Quote from: CRKrueger;750158Where have we seen this before? :hmm:

I have an idea.

Quote from: Ravenswing;750173Above 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.

One of many things that amaze me about some gamers.

Quote from: Ravenswing;750173Right 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.

Quote for truth

Actually, the French edition of the Appel de Cthulhu supports Pulp emulation explicitly. It has three tiers of play, from gritty investigation to heroic-y to pulp, and does very much put into play lethality and sanity and all the trappings you know about CoC throughout, with twists, so you can actually get the best of all worlds, just saying to your players "OK, I need characters for pulp, or lovecraftian investigation, etc, and we go from there".

Quote from: Black Vulmea;750176I have an idea.

That is VERY pertinent. As a French guy who grew up on the "films de capes et d'épées" as a child with the likes of Jean Marais, I can totally relate.

I think more important than character death or vulnerability is genre fidelity. As The Butcher suggests in the OP, "pulp" doesn't equal "charges machine gun nests, laughs at having a gun barrel jabbed in the ribs". If PCs can't die, then either players self-police (feels fake from an in-character POV) or they act with the verisimilitude-breaking knowledge that they can do whatever they like without serious consequence.

As for what can be done mechanics-wise to separate death from genre fidelity, that's another question. When they're linked, you have a double benefit. Most players are incentivized to stay within genre because they want their character to live. (And this maps pretty closely to the IC survival instinct.) But if a player doesn't really care about their character, that's cool, because the character's death ends the problem. (You do have issues with parties being screwed over by one loony or bad sport in their midst.)

But other mechanical approaches I've found only handle incentive without offering damage control if incentive fails. E.g. suppose you give each player a reroll budget before each adventure, with leftover refills converted into character points. So there's an incentive to be smart so you can minimize your use of rerolls. But if a player just doesn't care about advancement, the incentive is gone.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;750176I have an idea.

Oh my, that essay speaks to me... my previous group quoting TPB ad nauseum but having no clue at all about Errol Flynn movies or the original fictions. Much like Monty Python, their excessive and narrow repetition drove away the joy of it.

I'm in agreement with The Butcher and Ravenswing.
When I play a game where I KNOW my PC can die... doing dangerous stuff is THRILLING and I often feel downright HEROIC doing it... even if I do end up rolling a new character.
If I can just toss in some extra chips to metagame my way to assured success that thrill is gone and I certainly don't come away feeling heroic.

Pulp remains a medium for me, as does anime/manga... 'Hollywood Action Hero' (HAH!) would be my preferred way of speaking about implausible survival rates in the face of overpowering danger.

Good essay, BV.

And a thumbs-up to the posters talking about the need for genuine fear.  I've an anecdote.

I've mentioned playing for some years in a combat boffer LARP.  For most of that run I was the game's most powerful ritual magician, and for much of it its lead healer and a national leader.  Healing was pretty ubiquitous, and raising the dead pretty routine.  Heck, there was a site TPK -- every single PC had been killed, nearly a hundred of them -- but because I played dead, and then hid until the Bad Guy Army withdrew, I raised every single PC.

This didn't happen once.  It happened at three separate events.  (Okay, on one of them, I was killed, but my IC daughter was the last living PC, she followed my usual example and played dead, and used a healing potion to get me up.  And so the ball started rolling.)

I was asked more than once, IC, whether I was afraid, and I honestly had to say No.  Being wounded was a momentary inconvenience.  Being killed was a temporary inconvenience.  The worst depredation of the Big Bad would be set right in the end -- if not at this event, then eventually.  Getting torn asunder and made unrevivifiable?  Even that could be fixed, and I was one of the very few people who could do that.  Exactly what did I have to fear?  Evil winning the day?  Bah; you did a tactical retreat, you regrouped, and you came back swinging.

I just couldn't create a suspension of disbelief strong enough to be afraid, strong enough to override my character's common sense observation, powered by years of play.

So much handwringing over which choice of artifice one makes ...

Quote from: CRKrueger;750160or 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.  

Conversely some just cannot grasp that Conan, Doc Savage, The Spider, etc Do come very close to death quite often. BUT. They are the adventurers that survived and thus we are reading their tale as opposed to reading about soon-to-be-dead-adventurer #55. And some pulp adventures go through at least an adventurer a story, sometimes with a TPK or sometimes they fail the quest.

Pulp never = unkillable. It is just that if it is a series centered on a central character then flat out death us unlikely as that would be contraproductive of a series ya know? It can be just as gritty and lethal. But that lethality tends to fall to those around the main character or the life and death struggles said characters face.

Torg did pulp adventuring pretty well with its Nile Empire cosm
Call of Cthulhu can indeed do pulp adventuring and Noir really well.
Cthulhu Live has the Shades of Grey booklet which is about playing Pulp Heros.
D&D itself can do pulp adventuring just fine.

Quote from: CRKrueger;750158Gamers 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.

Most gamers read games and game-derived fiction, not the actual literature their games are based on, and as a result don't know shit about genre analysis, elements of fiction, or the fact that there's quite a large academic community that's been studying this stuff for centuries and has built up quite a serviceable vocabulary for describing and discussing it.

"High fantasy", "pulp", "cyberpunk", et. al., ad nauseum - gamers as a group simply don't know what these terms actually mean, and the argument that "language evolves" would only work if the corrupted definitions used by gamers were used by anyone who wasn't a gamer.

Many great responses, sorry if I can't answer them all.

Quote from: Warthur;750133I'd say you're fighting a losing battle to turn back the linguistic clock.

Not fighting against the "linguistic clock", just the dumb idea that pulp RPGs can't have teeth.

Quote from: Warthur;750138I'd say that "pulpy" and "Lovecraftian" are mildly incompatible prospects

That is one of the points I'm making, actually; "pulp" is a damn big tent, and if your definition excludes a pulp author as prolific and proeminent as Lovecraft, it's probably not a very good one.

Quote from: Spinachcat;750159"Pulp" has been a genre for decades.

Says who? The Internet? Seriously?

Quote from: Spinachcat;750159If you want to create "Lethal Pulp" as your take on that established genre, go for it.

That's the exact misconception I'm taking issue with. Pulp heroes faced life-threatening danger all the time. Having a lethal pulp RPG is far more proper genre emulation than the cartoonish immortality that certain games try to sell off as "true to source."

Quote from: Spinachcat;750159Pulp 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.

Protagonists don't survive because it's their story. It's their story because they've survived.

Quote from: Spinachcat;750159But 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.

How exciting would it be to watch the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, if there was no risk of Indy dying from the traps or the giant boulder?

Quote from: Warthur;750174Whilst 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.

True. I'm not advocating OD&D-Normal-Men levels of lethality here,just railing against the one-true-wayism and the excesses. Having said that, though...

Quote from: Emperor Norton;750166I 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.

...I like the idea that PCs live in a very dangerous world in which a moment's hesitation or a stroke of bad luck can cut their adventuring careers brutally short. Makes daring stunts of courage actually daring and courageous, y'know.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;750176I have an idea.

THANK YOU.

Quote from: Benoist;750190Actually, the French edition of the Appel de Cthulhu supports Pulp emulation explicitly.

So does the English language core rulebook. That's kind of my point.

Quote from: Arminius;750214But other mechanical approaches I've found only handle incentive without offering damage control if incentive fails. E.g. suppose you give each player a reroll budget before each adventure, with leftover refills converted into character points. So there's an incentive to be smart so you can minimize your use of rerolls. But if a player just doesn't care about advancement, the incentive is gone.

That's exactly how Savage Worlds does it. When I first read it, I thought converting bennies to XP was dumb, but now I see a certain logic.

Quote from: J Arcane;750221So much handwringing over which choice of artifice one makes ...

I think I'm a pretty level-headed poster. I feel like I've earned the right to be outraged and rant about elfgames every once in a blue moon.

Quote from: daniel_ream;750232Most gamers read games and game-derived fiction, not the actual literature their games are based on, and as a result don't know shit about genre analysis, elements of fiction, or the fact that there's quite a large academic community that's been studying this stuff for centuries and has built up quite a serviceable vocabulary for describing and discussing it.

"High fantasy", "pulp", "cyberpunk", et. al., ad nauseum - gamers as a group simply don't know what these terms actually mean, and the argument that "language evolves" would only work if the corrupted definitions used by gamers were used by anyone who wasn't a gamer.

Too true. Everyone nowadays, gamers included, apparently only gobble up pop culture rehashes of everything, oblivious to the original forms. Shit, we wouldn't have an OSR if that wasn't the case.

For a genre-simulation-oriented game, PCs need to be able to do the things protagonists do in the genre, with similar prospects of success from the POV of the protagonists. So in a Musketeers game a Musketeer PC should be able to duel a typical member of Richelieu's guard with a high chance of survival and small prospect of death or long term injuries. If he takes on ten of Richelieu's guards on an even field, he should feel certain of a swift demise.

A lot of 'pulp' and 'cinematic' games get this wrong - they stat it "with benefit of hindsight", ie chances of success are hugely booosted because 'heroes don't die'. So eg in 1e WEG d6 Star Wars a beginning PC with combat-oriented stats can take on the squad of stormtroopers that Han Solo ran from, with a good prospect of success. This then encourages player characters to behave differently from the heroes in Star Wars ep IV-VI; the PCs behave more like the Jedi vs the robot soldiers in episode I.

Good genre-emulation mechanics are mechanics that encourage the PCs to behave similarly to the way the protagonists in the genre fiction behave (assuming we are emulating the activities of the protagonists). So eg good rules for Conan genre should encourage Conanesque behaviour - which includes a lot of running away, and even surrendering.

Quote from: J Arcane;750221So much handwringing over which choice of artifice one makes ...

Who is the bigger handwringer?  The handwringer or the one who handwrings about him?

Quote from: Benoist;750192That is VERY pertinent.

Quote from: Simlasa;750216Oh my, that essay speaks to me...

Quote from: Ravenswing;750219Good essay, BV.

Quote from: The Butcher;750256THANK YOU.

Thank you.

The result, in roleplaying games, is that you end up with a narrow, limited and limiting take on the genre.