Quote from: Eirikrautha on January 22, 2025, 04:05:36 PMFor example, CoC is not designed as an action-oriented or combat-heavy game.  Generally, if you're fighting the eldritch horror with weapons, you've already lost.  As such, high lethality is an expectation, but not as something that will occur five times during a session.  Catastrophic sanity loss takes time (unless you are running houserules), and usually doesn't happen within ten minutes of the game starting..  CoC works best at the table as a slow burn.  On the other hand, D&D is an action-oriented, combat-heavy game (as is Rolemaster).  The standard dungeon-crawl might see the players engage in a half-dozen fights of varying scales each session. 

So, while both Rolemaster and CoC can be said to be highly lethal, there are different rates of lethality.  You probably don't expect your CoC character to survive the campaign (yet many do).  You probably don't expect your Rolemaster character to last the week (and many don't).  So complicated and involved point buy systems may "work" for CoC, and still be terrible design for a combat-oriented RPG like Rolemaster.

This is an interesting point, but this doesn't dismiss Call of Cthulhu as an example. The topic isn't just about D&D and Rolemaster. It's about deadliness of systems in general. The original claims - that my OP was responding to - about the problems of skill-based chargen weren't qualified as "only for D&D-like combat-oriented systems".

I agree with the generality that combat-oriented systems will have different priorities than investigation-heavy or exploration-heavy systems. But I don't think I agree with the point about Rolemaster or combat-heavy systems.

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I played two short campaigns of Rolemaster in the 1990s. The first was in college, a fantasy campaign set in Renaissance Italy, where I played a overpowered sympathetic healer. The second was a segment of a friend's fantasy campaign ("Land of Neng") where he was experimenting with different systems, where I played a mentalist. Neither of them was combat heavy - they were both fairly immersive with detailed worlds, more like Pundit's "medieval authentic" than like dungeon crawls. I never had any PCs die. We were pretty careful about combat in both cases, and in the first, I was amazing at healing.

Rolemaster is a bit of an oddity, and I'm not sure what the bigger community was like. From the books, RM was intentionally broader in focus than D&D. It gave XP not just for combat, but also for things like ideas and miles travelled. The sample adventure in Campaign Law, "Vog Mur" looks more like a Harnmaster adventure than a D&D adventure, with many pages of background and detailed description. The end challenge is about finding a rare herb to awaken a golem.

So first of all, I'm not sure I'd class Rolemaster the same as D&D. And after that, there's the question of whether the detailed chargen of Rolemaster works. I'm not a big fan of it, but I can speak more to Harnmaster - which also has detailed skill-based chargen, and that I think does work.

Quote from: ForgottenF on January 22, 2025, 11:32:43 PMThe day-to-day adventure was fun, equipment didn't matter much, character creation is fast and relatively enjoyable, there was little ongoing plot, and starting characters in that game aren't much weaker than experienced ones.

A reasonable set of potential factors there.  A good argument can be made that all of them play some role.

Any player in any game I've ever participated in was permitted to and capable of rolling up a backup character ahead of time.

The idea that anyone has to sit out for the rest of an entire session if their PC dies is nuts. In my experience, that's invariably on the player for not creating the backup PC ahead of time.

But if I ever encountered a DM that just refused to bring a character in because "story" or something, I'd find a new game right quick.

Quote from: Zalman on January 23, 2025, 08:03:21 AMAny player in any game I've ever participated in was permitted to and capable of rolling up a backup character ahead of time.

The idea that anyone has to sit out for the rest of an entire session if their PC dies is nuts. In my experience, that's invariably on the player for not creating the backup PC ahead of time.

But if I ever encountered a DM that just refused to bring a character in because "story" or something, I'd find a new game right quick.

Yeah, if you are going to run a "story" game--like characters are the ones in the prophecy who will save the world kind of deal--then you need to make character death unlikely--and not just because it is a hassle to make a new child of prophecy character and work them into the story.

OTOH, if you want to run a game that benefits from the threat of real character death, then don't run the stupid child of prophecy story game.  It's not rocket science.  There's appeal to both types to different players, but you can't have both in the same game.  The root of this problem is that people want their cake and eat it too.  In particular, they want the pretense that a story game is deadly without losing characters, which never works.  No matter how much everyone at the table pretends to get a little thrill at how close that encounter was to losing someone, everyone knows it wasn't going to happen. 

So yeah, definitely, not only do I have players make backup characters, I incorporate them into the game ahead of time.  Sometimes when not many players can make a session, we'll have the player handle the main and the backup in the same session.  Sometimes, when someone loses a character and reverts to the backup, we'll play an adventure where all the backups go do something.  Then I have the players meeting NPCs (ahead of time) that could turn into backup characters.  It's like AD&D henchmen on steroids. Get this, I've even had a couple of players lose a character, start playing their backup, and in a few sessions are happy about it, because they like the backup character even better.  And after that happened, I even had a player voluntarily switch to their backup, without the main character dying. 

It's amazing what you can do when you know characters will eventually die, instead of pretending that they might for that little fake thrill.

Quote from: Chris24601 on January 20, 2025, 08:54:52 AMI wish you were wrong, but I'm going to have to agree here. One of my friends served over in Iraq until he was disabled. He remembers them all by name.

Trauma tends to cement rather than dilute memory. That guy who exploded next to you on your first day (who would have been you if the flight path was a fraction different) is not something you forget.

They don't talk about it (much), but they don't forget.

Not entirely true. People deal with trauma in different ways, either consciously or subconsciously. One person may have it "Cemented" in their memory and cannot forget. Another person may subconsciously forget the incident by having a false/screen memory.

I know for myself personally, having served in Iraq in '05, there are things I've forgotten and others I remember like it was yesterday. Without getting into details, the psychological scars are there. I was diagnosed with PTSD after my deployment and will have it the rest of my life (20 years later and I'm still taking an anti-depressant).

I was lucky. I saw the warning signs and got help. To put in gaming terms, I failed my SAN roll once, lost 1d4 SAN, made my SAN a second time and got help, and recovered 1d4 SAN. Others, not so much. Less than a year after coming home, the youngest kid in out platoon committed suicide. For him, he kept failing his SAN roll and never found help. Ultimately he went under the threshold and hung himself in his parent's basement.

Yeah, it's morbid, but most veterans have a morbid sense of humor. It's a coping mechanism.

Sorry to derail for the moment.

Part of it I think is expectations. If the players understand the type of game it is, be it lethal or not, it will temper the players' expectations before and during the course of play.

This doesn't always work. You will almost always have at least one crybaby.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on January 23, 2025, 09:32:53 AM

QuoteAny player in any game I've ever participated in was permitted to and capable of rolling up a backup character ahead of time.

The idea that anyone has to sit out for the rest of an entire session if their PC dies is nuts. In my experience, that's invariably on the player for not creating the backup PC ahead of time.

But if I ever encountered a DM that just refused to bring a character in because "story" or something, I'd find a new game right quick.

Yeah, if you are going to run a "story" game--like characters are the ones in the prophecy who will save the world kind of deal--then you need to make character death unlikely--and not just because it is a hassle to make a new child of prophecy character and work them into the story.

OTOH, if you want to run a game that benefits from the threat of real character death, then don't run the stupid child of prophecy story game.  It's not rocket science.  There's appeal to both types to different players, but you can't have both in the same game. 

The context I've seen this in isn't "oh we can't lose this character or add a new one because the plot won't work". I'm sure that happens, but not with the people I've played with. Even the nu-school generally knows that you shouldn't hang your campaign on specific characters. What I've seen is people who are too wrapped up in the Creative Writing 101 school of DM advice and think they need to stop and discuss the character's backstory, motivation, history with the existing PCs etc., before figuring out a narratively consistent way to introduce them into the party.

It's one of those prime examples of the K.I.S.S. principle and the road to hell being paved with good intentions. DMs get lofty ideas into their heads which they think will make their games better and end up making them worse.

D&D Paranoia Call of Cthulhu

all popular games that punish players for being stupid. The games reward cleverness that keeps your barbie alive.