Quote from: rytrasmi on August 03, 2023, 10:51:55 AM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 03, 2023, 09:23:28 AM
Yes, lethality should have some inverse proportion to the time you spend creating a PC.

That's the answer right there.

I don't do long backgrounds. Usually just a former profession and homeland, and maybe a few family members. Background is created during play by the adventures themselves and by inventing background facts when needed.

Yes.  In fact, the extremes are easy.  Heavy character construction, almost impossible to kill (e.g. Champions), no problem.  B/X D&D low level, character in 5-10 minutes, dies like flies.  Also no problem.

It's when you want some mix (which many people to do), the trick is finding the right balance.  Yes, it's inverse, but it is not as if you just adjust the slider and one things shifts the other automatically.  "Less complex to make a character" can be done a lot of ways.  "More likely to live" can also be done a lot of ways.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on August 03, 2023, 12:57:49 PM

Quote from: rytrasmi on August 03, 2023, 10:51:55 AM

Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 03, 2023, 09:23:28 AM
Yes, lethality should have some inverse proportion to the time you spend creating a PC.

That's the answer right there.

I don't do long backgrounds. Usually just a former profession and homeland, and maybe a few family members. Background is created during play by the adventures themselves and by inventing background facts when needed.

Yes.  In fact, the extremes are easy.  Heavy character construction, almost impossible to kill (e.g. Champions), no problem.  B/X D&D low level, character in 5-10 minutes, dies like flies.  Also no problem.

It's when you want some mix (which many people to do), the trick is finding the right balance.  Yes, it's inverse, but it is not as if you just adjust the slider and one things shifts the other automatically.  "Less complex to make a character" can be done a lot of ways.  "More likely to live" can also be done a lot of ways.

That's a good point. Finding that balance I suppose could take some effort. However, what's the goal here? Do you want to eliminate all sudden deaths? Should players have some kind of expectation as to character survival based on background length? Too much balance, in my view, leads to grey goo. It should be the case that, once in a while, a carefully crafter character dies ignobly on day 1. Keeping that possibility in the minds of the players makes them a little less murder-hobo-y.

See, that's the thing with lethality. A game doesn't actually have to rack up a high death count for players to consider it lethal. The only thing that's required is the possibility of sudden death. In order to keep that possibility alive, you need rules that promote lethality, a fair GM, and, ideally, a few examples.

This might sound stupid, but in the 90s I used amnesia as a tool for highly lethal campaigns. Everyone had it - PCs, NPCs, etc. The campaign was about finding out why and how to restore everyone's memories. I also had players (3-4 players) run 2-3 characters each. This way, no one was knocked out of play early in the session. It's extreme but it worked! (I also had a homebrewed lifepath at the ready for the end of the campaign, but we never got that far due to me falling sick for a few years.)

Where does Traveller fall into this for y'all?

We spend 3-4 hours on chargen and also create connections between all the party members. We're all one bad damage roll from death. We've had 20 sessions of 5 hours each over the last year. I think all five of us have been close to death at least once. With three of us close two or three times. And if the pilot had failed one of his rolls, we'd all have died that one time.

We haven't had, I think, that many combats, because we work so hard to avoid them. I think less than half of our sessions have had combat. Maybe less than 5. But at least one of us gets close to dying every time.

Quote from: rytrasmi on August 03, 2023, 02:35:44 PM
That's a good point. Finding that balance I suppose could take some effort. However, what's the goal here? Do you want to eliminate all sudden deaths? Should players have some kind of expectation as to character survival based on background length? Too much balance, in my view, leads to grey goo. It should be the case that, once in a while, a carefully crafter character dies ignobly on day 1. Keeping that possibility in the minds of the players makes them a little less murder-hobo-y.

See, that's the thing with lethality. A game doesn't actually have to rack up a high death count for players to consider it lethal. The only thing that's required is the possibility of sudden death. In order to keep that possibility alive, you need rules that promote lethality, a fair GM, and, ideally, a few examples.

Well, for me I draw one line that "sudden death must be possible", however rare.  In other words, there is no "plot" protection for PCs.  Next, I draw another line that the players should have some uncertainty any time they are doing something dangerous.  So no jumping off the 80 foot cliff because, "I've got enough hit points to survive the fall."    Then, I want playing smarter to lead to less deaths.  Which may sound automatic, both in desire and execution, but it isn't in either.  For example, if kicking down the door and bursting in is something that players routinely manage to get away with, then it's too tilted towards the action movie tropes for me.  Kicking down the doors as a calculated risk from time to time, I'm all for that.

Beyond those lines, however, I'd be quite happy if death seldom happened.  It's not terribly common in my games.  Characters getting close to death?  Happens all the time.  Characters close enough that ill-timed bad luck could finish them off suddenly, it happens some.  Law of averages says that a few of those will end up in a death.  I've played all different kinds of ways with lethal levels.  One thing that I've seen to be constant is that when death isn't really an option, quite a few players start going through the motions of working to keep their characters alive.  When it is an option, they pay more attention.  The latter ends up being a better game for me and them.  Though maybe that's just the kind of players I attract to my games.

I think I first pondered this when I started playing Dangerous Journeys due to how long it takes to make characters in Advanced Mythus.

The ideal ratio of character make time to character play time will, of course, vary by preference, but whatever ratio is thought to be ideal, you certainly don't want to drift too far from it. As a ratio, there are two variables, the depth of character creation, and the lethality of the game. Lethality itself, broadly speaking, has two variables. How lethal the GM sets the world/sandbox/adventure to be. And the players' appetite for risk and ability to make "winning" choices vs "losing" choices. And so you wind up with three big factors, and I look at all of them.

For backgrounds, I actually think this should be developed as play goes on. For a few reasons. That it cuts down on character creation time is just one reason. Another reason is the purpose of the background is to put into context how the character makes decisions in the present. And those remain to be seen until after play begins. Third reason is, in-game, there is interplay between the character and the other PCs and the milieu in general. What comes out of that is a lot more organic than a backstory authored in isolation. There's also practicality. If you're taking roleplaying seriously, in the sense that you're making decisions the character would make, you need to first define or author how the character responds to various stimuli, and there's just way too many things that can and do come up in the game that you cannot possibly foresee.

For lethality, one thing I go back to are the old stories about Tenser the mage, who started out at 1st level, knowing only Read Magic, doing dungeon delves often in small parties, sometimes even solo. Ask yourself, what must be true of the game for this to even be viable. I think dwelling on this has implications for both how the GM puts together adventures as well as how the players approach them.

As GM, you can't really have encounters where players are expected to fight. Otherwise Tenser won't make it. You can't have challenges that are expected to be bested by a spell. Tenser's only got one, and it's Read Magic. Everything needs to be opt-outable by players. Meaning that opting out can't ruin the fun or adventure. But with freedom to opt out, there also has to be enticement to opt in. Some reason players want to engage in a situation. And situations can't have pre-set solutions. It's all got to be open to creativity. And finally, it's almost as if the game bits need to be treated as an afterthought. The real game is a game of imagination and wits. Character abilities are things to fall back on when the player's imagination and wits fail.

As player, a simple test you can use as a proving grounds is to roll up a 1st level magic-user. You can even start with read magic + 3 spells per the 1E DMG--an edge Tenser did not have to start with. But then go solo against the Appendix A random dungeon. You can even cheat and look ahead. We know almost immediately you're going to need to be running away from a lot of things. And that can be trouble when it comes to Giant Ants which will be too fast to outrun. But if you read the Evasion & Pursuit rules, you realize you can easily get away just by throwing down food. This means when you're spending your initial 20-50 gp, you need to pack food even if you have no intention of camping out mid-adventure. You build up an arsenal of basic tricks, then when you go to play an actual game, you're going to live longer even in a hard-core old school game.

Any one of these can solve, or at the very least mitigate, the alleged "contradiction." But implement all three, and you'll never have a problem.

Personally I've never cared about backgrounds when I play OSR, I'm more interessed in playing clever dungeons and finding creative solutions to problems, anyway, there are OSR games that offer more narrative options, Whitehack with it's group system comes to mind for example, I was actually surprised with how well it handles a more narrative style.

Quote from: Shaldlay on August 02, 2023, 05:03:08 PM
I've always considered lethality a crucial part of D&D. I consider it so important that I find games that don't risk character death nearly unplayable. What good is "winning" a game if there is no way that I can "lose"? I would think it's very safe to assume that this sort of thought process is shared in this community and in much of the OSR, which makes this contradiction I've come across all that more confusing.

Many OSR/ OSR-adjacent games feature a "background" feature, either Lion and Dragon's Background Events Tables or Deathbringer's Random Misery Table. I actually really like this idea, as I like the characters to be more than just "hero man" and "magic girl," yet, it seems incompatible with the notion of having a deadlier game. If you have a deadlier game, but the characters have backgrounds that the players get attached to, then it can really cause a schism when that character dies and can result in apathy and resentment, something that I very much would want to avoid.

For example, if Joe the Fighter dies from a random stray arrow from a failed search for traps roll, no big deal; Tim the Fighter can replace him. But if Joe, the champion blacksmith of Nottingdale, older brother to Celia, the party Cleric, Son of Peter, and Qwen, Brother of 6, and father of young Andrew (who he is adventuring to gain money to help raise), dies because the thief fucked up a roll, that can cause Joe's player to have a bitter taste in his mouth, and likely not care nearly as much when Tim the brother of Joe shows up. I was being a bit hyperbolic with the background of Joe, but the idea is still there. By having more to them, the character and player become more attached, and death becomes much more bitter between the DM and players and can lead to players just not caring anymore.

Am I missing a key ingredient in how this needs to be balanced? Am I just stupid and worrying too much? How do y'all go about this? Any advice would be appreciated.

I want the fear of death to be present and the understanding that it can come for you at any time, but I also don't want it just to become a board game of rotating characters. I've thought of having a negative HP system, where you have an amount equal to your Con, and every round after the first, you lose 1d4 HP, but I don't know how well that would work.

If you don't like lethality why are you playing lethal rpgs? STUPIDSTUPIDSTUPID

Play something where YOU can decide when your Barbie kicks the bucket. I'm so fkn tired of people complaining about what D&D doesn't do as if there aren't hundreds of other rpgs out there. Some "less lethal" ttrpgs:

• FATE
• Cortex Prime
• Blades in the Dark
• Tenra Bansho Zero
• Wildsea
• Tales from the Loop
• Wanderhome
• Fabula Ultima
• Genesys
• HeroQuest

Quote from: Shaldlay on August 02, 2023, 05:03:08 PM
I've always considered lethality a crucial part of D&D. I consider it so important that I find games that don't risk character death nearly unplayable. What good is "winning" a game if there is no way that I can "lose"? I would think it's very safe to assume that this sort of thought process is shared in this community and in much of the OSR, which makes this contradiction I've come across all that more confusing.

Many OSR/ OSR-adjacent games feature a "background" feature, either Lion and Dragon's Background Events Tables or Deathbringer's Random Misery Table. I actually really like this idea, as I like the characters to be more than just "hero man" and "magic girl," yet, it seems incompatible with the notion of having a deadlier game. If you have a deadlier game, but the characters have backgrounds that the players get attached to, then it can really cause a schism when that character dies and can result in apathy and resentment, something that I very much would want to avoid.

You've never played Traveller?  Your PC has 10, 20, 30 years of background before you even get to play it.

Quote from: Scooter on August 04, 2023, 05:34:48 PM

Quote from: Shaldlay on August 02, 2023, 05:03:08 PM
I've always considered lethality a crucial part of D&D. I consider it so important that I find games that don't risk character death nearly unplayable. What good is "winning" a game if there is no way that I can "lose"? I would think it's very safe to assume that this sort of thought process is shared in this community and in much of the OSR, which makes this contradiction I've come across all that more confusing.

Many OSR/ OSR-adjacent games feature a "background" feature, either Lion and Dragon's Background Events Tables or Deathbringer's Random Misery Table. I actually really like this idea, as I like the characters to be more than just "hero man" and "magic girl," yet, it seems incompatible with the notion of having a deadlier game. If you have a deadlier game, but the characters have backgrounds that the players get attached to, then it can really cause a schism when that character dies and can result in apathy and resentment, something that I very much would want to avoid.

You've never played Traveller?  Your PC has 10, 20, 30 years of background before you even get to play it.

Depending on the version, you can die in chargen!

Quote from: Scooter on August 04, 2023, 05:34:48 PM

Quote from: Shaldlay on August 02, 2023, 05:03:08 PM
I've always considered lethality a crucial part of D&D. I consider it so important that I find games that don't risk character death nearly unplayable. What good is "winning" a game if there is no way that I can "lose"? I would think it's very safe to assume that this sort of thought process is shared in this community and in much of the OSR, which makes this contradiction I've come across all that more confusing.

Many OSR/ OSR-adjacent games feature a "background" feature, either Lion and Dragon's Background Events Tables or Deathbringer's Random Misery Table. I actually really like this idea, as I like the characters to be more than just "hero man" and "magic girl," yet, it seems incompatible with the notion of having a deadlier game. If you have a deadlier game, but the characters have backgrounds that the players get attached to, then it can really cause a schism when that character dies and can result in apathy and resentment, something that I very much would want to avoid.

You've never played Traveller?  Your PC has 10, 20, 30 years of background before you even get to play it.

And you can die DURING char gen! One can find no purer example of background complexity Venn overlap with lethality than that.

I am not a huge fan of high lethality campaigns. It takes me several sessions to get into character properly with or without a background, and killing a character off might not completely reset this process for the next one, but it will sure throw in a set-back.

There are ways to bridge the two, but they often include "cheating" in some way. In my homebrew system, the default quest-giving character literally has a one-time-use, XP-consuming time rewind ability you can use to reset sessions where several PCs died in (or, if the GM is sufficiently devious, something really bad happened in the story the players want another chance to stop.) Having a baked-in bail out provision means the GM can turn up the difficulty quite severely and not have to worry about ending the campaign, and even after the rewind the PCs have memories of the pre-rewind game, which separates the pre-rewind and after-rewind difficulty with enough gameplay that the GM can turn the difficulty down enough that it probably won't kill the PCs.

Quote from: Grognard GM on August 04, 2023, 06:33:24 PM

Quote from: Scooter on August 04, 2023, 05:34:48 PM

You've never played Traveller?  Your PC has 10, 20, 30 years of background before you even get to play it.

And you can die DURING char gen! One can find no purer example of background complexity Venn overlap with lethality than that.

Exactly and last I checked it was one of the most played Sci-Fi RPGs in the history of TTRPGs

Quote from: Scooter on August 04, 2023, 08:15:35 PM

Quote from: Grognard GM on August 04, 2023, 06:33:24 PM

Quote from: Scooter on August 04, 2023, 05:34:48 PM

You've never played Traveller?  Your PC has 10, 20, 30 years of background before you even get to play it.

And you can die DURING char gen! One can find no purer example of background complexity Venn overlap with lethality than that.

Exactly and last I checked it was one of the most played Sci-Fi RPGs in the history of TTRPGs

I think it works because, options like Mercenary and the like aside, your adventures don't have to involve constant combat. I love that many of the adventure modules are search and rescue missions or mysteries and the like. Our poor GM keeps setting up for combat, and we keep avoiding it.

Quote from: Scooter on August 04, 2023, 08:15:35 PM

Quote from: Grognard GM on August 04, 2023, 06:33:24 PM

Quote from: Scooter on August 04, 2023, 05:34:48 PM

You've never played Traveller?  Your PC has 10, 20, 30 years of background before you even get to play it.

And you can die DURING char gen! One can find no purer example of background complexity Venn overlap with lethality than that.

Exactly and last I checked it was one of the most played Sci-Fi RPGs in the history of TTRPGs

Sadly I've never had a chance to try the game. The closest I've probably gotten is some 2300AD (being that it's a hard sci-fi system).

I do remember an old magazine article (maybe early White Dwarf) with the rules for making a Blade Runner style Replicant for Traveller, which I thought was neat.