Quote from: Aos;321575Real men use sand and peanut brittle for lube.

A Real Man known as "Needledick," perhaps.

GM's who go for TPKs by abusing their power are, IMO, very bad GMs. The real test of a GM is one who goes exactly by the rules, never fudges a die AND can get a TPK. To me it is an RPG. It's a Game. Giving the Players the ultimate test and the most extreme challenge is all part of it.

Now, the Superhero Genre rarely has death in it because no Comic Book company is going to wantonly kill off their money-making character so therefore it has translated over to SuperHero RPGs. That is one of the few genre's where I can live with "No Character Death" as long as there is something that is almost as bad. What I've come to view it as is "Forced Player Character Retirement", meaning that for whatever reason the Player is forced to give up the character. In a Super game that could be a Hero being Disgraced and forced to retire, going to Jail/converting to becoming a Bad Guy, etc...

Taking away the Ultimate "Bad Thing" is like having a Pro Sports Star playing in the Minor Leagues. You're just not pushing the Player to work for the reward. Players get lazy...

I'd say that any game that has NO involuntary PC death at all, with the exception of certain very specific genres (Toon, for example) would just be stupid. Toon is meant to be stupid, so its excepted.

And yes, in Supers gaming, if you were emulating DC and Marvel these days, you should almost FORCE Players to have to make their PCs come back. Which we all agree is also stupid.  If its pretty much accepted that one of the reasons comic books has gone to shit is because "death has no meaning" anymore, why would we want to translate that into RPGs?

RPGPundit

Quote from: Aos;321540No more than a Conan story is.
From page one you know Conan isn't going to die, in fact you know he's going to win. Will he win big, or barely survive?
That's the question.
Now before someone points out the ever so obscure point that Conan stories are not RPGs, I'll point out the equally difficult to grasp point that neither are soap operas.

All that aside, in a multi player game I'll do a tpk in heartbeat, however, I'm a bit more reluctant in a one-on-one game.

I agree fully with Aos. Though I like he risk of losing my PCs, and ten myself to run gritty games in which death is not unusual, I disagree with the idea of "without the possibility of death everything is boring." See Bond movies and tell me about that. The good ones, I mean.

Quote from: Aos;321545The tpk allows the GM to feel powerful and smart, which cuts down on his time to orgasm during masturbation, therefore leaving him more time for important things, like going out and picking up more doritos.

You win the thread.

Quote from: jibbajibba;321555People die in soap operas all the time. They even die and then come back in the next series with a different face, just like a reincarnation in a RPG.
The two things are fucking identical

Also, what I wanted to say just better put.

Bond movies, Conan Fight Scenes and Superheros that can´t die and where everything is about their imnnmer life are stupid and boring at the same time.
That´s why one plays RPGs to GET AWAY from these idiotic offerings.

Any person wishing to EMULATE such inane crap is part of the festering wound that the hobby will succumb to.

Quote from: Settembrini;321654Bond movies, Conan Fight Scenes and Superheros that can´t die and where everything is about their imnnmer life are stupid and boring at the same time.
That´s why one plays RPGs to GET AWAY from these idiotic offerings.

Any person wishing to EMULATE such inane crap is part of the festering wound that the hobby will succumb to.

Oh please. Like fucking OD&D was so deep and meaningful and phylosophical. You speak like the Swine you denounce.

Quote from: One Horse Town;321533To quote Pierce, "If a game does not allow a TPK without the consent of the players, it's not an RPG."

[...]

If PC death is off the table, is the result little more than soap opera?

It's a bit backwards. Let's bring it back to what's happening around the game table.

I think we have to distinguish between "pc death" and "tpk". If one PC dies then the campaign can go on. If all the PCs die then the campaign is usually over; quite often someone else will end up GMing.

Often the TPK happens because the GM is sick of GMing, or pissed off with the players, or the players are pissed off with the GM and so did something stupid to try to end the campaign.

Soap operas continue after one character dies, and they frequently do die to make way for new cast members. But if they wipe out the whole cast, that's usually because the series was unpopular and the executives decided to end it.

On the other hand, action and comedy shows rarely have even one main character die, and they end mid-story.

Thus, relatively frequent PC death is most like a soap opera; infrequent PC death is most like an action or comedy series. TPK is like a series that's going to end because nobody likes it anymore and the actors go on to new roles... with someone else directing.

Quote from: kryystI question what value a TPK brings to an on-going campaign (one-shots perfectly acceptable). What's the purpose other then just doing it because you can. There's no challenge in it since the GM holds all the cards and the reward for doing it are pissed off players and rebooting the game, usually in some illogical manner.

Or more commonly, the players go their separate ways and that GM does not get to GM again for a while.

Again, "PC death" is not the same as "TPK". One can be dramatic and interesting and really move the campaign forward. The other is almost always lame and stupid and leads to a coup de jeue with the GM being replaced.

Imperator, you´re being dense.

D&D is a game, it does not and does not need to emulate anything. That´s why it´s good. It´s it´s own thing.

The moment RPGs try to be something else instead of their particular own things, the falter and collapse and destroy stuff around them. The only way to go in established settings is to widen them to the point at which all the artificialities re: death, prodigy Jesus characters, the Trek-bridge crew problem etc. are ironed out. See EU-WEG Star Wars for a good example. In turn, the WEG-SW stopped being true to it´s source material in the Campbellian sense.

That´s why it was playable.
It was a virtue, not a fault.

In the opposite direction lies ruin, as we can observe every day. It draws in the retarded, the emotionally and intellectually stunted, poisons the well to a point...well, nearly to the point we are right now.

Quote from: Settembrini;321661D&D is a game, it does not and does not need to emulate anything. That´s why it´s good. It´s it´s own thing.

Other classic games like CoC or James Bond 007 or Pendragon set out to emulate other things, and succeed spectacularly. So?

QuoteThe moment RPGs try to be something else instead of their particular own things, the falter and collapse and destroy stuff around them.

I love it when you get so Wagnerian talking about your imaginary Apocalypse. Pity that I've been hearing about it since the '85 and now it's as wrong as ever.

Quote from: Imperator;321663Other classic games like CoC or James Bond 007 or Pendragon set out to emulate other things, and succeed spectacularly. So?
 
I love it when you get so Wagnerian talking about your imaginary Apocalypse. Pity that I've been hearing about it since the '85 and now it's as wrong as ever.

Imperator, That's 3 times today I've found myself in agreement with you.... is Hell frozen over?

Seriously, tho', you're quite right about people talking about the end of the industry since 1985. Used to be on WWIV net. Then on USENET. And now on boards like this, and blogs like Monty Cook's.

Quote from: aramis;321673Imperator, That's 3 times today I've found myself in agreement with you.... is Hell frozen over?

Goddamit.

Hell must be frozen because here at Barcelona is horribly hot and humid. I bet that they have better A/C than us.

QuoteSeriously, tho', you're quite right about people talking about the end of the industry since 1985. Used to be on WWIV net. Then on USENET. And now on boards like this, and blogs like Monty Cook's.

30 years from now on people will keep fucking around with that topic in whatever is the equivalent of Internet.

CoC? Which lovecraft Story has more than one protagonist?

Pendragon? A success? Are you kidding me? Jack and Shit play Pendragon. And jack left for Uruguay some years ago.

007? The Fuck? That Albatross flew only for a VERY short time.

Pull your head out of your rectum, and wash your face, Settembrini, and you might stop seeing feces everywhere you look.

Funny enough you should use Pendragon as an example. It's one of the games I've been begged to run again and again. In the hands of a competent GM with a grip on the setting, it's a great game. Several of the people who have played in my games have run it after playing in my group.

One I've run several campaigns of. One of which was 8 players, having a great time. It's spawned 4 editions in print, over a span of 20+ years, and was in print as recently as last year. (WWG decided to put it to bed, but Greg Stafford is still making money off of subsidiary profit.)

The real measure of a game design is play. Pendragon gets played.
The measure for the designer is if he can make a profit. Greg does.
And on Glorantha, as well... in both the RuneQuest and Hero Quest lines.

Quote from: Settembrini;321678CoC? Which lovecraft Story has more than one protagonist?

Dunwich Horror, Mountains of Madness, Rats in the Walls... should I follow? God, you're really an ignorant bunch of scrotum lint.

QuotePendragon? A success? Are you kidding me? Jack and Shit play Pendragon. And jack left for Uruguay some years ago.

You really should try to get out of your cave more often.

Pendragon has sold the entirety of its run each edition, so it's a fucking success. Of course, it's not a sales success the size of D&D but it's a success nonetheless. Oh, heavens, you're a fucknugget.

Quote007? The Fuck? That Albatross flew only for a VERY short time.

Time enough to publish a list of books quite long, and be one of the best spy games ever made. It sold about 100K units according to Wikipedia, which is an excellente outcome.

Quote from: aramis;321680Pull your head out of your rectum, and wash your face, Settembrini, and you might stop seeing feces everywhere you look.

We agree again, and you deserve some kind of prize

QuoteThe real measure of a game design is play. Pendragon gets played.
The measure for the designer is if he can make a profit. Greg does.
And on Glorantha, as well... in both the RuneQuest and Hero Quest lines.

In Settembriniland the criteria for success are random and unrelated to reality.

A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, says Mallarme. Alain Badiou explains:

"For Mallarme number is anything but the material of opinion. It is 'the unique number that cannot be another,' the moment in which chance is fixed--by the intermediation of the dice-throw--as necessity."

It's one of the defining elements of their medium-specificity that RPGs perform the event of the dice throw. An event has "necessity" insofar as it's irreversible. It is not make-believe. It is a real, material alteration of a situation. The sword hits, or it doesn't. The sword doesn't exist, but the die does.

Over the years, RPG design has invented many safeguards that cluster around the event so as to tame its wild materiality: probability ("point buy"), representation ("story," "emulation," "campaign arcs")...

Yet even the most docile RPGs return to chance like a tongue to a loose tooth. Everyday life is full of mere representations on one hand, rare moments of fatal irreversibility on the other. One wants to see something really actually happening at last, yet also survive the experience.