Disclaimer #1: Warthur is a pretty cool poster and I agree with him more often than not. God knows he's not the only one who thinks this way and this si why I felt the need to spin this off in a thread of its own (also not to shit on another cool poster's very positive CoC thread).

First, let's clear up just what the fuck we're talking about. "Pulp", like "anime" is a medium and not a genre. There's pulp fantasy, pulp horror, pulp SF. But what most people are thinking of when they say "pulp" is what used to be known as "men's adventure"; contemporary (as of the writing, typically 1920-1950) fictional tales of badass men tackling on extreme danger of all sorts, from wildlife and criminals to far-out supernatural shit.

And therein lies my dilemma: you cannot have danger without grit and/or mortality. I am not a "negotiating the stakes of the conflict to be resolved" kind of guy, I find this a bullshit setup that robs conflict of its drama. I like conflicts to escalate and spiral out of control as men and women frantically grasp at the last straws and the Fates weave their tangled thread, Atropos ever with scissor in hand. Glad if something else works for you, doesn't work for me.

Not even the much-vaunted, borderline-superheroic proto-Batman, Doc Savage (certainly a protagonist at the higher end of the power scale for the genre) charged gunmen, like you're wont to see with some "ZOMG so pulpy" RPGnet darling of the month. He was wise enough to surrender when some "mook" got the drop on him with a handgun at close range.

I posit that true-to-source pulp gaming not only admits but requires actual danger. Not "ZOMG I took a punch and lost my girlfriend LOL this game is so sweet". Without the threat of grave and irreversible consequences hanging over every daring escapade, there's nothing "daring" about undertaking them and every victory becomes hollow and mechanical. What's awesome about jumping over a five-meter-wide chasm with bubbling incandescent lava below if you can emerge unharmed at the other side by spending a Magical Brownie Point?

Disclaimer #2. I play games with Magical Brownie Points every now and then. I strongly prefer "reroll" or "small bonus" MBPs (e.g. Savage Worlds bennies, WW Willpower) to "auto success" or "big bonus" MBPs, as they keep things surprising and players and GM alike on the edge of their seats. But I play them all. They're not bad when used sparsely but they tend to turn harrowing situations into resource management which isn't always what I want out of them.

Which is why the "pulp is not gritty/lethal" meme must PERISH IN THE FIRE OF A BILLION BLUE HYPERGIANTS GOING NOVA.

Thank you.

Bring on the flames.

Unless I am in a Magical Disney Princess RPG, I find games without death a possibility to be very unfun... Superhero games are one of my favorites, and I still like games to be someone challenging where death at least a possibility.

Also, I don't like games where the players have plot immunity...

I want to play an RPG, not emulate Fiction/TV/Movies/Anime.

There were a lot of times Indiana Jones could have died in Raiders of the Lost Ark... If not for Plot Immunity, it would have been a very short movie...

Quote from: The Butcher;750127First, let's clear up just what the fuck we're talking about. "Pulp", like "anime" is a medium and not a genre. There's pulp fantasy, pulp horror, pulp SF.

Counterpoint: pulp was a medium. 99.99% of the time in an RPG context it's used to designate genre conventions.

Hell, this original came up in the context of a Call of Cthulhu discussion - and Chaosium are (finally) going to be publishing their Pulp Cthulhu supplement alongside CoC 7th. If Chaosium themselves think that a) "Pulp" designates genre conventions and b) CoC needs an entire supplement to make it support that particular style, I'd say you're fighting a losing battle to turn back the linguistic clock.

Is Weird Tales horror pulp? I have some very pulpy horror short stories; the protagonists do survive more often than in Lovecraft or Poe, but often they end up with their girlfriend turned into a waxwork or somesuch.

To be fair, Lovecraft himself was published in Weird Tales.

To be accurate, though, Lovecraft's particular style was always kind of an odd fit for Weird Tales - much more pessimistic, often more low-key, and unlike some writers (like Robert E. Howard) Lovecraft never deigned to cater to the editor's kinks in order to make sales. (Farnsworth was really into bondage artwork, to the extent that if a story gave him an excuse to commission some for the cover of WT he was markedly more likely to buy it.)

Remember, Weird Tales rejected At the Mountains of Madness, so whilst there's plenty of room for pulpy Mythos stuff (thanks to pulpier writers who latched onto the Mythos in Lovecraft's time and afterwards), equally I'd say that "pulpy" and "Lovecraftian" are mildly incompatible prospects - not least because Lovecraft himself was never entirely compatible with the ethos of the pulps. (Or society. Or his wife. Or himself. Or really anything else. Awkward bird, was Lovecraft.)

It really depends on how you define "pulp". If it's just magazines printed on that sort of paper, you have a wide variety of genres.

But in practice, it means stuff like The Shadow, Doc Savage, The Spider, The Phantom Detective, etc. I think The Shadow lost 1 agent in the whole nearly 400 issue run.

But even if you expand it to other stuff, like mystery novels, you have Sam Spade, the Continental Op, Phil Marlowe. None of them ever died.

As you are playing in the Setting and not reading a Story, I see no reason that the "Hero" can't die. I do think that it should not be from an infection or blood loss.  It should be something Dramatic. This is where I see the "Magical Brownie Point" coming into play. They would heal wounds, clear infection and stop blood loss. They would not save you from falling into lava.
They might give you a re-roll on the jump attempt but when you fail after using one, so sad.
=

Is it redefined however?  The movie Pulp Fiction was about seedy, gritty, sexy, violent criminals, not about gorilla scientists in biplanes attacking nazi zeppelins over Mars.  Gamers specifically, and modern culture in general, seem to have a pathological need to take everything and crank the satirical, ironic, over the top elements of anything up to the 11th power.

So what we're talking about is a redefinition of "pulp" within the RPG community then.  But, games like Two-Fisted Tales aren't the same as SotC.  What Warthur refers to as the pulp redefinition is really "highly cinematic pulp", taking a small segment of the definition and assuming it's now the real definition in use.  Where have we seen this before? :hmm:

However, if we are talking about playing a "Pulp" game, then a lot of people are talking about genre conventions, but genre conventions vary widely from different genres of pulp.  

Call of Cthulhu is actually more of a playing "within the world of Lovecraft" rather then "within the fiction of Lovecraft" and as a result, aside from Sanity, it's not heavy on genre mechanics at all.  Since it's not heavy on genre mechanics, it's flexible.  If you are looking for Noir in characterization and not some metagame out of character mechanic, CoC can do Noir or other Detective Fiction, Westerns or any other type of low-powered pulp.  If you consider all of BRP as possible supplements for CoC (which they are, because all the d100 stuff is easily interchangeable) then you have rules for lots of different pulp styles.

However, if by pulp you mean "larger then life heroes who are a higher form of being then the mooks around them expressed through OOC metagame mechanics" then yeah, CoC doesn't help you much.

So what does Chaosium coming out with it's own Pulp Cthulhu say about CoC itself?  Not much, really, other then the typical, if somewhat banal at this point, new school shift.  What did Astounding Adventures add to BRP?  Narrative logic through OOC metagame elements to simulate genre.  What did COC7 add to CoC?  Narrative logic through OOC metagame elements to simulate genre.  What will Pulp Cthulhu add to CoC?  :hmm:

Indiana Jones vs. Cthulhu is popular though, so it's only natural I guess that Chaosium wants that money too, even if they're a little late to the table.

"Pulp" has been a genre for decades. It's a genre with its own assumptions and conventions. If you want to create "Lethal Pulp" as your take on that established genre, go for it.

Pulp RPGs seek to emulate the fiction...and in that fiction (for obvious reasons), the big damn hero lives to fight another day in issue after issue, proto-comic book style.

Lethal RPGs are about those same stories, but without the plot immunity, but since plot immunity is a KEY part of the Pulp Genre, you are messing with a core concept to what people understand to be Pulp.

But that's fine and it's quite possible that if you or someone else makes a really fun Lethal Pulp RPG, it will find an audience who wants to play Indy Jones who might die in 5 minutes into the movie.

or some people understand that playing in the Hyborian World doesn't mean we will all never die like Conan, because, well...

We're not Conan, and this isn't a book we're reading.

Whichever.  

Quote from: JeremyR;750152It really depends on how you define "pulp". If it's just magazines printed on that sort of paper, you have a wide variety of genres.

But in practice, it means stuff like The Shadow, Doc Savage, The Spider, The Phantom Detective, etc. I think The Shadow lost 1 agent in the whole nearly 400 issue run.

But even if you expand it to other stuff, like mystery novels, you have Sam Spade, the Continental Op, Phil Marlowe. None of them ever died.

The protagonists rarely die in most genres. I think giving PCs a boost so they have protagonist style plot immunity (or something apporaching it) is more what I would call cinematic than pulp. I think it is totally fine to do, but games that don't do it are not failures or poor design because they don't regard that as essential to the genre they are inspired by. CoC does lovecraft well. In fact lovecraft arguably loses his punch if you give PCs plot immunity and treat them as larger than life heroes.

I usually don't think of pulp as being immune from death.

I will say that in pulp I think death is a bit HARDER. I mean, there is a mountain of middle ground between constant fear of death and death only if the player wishes it, and I tend to find pulp somewhere in that realm. you may die, but it isn't going to happen at some random moment, its going to be after a huge spiral of bad decisions/luck.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;750163The protagonists rarely die in most genres.

Right freaking there.  If I could put flashing lights beside it, I would.

Above and beyond that, it's a never-ending source of amazement to me how many gamers just can't separate the conventions of fiction (either literary or cinematic) with the conventions of tabletop gaming.  There's not one RPG party in ten which wouldn't jeer at the plan of the Council in LotR ("Let me get this straight.  Instead of the Ring being toted by the 15th level types, you're going to hand it to 1st level mooks?).  There's not one RPG party in ten which wouldn't scream bloody murder at the notion of their "protagonist" being effectively immortal.  There's not one RPG party in ten which, being plopped into Hogwarts, wouldn't adopt the common fanfic POVs that Dumbledore was either a manipulative asshole or completely senile, and that all the adults were incompetent, wimpy sheep.  (Heck, a lot of RPG parties, if the serial numbers were filed off, might well conclude that Voldemort was the only leader on the chessboard with any balls, and swing that way.)  

Fiction gives face time to the people the author wants, it gives plot immunity to the people the author wants to live until the end of the story -- and almost invariably to the protagonist/viewpoint character -- it has the characters acting the way that suits the plot, and it has those characters wearing blinkers which suit the author's amour propre.  GMs who routinely enforced these elements in campaigns would not win popularity contests.

Can we please stop buying in to nonsense such as "pulp isn't lethal because ongoing series don't kill off the protagonists?"  For pity's sake, the series wasn't called "Mike Hammer, Until It Was The Next Guy, And Then The Next Guy After That."

All that being said, I'm in general agreement with the OP.

Whilst it's true that the existence of character death as such isn't a meaningful distinction with pulp, I think there's room to discuss relative lethality in terms of what level of risk is considered to be safe, threatening, and suicidally dangerous for characters. We know that in some genres, one average guy with a knife and a nasty attitude is a serious threat to the protagonists, whilst in other genres the protagonists put down hordes of goons without breaking a sweat and are only seriously threatened by similarly tough individuals to themselves.