mats, but take the mundanity and repetition out of it and use your imagination a bit, and you've got the core of a potentially kick ass adventure.  

I think the thread through all of this is, you have to take these MMO concepts, and look to the core of it, the good idea at the center, while ignoring the inevitable abuse and oversimplification the MMO environment has a habit of reducing such things to.  You don't need the grind and the metagaming and min maxing, but you can have an awful lot of fun if you're careful, borrowing some of the higher concept stuff that makes them fun.

Quote from: greylond;319047They may like it once or twice but eventually, just like letting Children do whatever they want, eventually, they'll get bored with the game. IMO, there has to be a SERIOUS Consequence to players F'ups...

Careful with the condescending tone here. You don't know they'll get bored with the game. Maybe these people just want to get together and goof around using an RPG. No harm in that, and they're not doing it wrong. Thinking that you know better than I do about whether I'm really having fun is a Forgeist attitude, and that's frowned upon around these parts.

Trust the GM, The GM is Always Right...