I think I am going to re-read Queen of the Black Coast after all this talk. Great story.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;751266I think I am going to re-read Queen of the Black Coast after all this talk. Great story.

It is that.  I admit that when I was asked to do a Conan solo on an emergency basis -- as in "Camera ready copy has to be in our hands no later than 30 days from now -- that was the very first idea that leapt into my mind.  It's a classic.

Worst comes to worst, you can read it online through Project Gutenberg.

Totally forgot about it. But FGU put out a 1930s themed pulp adventure RPG called Daredevils.

The genre-savvy Pulp Fiction, one of Tarantino's finer films, has Vincent die meaninglessly after coming out of the toilet. Because it's not his story anymore, it's someone else's. No matter what else has happened, and will happen, given the narrative's non linear structure, in that scene John Travolta is just a goon that Bruce Willis shoots.

Quote from: Omega;751911Totally forgot about it. But FGU put out a 1930s themed pulp adventure RPG called Daredevils.

One of my favourite games.
In one session a PC was trying to kidnap a baby so he put it in a suitcase ties that to his back and climbed out of the window of a Manhattan brownstone. The failed climb check and the fall were messy.

suffice it to say it was very pulpy.
Lost Cities, foggy Manhattan streets, Occupied Singapore etc etc ...

We played it big gulps 2 days straight sessions with a 8 hour sleep break 9-14 PCs.
Most sessions 1/3 of the PCs died In Singapore (actually funny I am here now ...) all but 2 PCs died mostly killing each other of course....

Quote from: S'mon;750936It kinda seems to me that I could do most of the original '30s "Two Fisted Tales" stuff a lot more easily in Call of Cthulu/BRP than in modern 'pulp' games.

Or you could try Two Fisted Tales (by Precis).

Seems to me that it's key that this talk of "plot immunity" shouldn't apply to PCs. I don't mind the use of Luck Points or what have you for hair's breadth escapes, but characters should always be able to die. Yes, the main character of a long-running saga like Conan seems to get out of an awful lot of scrapes, but I agree with the above posters who mentioned that the construction of the saga should happen, in theory, after the fact. It's BECAUSE the "hero" survived that we tell tales of his exploits and not vice versa. And quite often in swords & sorcery style pulps you'll get sidekicks and companions or even lovers getting killed, prompting the hero to seek revenge... And here's the trick: in an adventuring party, no one knows who the "hero" is! De facto, he's the guy who's still standing at the end. So, you got slaughtered by the snake cult? Turns out you were a sidekick! Only after the fact is the series of events turned into a narrative, which casts the survivor as the central protagonist (often even the narrator)... He doesn't even have to be the most "heroic" character. For an example of this, see Conrad's Lord Jim, in which Jim, the central character, gets involved in a pulpy "adventure" series of events towards the end, but Marlowe, the narrator, gets to recount his death.... Of course, LJ could be described as ironic commentary on the kind of imperial adventure fiction - precursor to the pulps - that Conrad mocked in its opening as "light holiday reading", but the point is you can have the hero die, as long as someone lives to tell the tale. And if no one does? Guess your series of adventures just never becomes a " story " at all....

Quote from: markfitz;753320Seems to me that it's key that this talk of "plot immunity" shouldn't apply to PCs. I don't mind the use of Luck Points or what have you for hair's breadth escapes, but characters should always be able to die. Yes, the main character of a long-running saga like Conan seems to get out of an awful lot of scrapes, but I agree with the above posters who mentioned that the construction of the saga should happen, in theory, after the fact. It's BECAUSE the "hero" survived that we tell tales of his exploits and not vice versa. And quite often in swords & sorcery style pulps you'll get sidekicks and companions or even lovers getting killed, prompting the hero to seek revenge... And here's the trick: in an adventuring party, no one knows who the "hero" is! De facto, he's the guy who's still standing at the end. So, you got slaughtered by the snake cult? Turns out you were a sidekick! Only after the fact is the series of events turned into a narrative, which casts the survivor as the central protagonist (often even the narrator)... He doesn't even have to be the most "heroic" character. For an example of this, see Conrad's Lord Jim, in which Jim, the central character, gets involved in a pulpy "adventure" series of events towards the end, but Marlowe, the narrator, gets to recount his death.... Of course, LJ could be described as ironic commentary on the kind of imperial adventure fiction - precursor to the pulps - that Conrad mocked in its opening as "light holiday reading", but the point is you can have the hero die, as long as someone lives to tell the tale. And if no one does? Guess your series of adventures just never becomes a " story " at all....

That's my view. And if you want the immersive experience of "You are Conan!" rather than "You are creating a Conan story!" then it has to be done that way. From Conan's POV within the stories, Conan can die. If he couldn't die he'd behave very differently, he'd be a different character. Probably a baddie.

"a baddie" haha, indeed!

So what's this game where PCs are invulnerable?  I mean, given the recent thread where just about nobody could come up with the last time that a PC with any investment in them died...

Quote from: robiswrong;753481So what's this game where PCs are invulnerable?  I mean, given the recent thread where just about nobody could come up with the last time that a PC with any investment in them died...

I got the impression from skimming some of the Nar games (Spirit of the Century, Marvel Heroic Roleplay, Dungeon World) that PCs don't die without player consent, but I could be wrong on some or all of those. Savage Worlds does the traditional approach of making PCs extremely hard to kill, but players have no metagame control of the narrative.

Quote from: robiswrong;753481So what's this game where PCs are invulnerable?  I mean, given the recent thread where just about nobody could come up with the last time that a PC with any investment in them died...

Our Deadland's campaign seemed very not-deadly. It may have been the GM handing out too many chips... or generally pulling his punches. None of the games I played with that group EVER had anyone die... but Deadlands seems to be the one where that effect was more closely tied to the rules.
For me, it sucked out all the excitement/drama of combat.

I currently play in a storygame RPG that's pulp (Trail of Cthulhu, Eternal Lies by Pelgrane) but the GM has let us know that there's no PC immunity. PC death immunity is not specifically a storygame RPG thing, as evidenced by several Trad games that have death immunity (like Marvel Superheroes) and storygame RPGs that don't (like the aforementioned Trail and other Gumshoe games).  Death immunity seems more to be a genre thing.

As for pulp, we need to define exactly what pulp we're talking about. Pulp is a diverse genre.

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;753525As for pulp, we need to define exactly what pulp we're talking about. Pulp is a diverse genre.

Pulp isn't a genre, it's medium, that delivered various genres. But the men's action adventure stuff is the most commonly addressed when folks claim their stuff is 'pulp'... a narrowed spectrum from private investigators on up to superheros.

My two cents.

Quote from: S'mon;753517I got the impression from skimming some of the Nar games (Spirit of the Century, Marvel Heroic Roleplay, Dungeon World) that PCs don't die without player consent, but I could be wrong on some or all of those. Savage Worlds does the traditional approach of making PCs extremely hard to kill, but players have no metagame control of the narrative.

I'm pretty sure that it's perfectly possible in Dungeon World, and I know that it's possible in Fate.

In Fate, if you're Taken Out, the opponent that took you out decides what that means - if you're knocked out, captured, or just plain dead.  You have no real say in what happens.  It's generally considered polite to let players know "hey, it looks like these guys are really out for blood" or the like.

The 'avoiding death' mechanisms in Fate generally boil down to the difficulty of a one-hit kill, and the ability to Concede a conflict (basically, retreat/give up).  If you stick it out and get Taken Out, well, it's up to the GM what happens.

It is true that there's a bit of an issue in SotC where the default stress track lengths are just stupidly long.  10 stress makes for long, long fights.  More recent iterations have the length drastically lowered - Fate Core defaults to two stress.

Now, it's also true that in Fate, there's no point at which the system enforces "and now you're dead."  That's *always* a call the GM makes.

I don't know anything about MHR, so I can't really say.  But I could totally see death not being typically on the line for reasons of genre emulation.

Quote from: Simlasa;753524Our Deadland's campaign seemed very not-deadly. It may have been the GM handing out too many chips... or generally pulling his punches. None of the games I played with that group EVER had anyone die... but Deadlands seems to be the one where that effect was more closely tied to the rules.
For me, it sucked out all the excitement/drama of combat.

That's often a GMing problem - the inability to actually put anything at risk besides the PCs.  I've felt myself slide into that groove quite often, and the more 'scripted' a scenario is, the more I find myself in it.  Since I know the 'plot' is going to get dragged along in a particular direction, and I know from experience that PC deaths in almost *any* game are pretty rare, it gets really easy to get into the "fuck it, we'll see what happens" mode.

For me, once I see that there really isn't much at risk in a game (and if we go through ten combats of people doing dumb things and nobody dies, then there's no real risk), I get bored.  I don't require that the risk be the life of my PC, but something has to be at risk.

I'll admit the "your PC's life is really at risk, even though we haven't killed a single PC in thirty sessions" illusion is a bit harder to pull off when the system makes it obvious that actually dying is difficult.  I guess I've just played enough that in most games I've seen through it.

That's why I prefer either really old-school games where the GM will happily murder your character, or games that are honest about the actual death rate, and put other things on the line instead.

While this article is about movies, I do think that the general advice works well in certain types of games - it's pretty wildly inappropriate for a dungeon crawl, for instance.

http://io9.com/why-you-should-never-write-action-scenes-into-your-tent-511712234