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nrg89
2016-09-05, 10:04 AM
The first RPG most of you guys probably heard of that I played was D&D 3.5, but before that i played some Swedish RPGs and one thing always stood out to me; the Swedish RPGs were far more deadly than 3.5 was. As in, 3.5 on first level was a cake walk. I've learned from some old timers that the Swedish RPGs are much closer to Old School D&D than modern D&D, which is not so surprising since the engines of the Swedish RPGs haven't changed much in 20-odd years. In both of them, you just have to expect a TPK to occur or you'll be baffled way too often.

And, as you all know, as the players progress beyond tenth level in 3.5 the CR of a monster reveals absolutely nothing. It can be CR 17, facing off against four PCs on level 12, and most of the time they barely break a sweat. To me, this is something that hurts the game and it touches on something that makes me grind my gears when it comes to fiction; no threats, no suspense.
When I watch Indiana Jones with it's lighthearted tone, I don't mind that he can take on two truckloads of nazis on a tank. But in Lord of the Rings, where I'm supposed to fear for the inhabitants of Rohan as the orcs are barreling down on Helms Deep, all of that clashes with Legolas surfing on a shield against an entire regiment of orcs, or Aragorn and Gimli fighting hundreds of orcs on a ramp and living to tell the tale. All the suspense is gone, and if the tone is supposed to be light, I don't mind it but if it's supposed to be dark and serious, like some D&D settings try to be, it just feels silly. I think Kurt Wiegel said it best when he explained why he didn't like Ravenloft; "you can do all this amizingly powerful **** ... what are you scared of?"
So, when a game is not that deadly, I feel there's limits on how much engagement and suspense GMs can ask for.

What do you guys think? Does the added risk of dying make Dark Sun better or is it not something to worry too much about?

Yora
2016-09-05, 10:11 AM
I think the key is that players are able to estimate the amount of danger they are facing and have to make the decision whether the rewards are worth the risk or the consequences of retreat are acceptable.

Of course, risk can only work if the players have a choice what to fight and which deathtraps to enter. If the game makes the decision foe them the game can only progress if there isn't any real risk.

nrg89
2016-09-05, 10:23 AM
I think the key is that players are able to estimate the amount of danger they are facing and have to make the decision whether the rewards are worth the risk or the consequences of retreat are acceptable.

Of course, risk can only work if the players have a choice what to fight and which deathtraps to enter. If the game makes the decision foe them the game can only progress if there isn't any real risk.

I expect there to be some knowledge of the risk, but I feel suspense is in the unknown. Yes, a GM should not keep his cards too close to the chest because that's treating the players unfairly, if they have no idea what's happening it's as bad as not challenging them. Instead of holding their hand and protecting them from danger, you're holding their hand leading them off a cliff.

But I'm of the opinion that there has to be a lot of variance and a healthy 60/40 or 70/30 ratio of known variables and unknown variables. Wether or not the room actually contains enemies, it's a great feeling when the players are holding their weapons high, sweeping the room and breathes out once it's established it's all clear because what if there would've been a big monster there that could eat them alive?
If they enter, are surprised by a goblin that attacks them, they get a flesh wound and stabs the goblin to death with minimal effort the GM cannot expect them to react with fear to the next threat or to be careful. They'll kick in the door next time, because whatever's inside there's probably going to bite the dust.

Knaight
2016-09-05, 10:34 AM
This sort of thing is extremely game dependent. There are games which work best when character mortality is extremely high*, there are games which work best when characters can only die when the players of said characters choose that they do (usually in lieu of some sort of other negative consequence.

*In Pendragon, everyone dies. Everyone. Dread comes pretty close.

nrg89
2016-09-05, 10:42 AM
This sort of thing is extremely game dependent. There are games which work best when character mortality is extremely high*, there are games which work best when characters can only die when the players of said characters choose that they do (usually in lieu of some sort of other negative consequence.

I think I actually agree, and this is pretty much why I feel there is no such thing as a perfect system. Some systems can't do horror, the mechanics of the game removes the suspense completely and in no way is it the players' or the GM's fault, they can be 100% into horror and really work to get that suspense, but they're fighting an uphill battle for no good reason.

My opinion is basically that the risk of dying matters. The risk of dying will drastically change the tone of the game, and if you don't want a light hearted tone you can't run a system where the PCs are essentially immortal.

JAL_1138
2016-09-05, 11:06 AM
AD&D 2e. First level wizard: 1d4 hp, rolled--no taking max automatically. Throw that plastic caltrop and pray. Max possible con bonus of 2, and Con bonus doesn't even start to kick in below 15 Con. Death occurs at 0 hit points unless you use an optional alternate rule. You get precisely one spell per day. No cantrips, unless you take the 1st-level spell called "cantrip."
Back in my day, we died like flies and we liked it, ya dagnabbed whippersnappers!

More seriously, I'm going to agree with everyone else and say it's game-dependent. Or at least campaign-dependent. Sometimes players want to be mighty heroes, and sometimes they want to prod the ground with a 10ft pole before every step they take.

Even in heroic games, though, I do think there needs to be at least some risk of, if not necessarily dying outright, then at least failing in some fashion. Succeeding at everything with no challenge and no risk gets boring quickly. How much risk is a question of the game being played, the campaign being played, and the immediate circumstances. Even in an everything-trying-to-kill-you meatgrinder of a survival-horror campaign, there are still some fights or other dangers that by all rights you should just sail on through at basically no risk. Just not very many compared to a more heroic, high-powered campain.

Koo Rehtorb
2016-09-05, 11:06 AM
There are ways to threaten players that isn't PC death. Threatening things or people they care about, threatening their hard earned achievements, even threatening their inventories if they have something irreplaceable. A lot of the time I feel like threatening something other than PC death makes for a more suspenseful game.

Too much PC death can lead to games where it's like "Oh no, Belf died. Here comes his identical twin brother Melf."

Vitruviansquid
2016-09-05, 11:32 AM
The risk of death is highly dependent on the tone of your campaign, and you can't go wrong if it's adjustable by the GM.

But to answer the spirit of the question, I think a mechanically good game could be made if the risk of failure (with consequences) is rather large, but the risk of actual death is rather small and chance-based. It is a fine thing in new RPGs for people to be able to get attached to their characters and have their characters develop over time as they play. It is also a fine thing for games to give a thrill of danger as old RPGs do. This is the best solution I can think of that preserves as much of the two as possible.

Fri
2016-09-05, 11:35 AM
Here's one of the most important part to establish BEFORE you start a game.

Establish how deadly the game is. It is a game where you can stumble into a statue-that-disintegrate-on-touch anytime? A game where one bad roll can kill you? A game where bad tactic can kill you? A game where you'll say "are you sure about this?" before killing people?

Once it's established. Go nuts.

The thing is, everyone "default deadliness" of the game is different. When you think people should die with one bad roll, other people might think people only should die if it's appropriate to die. Except if you're playing with long time group, always establish the deadly level of the game first. EVEN when you're playing with long time group. This is as important as establishing the genre and the system.

I usually play in narrative game where you only die when it's appropriate. It's genre appropriate. But I also played in super deadly game, where a long running long favourite character got killed because bad luck. It's one of my favourite game as well. But it's been established first that it's a super deadly game where everything can kill you.

And yes, death isn't that interesting of a threat in a lot of system or premise. And in fact, in a character-grinding campaign, where character die left and right and new character got rolled all the time, it's not even a threat anymore.

Cluedrew
2016-09-05, 11:38 AM
You know the risk of dying isn't directly tied to power level, strength of enemies can vary to. OK that is a nit-pick.

I think a much more important point was hit by JAL_1138. Failure=/=Death. You could call it a video game mentality, but board games do the thing where you win or you lose too. Most role-playing games don't have a win or lose condition. You can succeed or fail, but neither by itself will decide the outcome of the game, you can drive the story on either way.

Characters actually dying make this a little bit harder, but you can still do it. Characters merely failing can make the story more interesting. I think there should always be a decent chance of failure, death should generally occur much less often.

SethoMarkus
2016-09-05, 11:42 AM
Too much PC death can lead to games where it's like "Oh no, Belf died. Here comes his identical twin brother Melf."

In response to this, I'd like to quote The Gamers:



Some time after Ambrose the Mage has died.

The Gamemaster: Guys, please! I want you to roleplay this. Remember you've never met this guy before, the last guys you met tried to kill you, and you're standing in the ruins of an evil, cursed castle. Just act appropriately.
Magellan: Hello, I'm Magellan, a traveling mage. I notice your group has no wizard.
Rogar, the Barbarian: You seem trustworthy. Would you care to join us in our noble quest?
Magellan: Yes. Yes I would.
Magellan assumes Ambrose's former position in marching order.

Darth Ultron
2016-09-05, 01:30 PM
What do you guys think? Does the added risk of dying make Dark Sun better or is it not something to worry too much about?

The added risk of character death makes the game much better. With no, or ''almost no'' death, the game is as silly as a cartoon and other kids stuff. There is lots of meanness ''action'', but nothing else.

In a no death type game, players don't even have to try...they know they will win. It makes for a very boring and dull game. Even when they encounter something intimidating or scary, they know nothing will happen.

It's even worse on the DM side when they do stuff like ''oh, the orc blade death masters put down their dark blades and...um...punch'' or ''D'ak the evil archwizard casts ray of frost''.

A game can not have ''too much death''.

And sure you can talk to the players about it, though I find that to be a bit pointless. Oddly the players will often expect the game reality to make their characters immortal, but will whine and complain if a door has two traps on it...

Knaight
2016-09-05, 01:33 PM
There are ways to threaten players that isn't PC death. Threatening things or people they care about, threatening their hard earned achievements, even threatening their inventories if they have something irreplaceable. A lot of the time I feel like threatening something other than PC death makes for a more suspenseful game.
There are, and I'd even go so far as to argue that there are downright bleak games that can be run where the PCs being unable to die is part of what makes it so bleak. Just look at the Oz books, and how amazingly dark they get with that exact premise. That doesn't mean that there aren't styles dependent on high mortality.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-05, 01:44 PM
Here's one of the most important part to establish BEFORE you start a game.

Establish how deadly the game is. It is a game where you can stumble into a statue-that-disintegrate-on-touch anytime? A game where one bad roll can kill you? A game where bad tactic can kill you? A game where you'll say "are you sure about this?" before killing people?

Once it's established. Go nuts.

The thing is, everyone "default deadliness" of the game is different. When you think people should die with one bad roll, other people might think people only should die if it's appropriate to die. Except if you're playing with long time group, always establish the deadly level of the game first. EVEN when you're playing with long time group. This is as important as establishing the genre and the system.

I usually play in narrative game where you only die when it's appropriate. It's genre appropriate. But I also played in super deadly game, where a long running long favourite character got killed because bad luck. It's one of my favourite game as well. But it's been established first that it's a super deadly game where everything can kill you.

And yes, death isn't that interesting of a threat in a lot of system or premise. And in fact, in a character-grinding campaign, where character die left and right and new character got rolled all the time, it's not even a threat anymore.


While I generally don't care for "what makes the better story?" or "what makes for the more interesting narrative?" considerations as the primary concern... death is typically the least interesting complication that can arise from a character / gaming / emergent story perspective as well. Dead characters don't do interesting things (for the most part); they don't seek revenge or deal with loss of prestige or escaping captivity or being ransomed or swearing an oath in exchange for their life or... anything.


And I also agree that character death that's too easy becomes cheap, even comical, and prevents players from feeling any investment in their characters as "people" instead of just clumps of numbers and dice.

icefractal
2016-09-05, 01:58 PM
Something to keep in mind is iterative probability. Let's say people have a 10% chance of dying in a given battle. Not that high, right? But if a journey involves thirty battles, there's only a 4% chance for someone to make it from the beginning to the end. Most likely, the party that finally reaches their goal will have zero members in common with the party that first set off seeking it. If they haven't buggered off in a whole different direction, that is - after all, once the original party dies, what's happening them on the quest at all?

Now if you're fine with that - great! Nothing wrong with running a sandbox where we follow the adventures of a changing cast, and where the plot arcs tend to be short and localized.

But if you wanted something character-driven, and/or with longer-term plots going on, then you need to consider the effect a high death-rate has on that.

Tiktakkat
2016-09-05, 02:07 PM
Something to keep in mind is iterative probability. Let's say people have a 10% chance of dying in a given battle. Not that high, right? But if a journey involves thirty battles, there's only a 4% chance for someone to make it from the beginning to the end. Most likely, the party that finally reaches their goal will have zero members in common with the party that first set off seeking it. If they haven't buggered off in a whole different direction, that is - after all, once the original party dies, what's happening them on the quest at all?

Now if you're fine with that - great! Nothing wrong with running a sandbox where we follow the adventures of a changing cast, and where the plot arcs tend to be short and localized.

But if you wanted something character-driven, and/or with longer-term plots going on, then you need to consider the effect a high death-rate has on that.

Exactly.

Consider the base Paizo mentality and set-up:

A six-part AP.
As it starts, the PCs are expected to take background traits that tie them directly into the storyline.
One PC is expected to die in each installment.
Midway through the third installment, only one PC may have any connection to the story.
Midway through the fourth installment, zero PCs are likely to have any connection to the start of the story.
Yet they continue the quest because . . .

Yet the high death count and background trait concepts are both core elements of their game model.

nrg89
2016-09-05, 03:23 PM
There are, and I'd even go so far as to argue that there are downright bleak games that can be run where the PCs being unable to die is part of what makes it so bleak. Just look at the Oz books, and how amazingly dark they get with that exact premise. That doesn't mean that there aren't styles dependent on high mortality.

Well, yes, but that's not because they can basically defeat any problem coming their way. In D&D you're just practically immortal because you kill whatever's coming your way first.

But, yes, there are fates far worse than death but introducing them makes for a very prolonged removal of agency (not to mention that really graphic violence is not for everyone, if you go down that route) or needs many scenes of roleplaying for the players to feel invested in the person/object/place/thing they'll lose. When the players have just rolled up some characters the latter one will probably not work.

"Now, hurry! They will kill your sister!"
"Sister? Oh yeah, right, Mary!"
"Wasn't it Margaret?"
"Hmmm, maybe you're right. Oh no, we must save Margaret, you guys. Woe is me."

Cluedrew
2016-09-05, 03:26 PM
With no, or ''almost no'' death, the game is as silly as a cartoon and other kids stuff.Actually I think for this purpose we can actually separate the "risk of death" and the "threat of death". It is a rather fine distinction but I'm going somewhere with this.

What I think you are talking about is removing the idea of failure from the game, so that players can do whatever and still be met with success. It is a problem that can happen, I see it a lot in stories where the main character continues to take the one in a million chance over and over again. Of course in stories there is no randomness so they outcome can be controlled perfectly.

To counter act this you don't actually need to increase the amount of death in a story, which when distributed over the opportunities to die becomes your risk of death. Instead you want to increase the threat of death (or more generically, consequences for bad ideas), so that people who do stupid things are met with the consequences of their stupid actions.

If there hasn't been a single death because the party has used negotiation to cut down the number of fights, run away when out classed and executed every battle they did fight with tactical brilliance, I will claim the game has not become a cartoon.

In conclusion, death can add to a game, but I think the threat of death/failure is more useful.

flond
2016-09-05, 03:36 PM
The added risk of character death makes the game much better. With no, or ''almost no'' death, the game is as silly as a cartoon and other kids stuff. There is lots of meanness ''action'', but nothing else.

In a no death type game, players don't even have to try...they know they will win. It makes for a very boring and dull game. Even when they encounter something intimidating or scary, they know nothing will happen.

It's even worse on the DM side when they do stuff like ''oh, the orc blade death masters put down their dark blades and...um...punch'' or ''D'ak the evil archwizard casts ray of frost''.

A game can not have ''too much death''.

And sure you can talk to the players about it, though I find that to be a bit pointless. Oddly the players will often expect the game reality to make their characters immortal, but will whine and complain if a door has two traps on it...

Death is easy, failure is hard. If given the choice of "The PC will hold back the tide, bravely sacrificing themselves" or "The PC will flee and live, known forever as a worthless brigand who let the kingdom fall, mentioned forever as the villain." Many, many players will pick the first, even compete for the honor. And if you're in a game where the primary stakes are success or failure, you can get some heavy mileage out of failures that aren't death, yes even have death be explicitly on the table by focusing on actions and their consequences.

And this is even presuming that success vs failure is what we're doing. If we're playing an rpg like Fiasco, character death is often a moment of laughter. It has no tension, just "what's best for the story of failure and pain we've got going on here." (Likewise, for the traditionalist Paranoia has TONS of death, but it is so close to a cartoon the gadgets should be labeled ACME. )

Darth Ultron
2016-09-05, 03:42 PM
In conclusion, death can add to a game, but I think the threat of death/failure is more useful.

The threat is meaningless if it is not backed up. To just giggle and say to the players that something is just so threatening is just pointless, they will just laugh along.

The other types are failure are nothing compared to death....that is why death stands alone. If the players fail to save the kingdom they will just shrug and be like ''oh well'', but have all the PCs die and, wow, will you see a much bigger reaction.


Death is easy, failure is hard.

Except as above most players don't care if they ''fail''.




If given the choice of "The PC will hold back the tide, bravely sacrificing themselves" or "The PC will flee and live, known forever as a worthless brigand who let the kingdom fall, mentioned forever as the villain." Many, many players will pick the first, even compete for the honor.

Except the modern player of ''campaigns'' does not care. Every game is a new reality of a campaign, so what happened before does not matter. Your way only works if it id one DM/one world campaign like the good old days.

flond
2016-09-05, 03:47 PM
The threat is meaningless if it is not backed up. To just giggle and say to the players that something is just so threatening is just pointless, they will just laugh along.

The other types are failure are nothing compared to death....that is why death stands alone. If the players fail to save the kingdom they will just shrug and be like ''oh well'', but have all the PCs die and, wow, will you see a much bigger reaction.

That...runs very counter to my experiences. Replacing Sir Bob the Knight with Sir Glob the Knight has much less impact then some of the nonfatal losses I've encountered, or for that matter given.

Maybe your characters just aren't very invested in your world?

Because seriously, Death means one of three things:

1. They roll up a new but equivalent character. In this case they've lost some of the carefully built story of things...but well, if they don't care about it in other circumstances why would they care about it here.

2. They're out of the game. In which case well, they're out of the game. Disappointing but it's a one time thing.

3. They start with a beginning character. In which case it'll either smooth out to be 1 (as they catch up) or 2 (as they become a useless comedy pc).


If you hit them in the dignity though. That smarts. And it smarts even more if you rub it in later. If it has consequences. Not "Mechanical" consequences. But "You're now viewed as a fool" consequences. Frankly, death is easy to deal with, but the bigger failures...well those you may even want to be sparing in using. They might be too dangerous for some campaigns. :)

Darth Ultron
2016-09-05, 04:04 PM
That...runs very counter to my experiences. Replacing Sir Bob the Knight with Sir Glob the Knight has much less impact then some of the nonfatal losses I've encountered, or for that matter given.

If you hit them in the dignity though. That smarts. And it smarts even more if you rub it in later. If it has consequences. Not "Mechanical" consequences. But "You're now viewed as a fool" consequences. Frankly, death is easy to deal with, but the bigger failures...well those you may even want to be sparing in using. They might be too dangerous for some campaigns. :)

A player looses a lot as character death is seen as bad by everyone.

In character they loose all the role playing history, items and other things ''character #1'' had.

It is even worse if the DM twists the dagger: PC's 1-4 met the king and he offered a bounty of 10,000 gold to each. PC 4 dies and in comes PC 4.1....except that PC never met with the king and does not get the reward!

flond
2016-09-05, 04:06 PM
A player looses a lot as character death is seen as bad by everyone.

In character they loose all the role playing history, items and other things ''character #1'' had.

It is even worse if the DM twists the dagger: PC's 1-4 met the king and he offered a bounty of 10,000 gold to each. PC 4 dies and in comes PC 4.1....except that PC never met with the king and does not get the reward!

Now imagine "No one gets the bounty because you failed and are outlaws." :P

Also, sometimes it's great to have your character die. I've had moments where my PC surviving would have felt like a giant weight on the campaign. (And at least one where I wish they had died. Possibly two now!)

Darth Ultron
2016-09-05, 04:28 PM
Now imagine "No one gets the bounty because you failed and are outlaws." :P

Also, sometimes it's great to have your character die. I've had moments where my PC surviving would have felt like a giant weight on the campaign. (And at least one where I wish they had died. Possibly two now!)

Right, and for the ten seconds after the game ends everyone is sort of sad. Then everyone starts the new campaign and hits the reset button, so all that silly old stuff does not matter.

Few players and DM's would ''punish'' the characters for something for very long. Chances are it would be one cheep knock and then nothing.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-05, 04:34 PM
I predict snide, derisive attempts to belittle any opinion that's not an exact mirror of his own, until everyone just stops responding in exasperation.

Darth Ultron
2016-09-05, 04:42 PM
I predict snide, derisive attempts to belittle any opinion that's not an exact mirror of his own, until everyone just stops responding in exasperation.

Your mostly right, except the first part. Few people want to debate or discuss, they just want to post ''I'm right''.

flond
2016-09-05, 05:03 PM
Right, and for the ten seconds after the game ends everyone is sort of sad. Then everyone starts the new campaign and hits the reset button, so all that silly old stuff does not matter.

Few players and DM's would ''punish'' the characters for something for very long. Chances are it would be one cheep knock and then nothing.

Or you know, the defining joke of a campaign. Or a big part of a character's arc.

Heck, it's always been a big deal for my players even in short games like PbtA campaigns.

So you know, different playerbases. (or maybe something about your campaign style inhibits investment)

oxybe
2016-09-05, 05:34 PM
The cheaper the death, the cheaper the campaign.

I see no reason to get invested in the game world, the characters, the NPCs, the quests, etc... if death is cheap. There is no lasting impact from quick, successive death. No sense of having lost anything of value if PCs are cheap and easily replaced.

Why should I care if my character dies? Quest failure? Was I even attached to that quest giver or the reason for the quest in the first place? Doubtful. In a game where death is quick and cheap I likely would not even try to setup relations with NPCs, knowing that they wouldn't last or try to be invested in them.

It's just boring.

I want consequences for failure that have impact. Things that would cause my character to rethink how they look at things, or force them to make choices.

"Death" isn't really a choice for the most part. It's usually something outside of my character's control and once it hits it's largely final (barring stuff like high level D&D where Death can be reversed pretty easily by default assumptions)

You can't make me fear death in a TTRPG: I can always choose to reroll a new character or go "whelp, bored now" and leave the game. But as long as my character is alive and I feel like I have a chance to succeed my goals that means I also have things I can likely lose or fear losing. That's where things get interesting for me: Living with failure is a much more terrifying alternative then the "get out of (plot) jail free" that is death.

Pugwampy
2016-09-05, 05:56 PM
I like to try new things and monsters and hit the players hard sometimes .
In return I always have easy access temple "Raise Dead" options as well as no consequences for coming back .

My cousin partakes in games where you die once and its back to making a new character while your still warm corpse is being robbed by fellow players . I think thats a horrible way to play .

bulbaquil
2016-09-05, 06:02 PM
You can't make me fear death in a TTRPG: I can always choose to reroll a new character or go "whelp, bored now" and leave the game. But as long as my character is alive and I feel like I have a chance to succeed my goals that means I also have things I can likely lose or fear losing. That's where things get interesting for me: Living with failure is a much more terrifying alternative then the "get out of (plot) jail free" that is death.

Same here, basically.

Mr Beer
2016-09-05, 06:05 PM
Very game dependant as said above.

If I'm aiming for a lengthy campaign with heroic fantasy overtones and the good guys becoming great and powerful heroes, I want low lethality. Yes they can die, yes someone will die sooner or later but it's the exception for a session rather than the norm.

If it's a 6 to 8 session dungeon bash with pregenerated characters, yeah, lethality goes up because players have a lot less personal investment.

If it's a game like Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu, well you can expect a high bodycount.

EDIT

Also, no you don't have to have the threat of involuntary character death to make for a decent RPG. There's more than one system I'm sure where character death only occurs with player consent. And that's just fine.

Jay R
2016-09-05, 06:40 PM
Regardless of the real risk of dying, it should appear greater to the players than it is.

What they want in the middle of the game is a quick, easy, risk-free solution to the problem. But what they will want tomorrow is a cool story about how they almost died, but brilliantly managed to win against impossible odds.

obryn
2016-09-05, 06:49 PM
It all depends on the style of the campaign. This isn't a question with one answer. If I'm running DCC or Paranoia, let the bodies hit the floor. If I'm running the Zeitgeist adventure path - which really profits from continuity - death shouldn't be as big a concern as failure.

Vitruviansquid
2016-09-05, 06:52 PM
Of course there's no reason to be afraid of death, but I find these games more fun if you pretend to be afraid of death anyways.

Of course there's no reason to be afraid of failure, but I find these games more fun if you pretend to be afraid of failure anyways.

It's less productive to look at death and failure from the view of which is more punishing to players than it is to look at death and failure and determine which one provides more room for the campaign to be interesting.

Cluedrew
2016-09-05, 07:05 PM
The threat is meaningless if it is not backed up. To just giggle and say to the players that something is just so threatening is just pointless, they will just laugh along.Let me clarify what I meant. The possibility of death can be important, but there being a possibility of death does not mean it is certain. The players can successful avoid the possibility resulting in little or no death. But they could of also failed to do so and died. I do not speak of illusion when I used the word 'threat' here, I am speaking of something that really can happen (but might not, that is up to the players and the dice).

kyoryu
2016-09-05, 07:19 PM
The funny thing is that this really conflates two different questions:

1) How often should the players be in danger of losing?

2) How often should the price of losing be death?

I think it's better to answer those questions separately (and, of course, the answer is only for a particular game/table, as there is no universal answer).

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-05, 08:02 PM
Let me clarify what I meant. The possibility of death can be important, but there being a possibility of death does not mean it is certain. The players can successful avoid the possibility resulting in little or no death. But they could of also failed to do so and died. I do not speak of illusion when I used the word 'threat' here, I am speaking of something that really can happen (but might not, that is up to the players and the dice).


Here's how I view it.

If my player have their characters engage in reckless, stupid, and/or clearly contraindicated actions, they can get themselves killed.

NPCs may earnestly attempt to kill them, and "smart" PCs take steps to counter that.

It is not, as the GM, my job to actively try to kill them on a regular basis.

Darth Ultron
2016-09-05, 09:13 PM
If my player have their characters engage in reckless, stupid, and/or clearly contraindicated actions, they can get themselves killed.

It is not, as the GM, my job to actively try to kill them on a regular basis.

I think it's wrong to give a character invincible armor as long as the DM likes what they are doing. It's like saying as long as the player is cool, they are safe. It teaches the players to just jump through the DM's hoops. It's even worse if the DM is just pals with the player and lets them get away with anything.

And it is a DM's job to ''actively'' control the foes that should overwhelmingly want to kill the characters. Sure, for role play reasons you can have some foes to the old ''lets capture them and lock them in a tool shed'' , but most foes should want to kill. When the players are in a typical life and death adventure, it's just silly and downright cartoony for the foes to just try and knock the characters down. Like the vampires would just slap the characters and not rip into them with their fangs or a dragon would just like talk to a character and not like, well, eat them.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-05, 09:19 PM
I think it's wrong to give a character invincible armor as long as the DM likes what they are doing.

That's not what I said.

Silus
2016-09-05, 09:19 PM
Gotta agree with the cheap death argument along with it being game dependent. If I was plying Call of Cthulhu, Only War, or Paranoia, then yeah, I'm going in expecting for my character to die. It's kinda part of the system. Also I sorta imagine character creation to be rather quick to compensate for the lethalness.

Counterwise, in a game like, say, Rolemaster (Which for the record I loathe), it takes forever to create a character and you can get one-shot in the very first encounter by some very lucky/unlucky rolls. Death because the PCs were overconfident, stupid, or unprepared is one thing. Death because some random mook randomly manages to stab you through the heart in a back alley is something else entirely and not something that, as a player, I'm down for.

And honestly, as a player, I'm not above lying or cheating to avoid such a BS death. Granted that only really applies for the annoyingly old school games like Rolemaster and Palladium with annoyingly high lethality.

Guancyto
2016-09-06, 02:32 AM
4 factors:

1. Imposed downtime - how much does dying impact me logistically? Does A) making a new character sheet take a few minutes or B) a couple of hours?
2. Investment - how much does dying impact me emotionally? Am I A) encouraged to make my character a cipher with little or no personality, or B) give them a fully-fleshed history and personality all their own?
3. Plot hiccups - how much does dying impact the session? Is the character A) irrelevant to the plot and thus everyone can continue as though nothing happened, or will it B) grind to a halt because the Chosen One met his end at the hands of a couple of lucky kobolds?

The further toward A on the spectrum you gravitate, the more lethal you can be. The further toward B you gravitate, the less lethal you should be. But there should pretty much always be a chance.

Oh! There's a fourth factor, which is setting lethality - how much are you encouraged to avoid combat? Are you A) expected to generally solve your problems with guile, diplomacy or elaborate plans, or B) expected to kick in the door and start swinging?

Old Vampire, for instance, takes a while to make your character sheet, encourages fleshed-out characters and likes character-driven plots but is incredibly lethal, and that would be absolutely terrible except that getting into fights is supposed to be serious frigging business and something you avoid where possible, so there's a lot of encouragement to solve your problems through intrigue, politicking, stealth, and a healthy dose of Domination.

D&D, on the other hand, has barely any support for non-combat gameplay at all, so its lethality should be strictly proportional to the ease of replacing characters.


That's not what I said.
Gotta knock down dem strawmen, how else does a body win arguments?

Martin Greywolf
2016-09-06, 02:44 AM
Well, as kyoryu correctly pointed out, these are two separate questions. How often players should fail is really system-dependent, and depends on the nature of your world - grimdark setting will be different from epic fantasy and so on.

As for death itself, there are three things, not two, it depends on:

1) System

Paranoia can handle PC permadeath pretty damn well, DnD not so much, but has things built in to make sure permadeath is a somewhat rare issue. FATE doesn't do frequent permadeath well at all, being more narratively driven. For the record, this has nothing to do with how good a system is - I'll take Paranoia or FATE over DnD any day because they're consistent in tone.

2) Setting

Grimdark vs sugarland vs epic fantasy - you can't really have your LotR-like campaign if Aragorn bites it at Amon Sul, and the world is probably short on rightful kings of Gondor who are also dating an elf.

3) Players

Some players like to be in danger of death every time they fight, some like more narratively-focused campaigns. If you're the odd one out, then you need to either adapt or leave, not stay around and mess it up for your friends or complain about it on forums.

4) What I do

Well, first off, I run low-death campaign, with almost no chance of perfect success and even chance of success with consequences - you may hold off the invading army, but you had to make some deals that you really don't like. Then I make sure that what PCs have in the world is tangible - if they have a family, it will show up frequently, if they have a noble title, they will feel that they are more equal than almost everyone else at every step.

You see, players don't care about NPCs if the NPCs don't care about them. Give them a family member that wants to hear all about their latest exploits and helps once or twice with minor things, or hell, gives them a birthday gift, and most players will be all over that. If your players don't remember the names of their family, then the blame lies strictly and only on DMs shoulders, for not making them relevant in any way.

Of course, this means that first two or three adventures will not be high stakes - the consequences for loss are mostly not getting quite so much bling as a reward, but that's okay, you can ramp it up later, and your campaign will be better for it - save the world is hell of a lot less important goal for PCs if they don't really care about the world they're supposed to save.

Of course, there is a ton of exceptions and dirty tricks - playing just one game with a group works differently, you can create player investment well before the game if you run the game in already existing universe (Marvel, DC, Naruto, take your pick) and so on.

RazorChain
2016-09-06, 03:02 AM
I think this is mostly dependent on the campaign. Frequent death is best when you are running a mission based campaign ala Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Blackops/Military or system that call for frequent deaths like CoC. The most important thing is clearly communicating with your players beforehand. Even if you are running Expendables Rpg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expendables_(role-playing_game)) it is wise to tell the players that deathtoll will be high.

But as others have mentioned killing lot of PC's is bad for continuity and may cause campaigns to fall apart. For character driven campaigns, PC death is bad news and as we all know TPK is the great ender of all campaigns.

Grognards like to brag about how lethal DnD was in the old days but I usually laugh in their face because once you hit certain level death is only a minor obstacle....it either costs you 5.000 gp and a level or 10.000gp and you are fine and dandy. I mean almost ALL other systems I've played mean serious business where dead is dead. I remember a game where all the players were D&D players testing a new system and one of them got killed. So the player asks the others if they can't bring his character to the village priest and have him raised from dead. The others comply and offer the priest money for raising the dead character, but the smirk on the GM's face was priceless when the village priest said "I can't raise no dead, but digging him a hole is free"

So why kill characters? Some have mentioned suspense, excitement, the feeling of danger. You can manage that with a relatively low death rate, just for the players to know that they can die is often enough to keep the suspense. But then if you can keep suspense, excitement and the threat of failure without killing off characters that is often much better for a narrative driven campaigns.

Characters very rarely die in my story/narrative driven campaigns but it does happen and the players know it can happen so they are on their toes and try to play smart. Even when they decide to do something stupid I often ask them "Are you really going to do that? Waking up that giant with a pickaxe in the toe might make him grumpy to say the least".

The only times I regret having killed off characters is when they haven't gotten meaningful deaths.

MrStabby
2016-09-06, 06:14 AM
I think a lot of it is personal, but for me I like the real risk of character death in a campaign and I mainly play D&D 5e.

I don't just mean bad odds and dangerous spells but the DM rolling in secret and players happen to just get lucky enough to survive. I mean that we, as players, know we have to play smart if we want to live and maybe not even then. It drives attention to detail when you know that one of those details is a clue that might just keep you alive.

This isn't to say the campaign should be over-the-top lethal. One character death ever 8 or 9 months is enough to keep people aware that the risks are real.

Jay R
2016-09-06, 07:48 AM
If it is not possible to lose, then it is not possible to win.

Similarly, if it is not possible for a PC to die, then it is not possible to brilliantly save your PC's life.


But "possible" doesn't mean it happens regularly. The DM should ideally prevent character deaths except in extreme circumstances, but he should never let the players catch him at it.

Knaight
2016-09-06, 09:46 AM
Gotta agree with the cheap death argument along with it being game dependent. If I was plying Call of Cthulhu, Only War, or Paranoia, then yeah, I'm going in expecting for my character to die. It's kinda part of the system. Also I sorta imagine character creation to be rather quick to compensate for the lethalness.
I'm a big proponent of having a wide variety of systems, and of different mechanics all having their place, and other things like that. Even given that, I'd still argue that the combination of high lethality and long character generation is a straight up design flaw, much the same way a game designed for one shots with long character generation where the characters are expected to be used once would be.

AMFV
2016-09-06, 10:02 AM
I'm a big proponent of having a wide variety of systems, and of different mechanics all having their place, and other things like that. Even given that, I'd still argue that the combination of high lethality and long character generation is a straight up design flaw, much the same way a game designed for one shots with long character generation where the characters are expected to be used once would be.

Well that depends on the design goals. If you want high lethality and death to be fairly inconsequential, then it's a design flaw. If you want high danger and death to fairly scary, then it's a perk. That encourages a kind of paranoid playstyle where you try to avoid death or danger, which works very well for certain sorts of games.

Friv
2016-09-06, 01:45 PM
As a rule, you will find that Dart Ultron has a very different experience than most of us.

Count me in the "more ways to fail than are dreamt of in your philosophy" camp. If anything, dying was the failure state that upset my players the least.

Vitruviansquid
2016-09-06, 01:49 PM
Well that depends on the design goals. If you want high lethality and death to be fairly inconsequential, then it's a design flaw. If you want high danger and death to fairly scary, then it's a perk. That encourages a kind of paranoid playstyle where you try to avoid death or danger, which works very well for certain sorts of games.

I'm not sure I want to be scared of death in a game just because it means I'll have to do a lot of character generation work.

kyoryu
2016-09-06, 02:05 PM
I'm not sure I want to be scared of death in a game just because it means I'll have to do a lot of character generation work.

Yeah, it seems like "character creation time as death penalty" is a weird way of incentivizing fear of death.

I mean, if that floats your boat, sure, but it seems weird to me.

JAL_1138
2016-09-06, 03:03 PM
I'm not sure I want to be scared of death in a game just because it means I'll have to do a lot of character generation work.


Yeah, it seems like "character creation time as death penalty" is a weird way of incentivizing fear of death.

I mean, if that floats your boat, sure, but it seems weird to me.

I'd rather fear death because I'm invested in the character, in the current situation, or both, than because building a new character is a huge byzantine hassle.

However, it could be that for some people, character building is a part of what gets them invested in a character to start with (it doesn't for me; the concept maybe, but the process of the build not so much, and most involvement is going to come from how they've developed in-game, but to each their own), and they favor systems with intricate build-options as part and parcel of that. Systems that intricate are by nature time-consuming to make characters for. So in that case the correlation is there between difficult/time-intensive char-gen and fear of death, but the causation would be different than simply fear of annoying paperwork.

nrg89
2016-09-06, 04:14 PM
I'd rather fear death because I'm invested in the character, in the current situation, or both, than because building a new character is a huge byzantine hassle.

However, it could be that for some people, character building is a part of what gets them invested in a character to start with (it doesn't for me; the concept maybe, but the process of the build not so much, and most involvement is going to come from how they've developed in-game, but to each their own), and they favor systems with intricate build-options as part and parcel of that. Systems that intricate are by nature time-consuming to make characters for. So in that case the correlation is there between difficult/time-intensive char-gen and fear of death, but the causation would be different than simply fear of annoying paperwork.

And, as a very gross over generalization based on my experiences, systems that have long character creation processes are often more combat oriented ("to start a grapple, make a touch attack and...") whereas systems that makes you fill in the blanks on the spot seem to be more socially oriented because they want you to describe what you do and how you do it rather than make a check.

But, again, that's a gross over generalization. Swedish RPGs have character creation processes longer than feature length movies and they still expect you to only go into combat as a last resort, so there are exceptions.

Pugwampy
2016-09-06, 05:20 PM
There are worse things than death , young ones.

A digestor once vomited on all my magic weapons and armour . DM made me roll dice for see what was saved and totally unusable .
All my normal crap was spared but my precious magic goodies went down the toilet .

I was psychologically messed up for the rest of the afternoon. Thanks but I will choose death over nudity any day .

RIP +3 cold iron Warmace

AMFV
2016-09-06, 06:35 PM
I'm not sure I want to be scared of death in a game just because it means I'll have to do a lot of character generation work.

Well it's a very specific sort of game that aims for that particular paradigm. I was mostly objecting to the "DESIGN FLAW" claim, when it's a pretty clear design choice. And it is a sort-of incentive, depending on how you view things. Of course, it's not going to be for everybody. Then again, nasty unpleasant dungeon crawls aren't really for everybody either. It's a taste issue.


Yeah, it seems like "character creation time as death penalty" is a weird way of incentivizing fear of death.

I mean, if that floats your boat, sure, but it seems weird to me.

Well there are certainly other options, but most of them aren't as good. Because they don't affect you, the player. They affect characters in some way. Making you do extra work is certainly a way to punish you, the player.


I'd rather fear death because I'm invested in the character, in the current situation, or both, than because building a new character is a huge byzantine hassle.

However, it could be that for some people, character building is a part of what gets them invested in a character to start with (it doesn't for me; the concept maybe, but the process of the build not so much, and most involvement is going to come from how they've developed in-game, but to each their own), and they favor systems with intricate build-options as part and parcel of that. Systems that intricate are by nature time-consuming to make characters for. So in that case the correlation is there between difficult/time-intensive char-gen and fear of death, but the causation would be different than simply fear of annoying paperwork.

Well character building is definitely what gets me invested, so I'd be in that group. Although I will say that fear of time-consumption and being away from the game are also parts of it. So it's like a multiple set of fears.


And, as a very gross over generalization based on my experiences, systems that have long character creation processes are often more combat oriented ("to start a grapple, make a touch attack and...") whereas systems that makes you fill in the blanks on the spot seem to be more socially oriented because they want you to describe what you do and how you do it rather than make a check.


Well just because a game has a host of combat mechanics doesn't mean that it's designed for the characters to go looking for a fight. A lot of combat heavy games involve a lot of resource management, and a lot of judgement calls that involve deciding to run away from a fight. Usually the more codified the rule-system is vis-a-vis combat, the less able to pull through a horribly overbalanced situation you will be. So that would mean that flight is a good option a lot of the time. Rolemaster is an example of that system. GURPs, also has a pretty high lethality, in some versions, and is intended for that sort of play.

Contrasting that, a system like AW (I believe, I'm less familiar with that system), or Burning Wheel, or Fate, which is less codified tends to have mechanisms for narrative resolution and/or failing forward where you're supposed to narrate or resolve a situation even if you lose, instead of just getting a game over screen, as happens in lots of games when things end abruptly.

Vitruviansquid
2016-09-06, 07:41 PM
Well it's a very specific sort of game that aims for that particular paradigm. I was mostly objecting to the "DESIGN FLAW" claim, when it's a pretty clear design choice. And it is a sort-of incentive, depending on how you view things. Of course, it's not going to be for everybody. Then again, nasty unpleasant dungeon crawls aren't really for everybody either. It's a taste issue.

Fair enough, if that's just to illustrate the point.

But I propose that there is only one legitimate reason to fear death or failure in an RPG, and really only needs to be one. And this goes out to anyone, not just the quoted.

Death and failure should be feared because they have arbitrarily been declared to be bad in the context of the game. Do some players not seem to care if they die in an RPG? Sure, but that is not giving a basic level of cooperation with the game that you would expect in any game. Dying or failing over and over in an RPG and not caring is sort of like being checkmated over and over again in Chess and not caring - it is simply to everyone's benefit if we pretend that losing is undesirable even when there are, strictly speaking, no actual consequences because that makes the game fun.

Nor do we want to give actual negative consequences for death and failure, such as making people go into a lengthy character creation process. Tabletop RPGs are still games, and games should not actually aim to reduce fun or engagement for people as a mechanic. There is of course a certain thrill of danger that games might have for large consequences of failure. But this fun-positive thrill of danger is only present because it is weighed against the reduction of fun that failure entails, and so it is bever beneficial to purposefully make the reduction in fun any larger than it needs to be. As an example, we play lethal RPGs with permadeath because the idea that you could die or the prospect that you could succeed against the odds gives a net positive of more fun when weighed against the reduction of fun of no longer being able to play a character one's grown attached to.

GnomishPride
2016-09-06, 08:31 PM
Depends on the tone (and by extension, the campaign, game, and players). Gritty tone? Tends towards lots of death. High fantasy? Less so.
Personally, I prefer low death-risk but high death-penalty. Death should be rare, meaningful and impactful. If death was one poor roll away, it'd mean less. (Welp I died again. Oh well.) If death was, say, story-driven or super epic (Go my comrades! I'll hold them off long enough for you to escape!), so it occurred only when the players really feel the loss, it becomes a major plot point and everyone's experience is enriched.
Anyway, that's my two cents.

AMFV
2016-09-06, 09:18 PM
Fair enough, if that's just to illustrate the point.

But I propose that there is only one legitimate reason to fear death or failure in an RPG, and really only needs to be one. And this goes out to anyone, not just the quoted.

Death and failure should be feared because they have arbitrarily been declared to be bad in the context of the game. Do some players not seem to care if they die in an RPG? Sure, but that is not giving a basic level of cooperation with the game that you would expect in any game. Dying or failing over and over in an RPG and not caring is sort of like being checkmated over and over again in Chess and not caring - it is simply to everyone's benefit if we pretend that losing is undesirable even when there are, strictly speaking, no actual consequences because that makes the game fun.

But that's not something I can CHOOSE to do. I can't CHOOSE to care about something, more than I would logically care about it. I can choose to be somewhat competitive, but real failure consequences are much more significant to me than any kind of psychological supposition that you're implying. Chess is the wrong comparison point for this. Let's compare this to say Poker with no stakes, I'm not going to care nearly as much or be as emotionally invested as I would be in a Poker game for actual money. That's human nature, our brains are smart they can see the difference between real consequences and fake ones and nothing we can do, can change that.

This is the game leveraging these things. It's tapping into that to make a more distinct emotional experience. But I can understand that the real risk might be uncomfortable or not fun for some people. But you conversely should be able to understand that a real risk is going to be pronouncedly more involved, especially if you recognize the differences.



Nor do we want to give actual negative consequences for death and failure, such as making people go into a lengthy character creation process. Tabletop RPGs are still games, and games should not actually aim to reduce fun or engagement for people as a mechanic. There is of course a certain thrill of danger that games might have for large consequences of failure. But this fun-positive thrill of danger is only present because it is weighed against the reduction of fun that failure entails, and so it is bever beneficial to purposefully make the reduction in fun any larger than it needs to be. As an example, we play lethal RPGs with permadeath because the idea that you could die or the prospect that you could succeed against the odds gives a net positive of more fun when weighed against the reduction of fun of no longer being able to play a character one's grown attached to.

Why?

In a Poker game if I lose money, it's certainly a loss of enjoyment. But Poker is FAR FAR more popular than Chess. It's because the added risk raises the feelings of achievement after you succeed. Even chess has a certain feeling of achievement because you have to learn a huge amount to be competent at it, so you're pitting all those hours of knowledge and practice and research on the line.

The so-called "reduction in fun" makes the game more fun, because you know that you are beating real odds, it's a very different feeling when you know that there are stakes at hand. Of course, there are certain things that would be difficult or too high stakes, but me having to spend a half-hour making a new character (or heck, even an hour) isn't that a big a stake for me. If I value my time at 20 an hour, that's only like 20 dollars lost, which would piddling as compared to any kind of actual gambling stakes.

RazorChain
2016-09-06, 10:04 PM
Why?

In a Poker game if I lose money, it's certainly a loss of enjoyment. But Poker is FAR FAR more popular than Chess. It's because the added risk raises the feelings of achievement after you succeed. Even chess has a certain feeling of achievement because you have to learn a huge amount to be competent at it, so you're pitting all those hours of knowledge and practice and research on the line.

The so-called "reduction in fun" makes the game more fun, because you know that you are beating real odds, it's a very different feeling when you know that there are stakes at hand. Of course, there are certain things that would be difficult or too high stakes, but me having to spend a half-hour making a new character (or heck, even an hour) isn't that a big a stake for me. If I value my time at 20 an hour, that's only like 20 dollars lost, which would piddling as compared to any kind of actual gambling stakes.


I think skulking in a corner making a character no matter how lengthy the process is the least of the players worry when losing a character.

The loss is the investment the player has put into his character. Like if my kids break a plate my wife gets annoyed....but if it's a plate that's from the set she got from her late grandmother then she'll get sad. It's still just plates....but one has emotional attachments. The same is with characters, if the players have no emotional attachment then character death will rarely be more than an annoyance.

So that means when you play a game and you know death will be common then you brace yourself and try not to form attachments.

I started Gming for a new group half a year ago and at the start of the game one player asked if death would be common. I answered no but things can always go bad/wrong and characters can die. One player showed up with a character I would never normally have allowed in a game so at the end of the first session I killed his character deliberately but discretely. Then I helped him to make a characer that was more suited to the campaign.

My players all say that they like to play in a game where death is a real threat but the truth is now half a year later none of them wants to lose their character. But I already set a precedent, one died at the beginning....the threat is real to them. I'm not going to kill them, there are far worse things than death. Death is the easy way out.

icefractal
2016-09-06, 10:25 PM
But I can understand that the real risk might be uncomfortable or not fun for some people. But you conversely should be able to understand that a real risk is going to be pronouncedly more involved, especially if you recognize the differences.What are you meaning by "real risk" here? Do the players get punched if their character dies? Do they have to pay the DM $100? Because "they have to spend time doing a long character creation process!" does not seem any more "real" to me than "they have to think of a new character concept and then get interested in it", which would be the case with even the fastest char-gen.

I mean heck, there's nothing preventing a player from crossing out the name on their last character sheet and using the same build again, so "long char-gen" is an inconsistent penalty at best.

AMFV
2016-09-06, 11:42 PM
I think skulking in a corner making a character no matter how lengthy the process is the least of the players worry when losing a character.

The loss is the investment the player has put into his character. Like if my kids break a plate my wife gets annoyed....but if it's a plate that's from the set she got from her late grandmother then she'll get sad. It's still just plates....but one has emotional attachments. The same is with characters, if the players have no emotional attachment then character death will rarely be more than an annoyance.


Well that's true certainly. But in my scenario this would be like your wife deciding that the stakes were high enough to risk wagering her Grandmother's plates. See there's advantages to that increased emotional risk as well. Because then you can risk more on higher stakes.



So that means when you play a game and you know death will be common then you brace yourself and try not to form attachments.


That depends entirely on the context of the game, the involvement of character creation, and how you play. So again, playstyle and gamestyle matters more. I've played games that did not have any risk of character death where I had zero involvement in my character. And I've played games with actual high risk of death where I loved my characters. The risk doesn't determine how emotionally invested you get generally.



I started Gming for a new group half a year ago and at the start of the game one player asked if death would be common. I answered no but things can always go bad/wrong and characters can die. One player showed up with a character I would never normally have allowed in a game so at the end of the first session I killed his character deliberately but discretely. Then I helped him to make a characer that was more suited to the campaign.


That's not really relevant to the discussion at hand though. That's you killing a character for metagame reasons that weren't particularly involved in the whole high-lethality game thing.



My players all say that they like to play in a game where death is a real threat but the truth is now half a year later none of them wants to lose their character. But I already set a precedent, one died at the beginning....the threat is real to them. I'm not going to kill them, there are far worse things than death. Death is the easy way out.

I would say a game where one character died a year and a half ago, is not a game where I would consider the stakes life or death. I've run games where a PC died literally every session, and people still enjoyed themselves. It's just a question of playstyle goals and stakes. I've also run games that players did not die in at all. It's a different kind of game.


What are you meaning by "real risk" here? Do the players get punched if their character dies? Do they have to pay the DM $100? Because "they have to spend time doing a long character creation process!" does not seem any more "real" to me than "they have to think of a new character concept and then get interested in it", which would be the case with even the fastest char-gen.


But you're wrong, Time is risk, time is something that you can spend and use. Which is why people don't like wasting time. If I have to spend half-an-hour doing something I don't want that's the same (in my mind) as giving the DM 10 bucks. Exactly the same sort of thing, I'm burning my time. And worse my party is suffering while I'm gone.

In "come up with a concept" I spend less time, and therefore less risk, hell, I could have come up with my character before session and then just used that.



I mean heck, there's nothing preventing a player from crossing out the name on their last character sheet and using the same build again, so "long char-gen" is an inconsistent penalty at best.

Generally the DM, the rules, and other players prevent that from happening. In a game where death is supposed to be a severe consequence that's not going to be something people are going to permit. In a high-death game where it's not really that big a deal, that's probably fine though. You're making an assumption that's crossing two different styles of high lethality campaigns that were discussed. One were there's high lethality but death isn't a serious consequence and one where it is.

kyoryu
2016-09-07, 09:19 AM
I would say a game where one character died a year and a half ago, is not a game where I would consider the stakes life or death. I've run games where a PC died literally every session, and people still enjoyed themselves. It's just a question of playstyle goals and stakes. I've also run games that players did not die in at all. It's a different kind of game.

There's an interesting aside here that the stakes of character death are generally based on investment - the longer you play the character, the more investment there is. If you're running "everyone dies, all the time", then you might have a stronger use case for "character creation as death penalty", though I'm still not a fan. If you're having characters die that you've played for months... I think that investment would be much higher than the "make a character penalty".

But, yeah, totally agree on "one character died a year and a half ago" as being not a particularly lethal campaign. It's more like the style where people like to feel they're in a hardcore campaign, but really aren't. Which is a thing.

AMFV
2016-09-07, 09:49 AM
There's an interesting aside here that the stakes of character death are generally based on investment - the longer you play the character, the more investment there is. If you're running "everyone dies, all the time", then you might have a stronger use case for "character creation as death penalty", though I'm still not a fan. If you're having characters die that you've played for months... I think that investment would be much higher than the "make a character penalty".


Certainly true! But the "make a character penalty" has the advantage of being relatively static. Whereas investment can vary over time, you can get tired of a character as easily (in some cases) as you can get more emotionally attached to one. Also the nature of a character's death can help mollify or mitigate that particular cost. If your character dies in a way that you think is gratifying or fulfilling or character appropriate, then that may reduce the penalty from death due to investment to almost nil. But the other penalty is a relatively static and constant penalty.

Also often in many older games, that resulted in a loss of power (since you don't have all the rad equipment) and often because you'd come in at the lowest possible level. So that's additional cost as well. Although that particular sort of thing was far less popular as I understand it.

kyoryu
2016-09-07, 10:25 AM
Also often in many older games, that resulted in a loss of power (since you don't have all the rad equipment) and often because you'd come in at the lowest possible level. So that's additional cost as well. Although that particular sort of thing was far less popular as I understand it.

In old-school, open-table games it was definitely a thing. But that was somewhat ameliorated by the fact that you'd have multiple characters (though generally you played one at a time).

It's also worth noting that if a lowbie did survive with more experienced adventurers, they'd catch up fairly quickly in terms of xp.

JAL_1138
2016-09-07, 10:47 AM
In old-school, open-table games it was definitely a thing. But that was somewhat ameliorated by the fact that you'd have multiple characters (though generally you played one at a time).

It's also worth noting that if a lowbie did survive with more experienced adventurers, they'd catch up fairly quickly in terms of xp.

The XP tables were different than they are now, too. They differed by class, and also weren't consistent patterned increases. There were bumps where certain levels took a long time to get out of even compared to later levels, and others you could breeze through. My memory's really fuzzy, but something like by the time the party Fighter went from 9th to 10th, a thief or mage starting at 1st could be caught up (if they survived)--their similarly-delaying levels happened later.

Rakaydos
2016-09-07, 12:22 PM
Ironclaw is a game where weapons are scary. If the other guy knows how to use a weapon better than you, you are better off surrendering at gunpoint than fighting somene who can END you. Whereas if you know how to use a weapon better, you can stand in front of your cowering allies and DEMONSTRATE why graveyards are filled with middling swordsmen.

On the other hand, I play FFG's Star wars: Force and Destiny with full on episode 2 cheese, where dangerous results are set on the expectation that it's actually just a green screen- there'll be setbacks, and things that look like danger, but leaping int traffic to catch your enemy is entirely plausable.

Tanarii
2016-09-07, 04:40 PM
Obviously this is highly table dependent. But after DMing a super-heroic 3e campaign for years, and extensively playing (and sometimes DMing) official play in 4e, I'm thoroughly burned out on low-lethality. As well as combat-as-sport play and battle-mat play.

Combat-as-war as a term was made popular during the 5e ramp-up, and after reading about it I realized that's what I wanted. High lethality combat-as-war play. It's possible to re-introduce that in 5e, especially if you can get an old-semi-sandbox style campaign with level-appropriate zones where the PCs choose their own difficulty. Even more so if you can get multiple sessions with different groups going. So far I've found that if you advertise it as a high-lethality campaign, players will sign up in droves to see if they can hack it. It's in high demand after so many years of easy-mode D&D being the default.

No one should have to play that way if that's not what they want. Sometimes we just want to faff around and relax. But lots of people also really want a challenge to overcome.

Tanarii
2016-09-07, 04:49 PM
The XP tables were different than they are now, too. They differed by class, and also weren't consistent patterned increases. There were bumps where certain levels took a long time to get out of even compared to later levels, and others you could breeze through. My memory's really fuzzy, but something like by the time the party Fighter went from 9th to 10th, a thief or mage starting at 1st could be caught up (if they survived)--their similarly-delaying levels happened later.
There's a degree of that still depending on edition. In most of them you'll shoot up to approximately 5th level in the time the higher level guys gain a level. Then gain 1-2 levels per level they gain after that. Of course, depending on edition, being level 5 with a group of (for example) level 10s will mean different levels of ability to contribute.

icefractal
2016-09-07, 07:58 PM
In "come up with a concept" I spend less time, and therefore less risk, hell, I could have come up with my character before session and then just used that.You know you can also come up with a build before the session also, right? I think a fair number of people build more characters than they end up using.

Also, to the extent that you're right, and "wasting time" is as much a penalty as paying the DM $10 ... I'd point out that there are no games where you have to pay the DM when your character dies. Or where you get punched. This would suggest that most players do not, in fact, want real world penalties for in-game death.

AMFV
2016-09-07, 09:31 PM
You know you can also come up with a build before the session also, right? I think a fair number of people build more characters than they end up using.


Right, but they're just paying the cost in advance. Like people who save money in preparation for a rainy day. It's still the same cost investment. It's just made beforehand which means that there's less loss during the actual game.

Edit: Also you can restrict players from doing that, one way to do that is to tie their characters to die rolls that they roll in the session. So that works. Ergo there are probably plenty games where you can come up with the basic idea of how the character is developed, but you can't really do much.



Also, to the extent that you're right, and "wasting time" is as much a penalty as paying the DM $10 ... I'd point out that there are no games where you have to pay the DM when your character dies. Or where you get punched. This would suggest that most players do not, in fact, want real world penalties for in-game death.

My argument wasn't that it was the same. Also can you categorically state that there are no tables that have no monetary penalties for loss of character? That actually sounds really fun. You throw the players into a high lethality dungeon, then you have everybody pay into a pool everytime their character dies, the last player to die gets the pool. If all the characters die, then the DM gets the pool. Of course there would have to be a high degree of trust between the player and the DM (but that's really true of all gambling)

Also Boffing... that's a game where when you get hit, you get hit. So that's clearly something that some people want. And I suspect that if you look to fringe communities you'd find communities that were harsher with the penalties. But again, it's a pretty presumptuous assumption to suggest that because YOU don't want something nobody wants it.

Tanarii
2016-09-07, 09:36 PM
It really all comes down to: do you view not (permanently) dying as one of the primary challenges of the game? If so, then the 'penalty' of losing your character fits. If not, then it doesn't.

I generally do. Although I've moved more towards it as time passed.

RazorChain
2016-09-07, 10:41 PM
Well that's true certainly. But in my scenario this would be like your wife deciding that the stakes were high enough to risk wagering her Grandmother's plates. See there's advantages to that increased emotional risk as well. Because then you can risk more on higher stakes.


I actually think we are agreeing here. Most of the time players go for greater risk, it is no fun killing goblins at level 20. But then again not everybody is playing D&D and some system are much more lethal and you don't have a bloated HP blanket that keeps you warm and safe.



That depends entirely on the context of the game, the involvement of character creation, and how you play. So again, playstyle and gamestyle matters more. I've played games that did not have any risk of character death where I had zero involvement in my character. And I've played games with actual high risk of death where I loved my characters. The risk doesn't determine how emotionally invested you get generally.

If the risk of death is high then frequency of death should be high as well, else the risk is an illusion or a matter of percepiton. High Risk: High Frequency, that means you'll be burning through lots of characters. I've played in such campaigns and they can be fun but I rarely form any attachments to characters that live through a session or two. But boy oh boy do I remember my Super Swede, Sven Gustav, from a blackops campaign my group had running. He was the only character that survived through all the missions. In fact in my group when discussing how tough characters are, the saying is "He's pretty survivable but he's no Super Swede". In a high risk campaign the characters that do survive become memorable.




That's not really relevant to the discussion at hand though. That's you killing a character for metagame reasons that weren't particularly involved in the whole high-lethality game thing.

No but I was starting GMing for a new group and in my experience player perception of mortality is far more important than actual risk. So at the start I had established that characters can die and that makes the risk seem more real.



I would say a game where one character died a year and a half ago, is not a game where I would consider the stakes life or death. I've run games where a PC died literally every session, and people still enjoyed themselves. It's just a question of playstyle goals and stakes. I've also run games that players did not die in at all. It's a different kind of game.

6 months actually, but then again I'm not trying to run an high lethality game, but the system we use is rather deadly so the risk is always there. But as I have mentioned earlier in the post player perception is more important than the actual statistical risk.



After decades of playing different systems and settings with various degrees of lethality, I for one have come to the conclusion that high risk of dying has nothing to do with how exciting the game is.

Some have likened this to gambling where you risk losing money, if nothing is at stake the excitement is less. Yes could be if you are playing a combat simulation, where the narrative only exists to lead the party from one fight to another.

But if yo are playing a narrative or a character driven game then players are excited about what happens next...not about how their dice land in next combat

AMFV
2016-09-07, 11:16 PM
I actually think we are agreeing here. Most of the time players go for greater risk, it is no fun killing goblins at level 20. But then again not everybody is playing D&D and some system are much more lethal and you don't have a bloated HP blanket that keeps you warm and safe.


To be fair, I wasn't discussing D&D, in particular, or in specific. Most of my discussion was aimed at games like Rolemaster or GURPS Fantasy, which have both complex character creation and high lethality. AD&D and older D&D which had higher lethality did not have complex character creation. It's a virtue in certain systems to have certain kinds of risk.

I think that part of the difficulty is that everybody treats risk a little differently, and so their perception of the risk will be different.



No but I was starting GMing for a new group and in my experience player perception of mortality is far more important than actual risk. So at the start I had established that characters can die and that makes the risk seem more real.


Not to me, it wouldn't. Now if it does to your players, that's one thing, and that's fine. But you can't assume that everybody's perceptions and reactions are the same. I know enough statistics and enough game theory to have a reasonable idea of when things are starting to get increasingly fudged in my favor. Not that I'm necessarily opposed to that. In a game where heroic fantasy is the goal, and focusing on my character's heroism is the objective, it's good to be able to act more heroically than I often would. Of course, that means that my character doesn't really get the whole benefits of the heroism though. It's an expectation, rather than something with real risk.



6 months actually, but then again I'm not trying to run an high lethality game, but the system we use is rather deadly so the risk is always there. But as I have mentioned earlier in the post player perception is more important than the actual statistical risk.


Well that depends on how astute your players are to the statistical perceptions. If your players are particularly savvy they'll even notice that you're pulling punches to avoid character death, since statistically it should be happening more often. Again, you're making broad strokes about general perception of all players based on a very small sample size.

Also, part of the virtue of high lethality games is that you as DM will sometimes be surprised by death. Sometimes characters can die in shocking and unexpected ways. It creates a very different tone and atmosphere. If I were playing a game set in a wartime setting, that's the kind of feeling I would want. The same holds true for Horror games. Although it doesn't work for everything.



After decades of playing different systems and settings with various degrees of lethality, I for one have come to the conclusion that high risk of dying has nothing to do with how exciting the game is.

Some have likened this to gambling where you risk losing money, if nothing is at stake the excitement is less. Yes could be if you are playing a combat simulation, where the narrative only exists to lead the party from one fight to another.

But if yo are playing a narrative or a character driven game then players are excited about what happens next...not about how their dice land in next combat

Well it's a different kind of excitement. I can be excited reading a novel or watching a movie. But if there's actual risk to me, then it's much more exciting. You can get some enjoyment out of a narrative like The Fast and the Furious, but it's not the same rush or excitement as you would get from actual drag racing. The stakes do matter. Of course, higher stakes also means that eventually worse things will happen.

Also, high lethality isn't necessarily opposed to narrative development. If anything high lethality inspires a degree of paranoia and nervousness that forces people to consider non-combat options. A game where there's a high risk of death will have less combat than a game where death is reasonably uncommon. Compare D&D 1st Edition to D&D Fourth Edition. OD&D was very very risky, particularly at low levels. Players actively tried to avoid fighting as much possible, sneaking or talking their way out whenever they could. Fourth Edition didn't have as much risk of death, and had many ways to avoid dying, it's basically a straight-up combat simulator.

Not that there's anything wrong with either course, naturally, but I think you're drawing correlations where none exist, and worse drawing some correlations in reverse of what actually tends to happen.

RazorChain
2016-09-08, 12:33 AM
To be fair, I wasn't discussing D&D, in particular, or in specific. Most of my discussion was aimed at games like Rolemaster or GURPS Fantasy, which have both complex character creation and high lethality. AD&D and older D&D which had higher lethality did not have complex character creation. It's a virtue in certain systems to have certain kinds of risk.

I think that part of the difficulty is that everybody treats risk a little differently, and so their perception of the risk will be different.



Not to me, it wouldn't. Now if it does to your players, that's one thing, and that's fine. But you can't assume that everybody's perceptions and reactions are the same. I know enough statistics and enough game theory to have a reasonable idea of when things are starting to get increasingly fudged in my favor. Not that I'm necessarily opposed to that. In a game where heroic fantasy is the goal, and focusing on my character's heroism is the objective, it's good to be able to act more heroically than I often would. Of course, that means that my character doesn't really get the whole benefits of the heroism though. It's an expectation, rather than something with real risk.



Well that depends on how astute your players are to the statistical perceptions. If your players are particularly savvy they'll even notice that you're pulling punches to avoid character death, since statistically it should be happening more often. Again, you're making broad strokes about general perception of all players based on a very small sample size.

All I have to draw upon is experience, I can't access the collective experience of all roleplayers. Most players are savy and know if the GM is pulling punches which is why I roll in front of my players. I think most important is balancing combat encounters. I'm running low powered Gurps fantasy at the moment and often the characters kiss the ground after a being hit once or twice, losing conciousness is often the great redeemer of Gurps, else character death would probably be more frequent.

Now I'm going to say that in my experience player perception is mainly based on the GM's portrayal. So in combat scenarios if the GM says "the beastman hits you and you take 14 points of damage to the chest, that means knockback so roll DX and roll HT to see if you stay concious" vs "The beastman's maul crashes into your chest, breaking some of your ribs, the blow is so hard that it staggers you backwards but you manage to keep your balance. It's a miracle that the blow doesn't stun you but the pain is so intense that you are barely holding on to conciousness"

This is easier in system like Gurps where characters don't get hit as often as in DnD. I must admit I had harder time of describing combat in Dnd as it was often death by a thousand cuts on higher levels.


Also, part of the virtue of high lethality games is that you as DM will sometimes be surprised by death. Sometimes characters can die in shocking and unexpected ways. It creates a very different tone and atmosphere. If I were playing a game set in a wartime setting, that's the kind of feeling I would want. The same holds true for Horror games. Although it doesn't work for everything.



Well it's a different kind of excitement. I can be excited reading a novel or watching a movie. But if there's actual risk to me, then it's much more exciting. You can get some enjoyment out of a narrative like The Fast and the Furious, but it's not the same rush or excitement as you would get from actual drag racing. The stakes do matter. Of course, higher stakes also means that eventually worse things will happen.

As can be said that being in real combat is much more exciting than rolling dice.

Pex
2016-09-08, 12:55 AM
For myself I can't quantify the variable but I'll know when it's too lethal when I see it. Foremost is the DM's attitude about it. If he boasts of his PC kill count, he won't be my DM. If he fondly remembers past PC deaths as a personal accomplishment as opposed to congratulating great play of heroic sacrifice, he won't be my DM. If he relishes the prospect of killing a PC, he won't be my DM. If he boasts PCs can only survive if they're very smart and can make no mistakes whatsoever, he won't be my DM. If he declares there's no Raise Dead/Resurrection and tells potential players to suck it up, he won't be my DM. Clarification: it's the "suck it up" that's the deal breaker, not the lack of Raise Dead itself. If a PC dies every or almost every session and it's not of the same player who's just being stupid, he's no longer my DM.

Tanarii
2016-09-08, 06:32 AM
Apart from the Raise Dead thing, I'd line up, along with many players I regularly game with, to play with a DM like you described. I'll even play a no Rez game with a killer DM once in a while, because that's a crazy harder challenge. Of course, those usually end up being one shots by nature.

Speaking of Raise Dead, that really is a game changer in conversations about lethality. It's a major safety net for lethality vs investment in a character. Usually DMs make it relatively trivial to find someone to cast it, even in fairly lethal games. The questions become: have you made sufficient allies to care about recovering your body, or otherwise made sufficient contingency plans; can you afford the cost; did you screw up enough so that it's not possible to recover your body.

So yah, when I think of high lethality, I'm usually thinking of getting to the level where you can afford the ability to Rez, after which you really have to screw up pretty bad to permanently die. Which isn't really the same thing. Those are 'low level lethal' game, not a generally highly lethal game.

Cozzer
2016-09-08, 09:03 AM
My personal rule is "if a character dies, I should be able to trace back to the mistake (or string of mistakes) that caused it". If the characters approach a situation in an optimal way (or at least, a way that looks optimal to me as GM), the risk of dying should be zero. Of course the chance of "failure" (defined as "the characters don't accomplish what they want") can be higher, even much higher in some situations.

To accomplish this I usually relax the rules for death a fair bit. For example, in Pathfinder (where I play lowish-level settings with no resurrection), I houserule that when you reach -CON HP you're "seriously injured". In that state you need medical attention or you'll die in minutes, even healing magic can't heal you quickly, and you'll have to spend days or weeks in bed before you're ready to adventure again. This means that if a character becomes "seriously injured", the party has probably failed their goal unless they're willing to let him die AND they're able to complete their task without him.

Also, I try to create fights where if the characters fight at their best (the tank tanks, the archer stays out of trouble, the wizard plays smart) the odds of losing are extremely small, but the enemies punish every mistake as much as they can (if the wizard leaves himself unprotected, the enemies will NOT waste part of their attacks on the fighter).

nrg89
2016-09-08, 11:46 AM
Also, I try to create fights where if the characters fight at their best (the tank tanks, the archer stays out of trouble, the wizard plays smart) the odds of losing are extremely small, but the enemies punish every mistake as much as they can (if the wizard leaves himself unprotected, the enemies will NOT waste part of their attacks on the fighter).

This is meta gaming, and not something I would condone. If I'm a wizard and leave myself unprotected when facing off against leopards or something it would break verisimilitude if they somehow figured out that I was more dangerous than the person hacking away at them right now.

And if I'm playing a game like Pathfinder, I aim to please those with some Munchkin tendencies. If they are the engineering type (aka, my circle of friends) they could be combining their interest of math and role playing at the same time and I will not play hardball if they do. I won't allow them every splat book ever printed, but I will acknowledge the player's enjoyment of trying out a new build and eagerly listen to the character story behind it.
And you please them by rolling fairly.

Cozzer
2016-09-08, 01:15 PM
This is meta gaming, and not something I would condone. If I'm a wizard and leave myself unprotected when facing off against leopards or something it would break verisimilitude if they somehow figured out that I was more dangerous than the person hacking away at them right now.

I disagree. Even wild animals have to have some sort of survival instinct that makes them think "reducing enemy numbers as soon as possible means surviving", otherwise evolution would have kicked them out of the universe in a world filled with dangerous creatures. I mean, real-world animal have pretty good pack tactics when they go after bigger and sturdier opponents, don't they? Of course their reasoning will be extremely simple and straightforward, but I still don't like to play them purely as "I roll a dice to see who they attack" or "they always attack the nearest opponent". If somebody, especially a frail looking character, leaves himself completely open, they will definitely try to exploit it by ganging up on him, for example. (Of course the characters are free to exploit it, for example by making it so the frail looking character is a Monk with Magic Armor and Cat's Grace, or something).

That said, it's a problem that doesn't come up very often, since I like to play stories where most important opponents are human or at least sentient creatures.

Jay R
2016-09-08, 01:38 PM
If poor play rarely leads to character death, then the game is too easy. If excellent play often leads to character death, then the game is too lethal.

This would help us answer the question if we had any agreement on what the terms "poor play" and "excellent play" mean.

kyoryu
2016-09-08, 03:33 PM
If poor play rarely leads to character death, then the game is too easy. If excellent play often leads to character death, then the game is too lethal.

This would help us answer the question if we had any agreement on what the terms "poor play" and "excellent play" mean.

I'd substitute "character death" with "loss", where character death is one type of loss.

RazorChain
2016-09-08, 04:14 PM
If poor play rarely leads to character death, then the game is too easy. If excellent play often leads to character death, then the game is too lethal.

This would help us answer the question if we had any agreement on what the terms "poor play" and "excellent play" mean.

Ok I'm a strategy buff that knows the game rules inside out. I've been playing for almost 3 decades. I control all the opponents and can make them act in cohesion whereas my players,who have 4 years playing experience between them, don't always agree on tactics.

I guess given equal or even inferior foes I should manage either TPK or at least kill half the party if I play optimally.

Tanarii
2016-09-08, 08:17 PM
I guess given equal or even inferior foes I should manage either TPK or at least kill half the party if I play optimally.
Which is why modern D&D with systems to balance encounters define balanced combat encounters as (considerably) less than equal to the party. If you assume partity, you'd be talking about a 50/50 for the players losing each fight. That's going to result in a TPK pretty rapidly.

YMMV in other game systems or intended approach to combat. For example, in combat as war, you might assume 'balance' for any combat situation is primarily defined by player skill, especially in regards to pre combat prepreration, not the thing(s) being fought.

AMFV
2016-09-08, 09:11 PM
All I have to draw upon is experience, I can't access the collective experience of all roleplayers. Most players are savy and know if the GM is pulling punches which is why I roll in front of my players. I think most important is balancing combat encounters. I'm running low powered Gurps fantasy at the moment and often the characters kiss the ground after a being hit once or twice, losing conciousness is often the great redeemer of Gurps, else character death would probably be more frequent.


True, but if you were playing with some more of the optional injury rules... then that might not go the same way. Of course, different sorts of things are important for different games.



Now I'm going to say that in my experience player perception is mainly based on the GM's portrayal. So in combat scenarios if the GM says "the beastman hits you and you take 14 points of damage to the chest, that means knockback so roll DX and roll HT to see if you stay concious" vs "The beastman's maul crashes into your chest, breaking some of your ribs, the blow is so hard that it staggers you backwards but you manage to keep your balance. It's a miracle that the blow doesn't stun you but the pain is so intense that you are barely holding on to conciousness"

This is easier in system like Gurps where characters don't get hit as often as in DnD. I must admit I had harder time of describing combat in Dnd as it was often death by a thousand cuts on higher levels.


Well in higher level D&D, it's not really the hits that kill you. It's the being status effected and then stabbed while unconscious.



As can be said that being in real combat is much more exciting than rolling dice.

Certainly true.


If poor play rarely leads to character death, then the game is too easy. If excellent play often leads to character death, then the game is too lethal.

This would help us answer the question if we had any agreement on what the terms "poor play" and "excellent play" mean.

I'm not sure I agree with that... It again depends on your style of game. For a certain style of game, then death from randomness is a big part of the tone and nature of the game. Randomness inherently cannot be a result of excellent or poor play. It's also worth noting that there are different ways to be excellent in play OD&D, for example, tended to reward outside the book type solutions that weren't present on character sheets. 3.5 on the other hand, tends to reward system master in character optimization. 4E tends to reward tactical acumen.


Ok I'm a strategy buff that knows the game rules inside out. I've been playing for almost 3 decades. I control all the opponents and can make them act in cohesion whereas my players,who have 4 years playing experience between them, don't always agree on tactics.

I guess given equal or even inferior foes I should manage either TPK or at least kill half the party if I play optimally.

Well that depends on the skill of your players, if you were playing with players who had more strategic acumen, then you might find a higher lethality game more enjoyable, since it's more of a contest. Another option is to put constraints on your playstyle that make complete domination more difficult.


Which is why modern D&D with systems to balance encounters define balanced combat encounters as (considerably) less than equal to the party. If you assume partity, you'd be talking about a 50/50 for the players losing each fight. That's going to result in a TPK pretty rapidly.

YMMV in other game systems or intended approach to combat. For example, in combat as war, you might assume 'balance' for any combat situation is primarily defined by player skill, especially in regards to pre combat prepreration, not the thing(s) being fought.

Well it's worth noting that a 50% chance of a failed encounters is not a 50% of a TPK. Or even a 50% chance of a single character dying. It's a 50% chance that the PC's lose the fight. And it's worth noting that retreating counts as losing in this case. Or bypassing the fight in some other not advantageous way (bribery tends to work fairly well as well).

Vitruviansquid
2016-09-09, 01:40 AM
Sorry this reply comes a bit late. Had a lot on my plate at work these past few days.


But that's not something I can CHOOSE to do. I can't CHOOSE to care about something, more than I would logically care about it. I can choose to be somewhat competitive, but real failure consequences are much more significant to me than any kind of psychological supposition that you're implying. Chess is the wrong comparison point for this. Let's compare this to say Poker with no stakes, I'm not going to care nearly as much or be as emotionally invested as I would be in a Poker game for actual money. That's human nature, our brains are smart they can see the difference between real consequences and fake ones and nothing we can do, can change that. This is the game leveraging these things. It's tapping into that to make a more distinct emotional experience. But I can understand that the real risk might be uncomfortable or not fun for some people. But you conversely should be able to understand that a real risk is going to be pronouncedly more involved, especially if you recognize the differences.


Why?

In a Poker game if I lose money, it's certainly a loss of enjoyment. But Poker is FAR FAR more popular than Chess. It's because the added risk raises the feelings of achievement after you succeed. Even chess has a certain feeling of achievement because you have to learn a huge amount to be competent at it, so you're pitting all those hours of knowledge and practice and research on the line.

The so-called "reduction in fun" makes the game more fun, because you know that you are beating real odds, it's a very different feeling when you know that there are stakes at hand. Of course, there are certain things that would be difficult or too high stakes, but me having to spend a half-hour making a new character (or heck, even an hour) isn't that a big a stake for me. If I value my time at 20 an hour, that's only like 20 dollars lost, which would piddling as compared to any kind of actual gambling stakes.

Okay, so you said you can't CHOOSE to care about losing... then you say you can choose to be somewhat competitive. Well which is it?

I don't think you quite understand about Poker and Chess.

Chess is merely an example I used to show that games are played without stakes and people fear loss and failure in those games. Chess is itself not exactly a niche, marginalized game. But other chess-like games include pretty much every video game you can imagine, and they're pretty popular. And also almost every board and non-gambling card game you can imagine, and those are fairly popular. And also pretty much any sport not played at a professional level. Given the popularity of all these games, and the seriousness with which they are played, I don't really think a case that people don't care about failure in those games can be made.

And then you say Poker with stakes is more fun than Poker without stakes, and I agree with that. But are people actually more engaged in Poker because losing is so dramatic and meaningful in it? I don't think so. I think the attraction of Poker come from three sources. First, it offers the prospect of winning a lot of money. Second, it's considered an interesting intellectual challenge. Third, many people also consider it an emotional challenge. The ability for players to lose money in Poker *only exists to allow the other mechanic of other players being able to win a lot of money*. The failure consequence is in fact a factor that repulses people from the game. The only reason it is included is because the prospect of winning money is a factor of attraction that outweighs the prospect of losing a lot of money.

Consider this: Your friends Alice and Bob are both hosting a poker game and both have invited you to play on the same day. Alice's game is simply Poker without stakes at all. You would play using some chips which are equally distributed to all players at the beginning of the game, and then the game stops when one player ends up with all the chips, at which point everyone calls it a night. In Bob's game, everyone has to bring fifty dollars with which to play. After one person ends up with all the money, he goes home with only his fifty dollars while every other player who has lost will take their fifty dollars and throw it into a fire. So Alice's game depends on your willingness to arbitrarily choose to believe that winning and losing matters while Bob's game has the drama of real life consequences, but does not have the positive factor of real poker that wasn't present in Alice's game. Which game would you rather play? So does giving real life consequences for in game failure seem like a good idea?

Tanarii
2016-09-09, 03:32 AM
Well it's worth noting that a 50% chance of a failed encounters is not a 50% of a TPK. Or even a 50% chance of a single character dying. It's a 50% chance that the PC's lose the fight. And it's worth noting that retreating counts as losing in this case. Or bypassing the fight in some other not advantageous way (bribery tends to work fairly well as well).
Right. But eventually after losing many fights (even if it's just a forced retreats) at that extreme rate, eventually one of those losses is extremely likely to TPK. But yeah, I associated 'losing' too strongly with TPK by putting them adjacent like that.

Also the party will contantly attrition down by individual losses, and need to constantly recruit replacements. Running high lethality campaign, even one with a far less than 50/50 loss rate per battle, both of that and TPKs occur pretty regularly. Setting up contingencies funds for Rez, and henchmen knowing where your party went with instructions to send in body recovery & extraction missions if needed, are both important aspects of that kind of game.

ImNotTrevor
2016-09-09, 04:17 AM
Sorry this reply comes a bit late. Had a lot on my plate at work these past few days.



Okay, so you said you can't CHOOSE to care about losing... then you say you can choose to be somewhat competitive. Well which is it?

I don't think you quite understand about Poker and Chess.

Chess is merely an example I used to show that games are played without stakes and people fear loss and failure in those games. Chess is itself not exactly a niche, marginalized game. But other chess-like games include pretty much every video game you can imagine, and they're pretty popular. And also almost every board and non-gambling card game you can imagine, and those are fairly popular. And also pretty much any sport not played at a professional level. Given the popularity of all these games, and the seriousness with which they are played, I don't really think a case that people don't care about failure in those games can be made.

And then you say Poker with stakes is more fun than Poker without stakes, and I agree with that. But are people actually more engaged in Poker because losing is so dramatic and meaningful in it? I don't think so. I think the attraction of Poker come from three sources. First, it offers the prospect of winning a lot of money. Second, it's considered an interesting intellectual challenge. Third, many people also consider it an emotional challenge. The ability for players to lose money in Poker *only exists to allow the other mechanic of other players being able to win a lot of money*. The failure consequence is in fact a factor that repulses people from the game. The only reason it is included is because the prospect of winning money is a factor of attraction that outweighs the prospect of losing a lot of money.

Consider this: Your friends Alice and Bob are both hosting a poker game and both have invited you to play on the same day. Alice's game is simply Poker without stakes at all. You would play using some chips which are equally distributed to all players at the beginning of the game, and then the game stops when one player ends up with all the chips, at which point everyone calls it a night. In Bob's game, everyone has to bring fifty dollars with which to play. After one person ends up with all the money, he goes home with only his fifty dollars while every other player who has lost will take their fifty dollars and throw it into a fire. So Alice's game depends on your willingness to arbitrarily choose to believe that winning and losing matters while Bob's game has the drama of real life consequences, but does not have the positive factor of real poker that wasn't present in Alice's game. Which game would you rather play? So does giving real life consequences for in game failure seem like a good idea?

I'll also add the following:

1. What basically breaks down to "Some math homework" is not really much of a consequence. Also, what was said above about how Poker IS high-risk outside the game but also high-reward outside the game. Unless the players in your campaign get some kind of reward outside of a cool story (all games that don't suck can provide this, risk or no) then the additional risk is pointless.

2. Regarding Time Cost: I'm already at the session. What else am I gonna do? If it happens at the very end, well, I'll do it at the next session. I'm not losing any time I wouldn't already be spending. So no functional loss of time. Oh, and if I have to roll in the GMs presence I can guarantee I'm gonna make him split his attention between me and the game he's GMing and then we'll see who's feeling punished and annoyed. *shrug* If this is my tabletop time, I'm gonna make use of it. I'm not going to take time dedicated to other things and do tabletop stuff with it. Real life takes priority, always. So you can count on me to spend as many sessions as necessary bugging the GM throughout until my character is done. (And I'm also still present for the session, so you can't even give the non-participatory thing any real teeth.)

3. It doesn't make me FEAR death. It makes death an annoyance. Sure, I want to avoid death... but I was already avoiding it because the point is to not die.

Basically, leveraging character creation isn't just not useful, it's actually ineffective because at the WORST it's annoying. Hence why people in the thread are confused about why you'd use it as a threat. It's like threatening someone with a mild pinch on the bottom. For most that's not really a problem, and for some it's a turn-on. :P

Psikerlord
2016-09-09, 08:26 AM
The first RPG most of you guys probably heard of that I played was D&D 3.5, but before that i played some Swedish RPGs and one thing always stood out to me; the Swedish RPGs were far more deadly than 3.5 was. As in, 3.5 on first level was a cake walk. I've learned from some old timers that the Swedish RPGs are much closer to Old School D&D than modern D&D, which is not so surprising since the engines of the Swedish RPGs haven't changed much in 20-odd years. In both of them, you just have to expect a TPK to occur or you'll be baffled way too often.

And, as you all know, as the players progress beyond tenth level in 3.5 the CR of a monster reveals absolutely nothing. It can be CR 17, facing off against four PCs on level 12, and most of the time they barely break a sweat. To me, this is something that hurts the game and it touches on something that makes me grind my gears when it comes to fiction; no threats, no suspense.
When I watch Indiana Jones with it's lighthearted tone, I don't mind that he can take on two truckloads of nazis on a tank. But in Lord of the Rings, where I'm supposed to fear for the inhabitants of Rohan as the orcs are barreling down on Helms Deep, all of that clashes with Legolas surfing on a shield against an entire regiment of orcs, or Aragorn and Gimli fighting hundreds of orcs on a ramp and living to tell the tale. All the suspense is gone, and if the tone is supposed to be light, I don't mind it but if it's supposed to be dark and serious, like some D&D settings try to be, it just feels silly. I think Kurt Wiegel said it best when he explained why he didn't like Ravenloft; "you can do all this amizingly powerful **** ... what are you scared of?"
So, when a game is not that deadly, I feel there's limits on how much engagement and suspense GMs can ask for.

What do you guys think? Does the added risk of dying make Dark Sun better or is it not something to worry too much about?

I completely agree it is something to worry about. Making it too hard to die, eg 5e default, makes the game lack suspense/danger, and consequently (for me at least) any sense of real achievement.

D&D has not always been this way, of course. In the OSR systems, death often occurs at zero hp automatically, or requires an immediate save or check of some kind, or death, or there is a buffer such as -3 hp or -10 hp, then death. It is quite worlds apart from 5e and 3 death saves and -full hp to die....

Personally I think the old style zero hp = dead is a bit toooo harsh, and I prefer something like DCC where you get a death save of some kind at zero hp, at least.

I vastly prefer too much danger to too little.

Psikerlord
2016-09-09, 08:30 AM
Apart from the Raise Dead thing, I'd line up, along with many players I regularly game with, to play with a DM like you described. I'll even play a no Rez game with a killer DM once in a while, because that's a crazy harder challenge. Of course, those usually end up being one shots by nature.

Speaking of Raise Dead, that really is a game changer in conversations about lethality. It's a major safety net for lethality vs investment in a character. Usually DMs make it relatively trivial to find someone to cast it, even in fairly lethal games. The questions become: have you made sufficient allies to care about recovering your body, or otherwise made sufficient contingency plans; can you afford the cost; did you screw up enough so that it's not possible to recover your body.

So yah, when I think of high lethality, I'm usually thinking of getting to the level where you can afford the ability to Rez, after which you really have to screw up pretty bad to permanently die. Which isn't really the same thing. Those are 'low level lethal' game, not a generally highly lethal game.
Interesting, I prefer no raise dead by PCs at all, instead making resurrection a major plot device, if available at all. I feel raise dead trivializes death otherwise.

Tanarii
2016-09-09, 08:54 AM
2. Regarding Time Cost: I'm already at the session. What else am I gonna do? If it happens at the very end, well, I'll do it at the next session. I'm not losing any time I wouldn't already be spending. So no functional loss of time. Oh, and if I have to roll in the GMs presence I can guarantee I'm gonna make him split his attention between me and the game he's GMing and then we'll see who's feeling punished and annoyed. *shrug* If this is my tabletop time, I'm gonna make use of it. I'm not going to take time dedicated to other things and do tabletop stuff with it. Real life takes priority, always. So you can count on me to spend as many sessions as necessary bugging the GM throughout until my character is done. (And I'm also still present for the session, so you can't even give the non-participatory thing any real teeth.):PInteresting threats. How does that work when the DM tells you "You're dead. Go home. Get in touch with me later, and we'll talk about rolling stats for your next character." ?

(edit: nm it looks like you were responding to the specific context of Time Cost of making a new character at a session vs playing at a session.)


Interesting, I prefer no raise dead by PCs at all, instead making resurrection a major plot device, if available at all. I feel raise dead trivializes death otherwise.For D&D specifically (as the origin of the hobby), it pretty clearly was a "save my end-game character" safety net intentionally introduced to the original game. Especially when you consider that it comes online exactly at name level. In other words, if you got a character to the point it was time to retire her and only bust her out for special occasions, then you had this get-out-of-jail-free card in your back pocket.

Of course, as time went on and perception of "end-game" crept up from name level to mid-teens to 20, this changed. In theory it still serves the same purpose: once you've invested a certain amount of time in a character you get a safety net. It's just the amount of time (generally speaking) had dropped dramatically, and likely-hood of surviving to that level has (generally speaking) become very high. Unless the DM intentionally makes her game a killer game.

Cozzer
2016-09-09, 08:54 AM
Interesting, I prefer no raise dead by PCs at all, instead making resurrection a major plot device, if available at all. I feel raise dead trivializes death otherwise.

I agree with this, but I also feel you can't just take resurrection away without taking into account SOMEHOW the fact that the rules are based on the possibility of resurrection (see all the instant death spells that start appearing in D&D more or less at the same level).

I mean, the fact that you're always a failed save away from death trivializes death at least as much as resurrection does. I won't get attached to something that can be arbitrarily taken away from me in any moment.

Max_Killjoy
2016-09-09, 09:07 AM
I agree with this, but I also feel you can't just take resurrection away without taking into account SOMEHOW the fact that the rules are based on the possibility of resurrection (see all the instant death spells that start appearing in D&D more or less at the same level).

I mean, the fact that you're always a failed save away from death trivializes death at least as much as resurrection does. I won't get attached to something that can be arbitrarily taken away from me in any moment.

Exactly.

In many systems, death is cheap not because it's easy to avoid or reverse, but because it's so easy to die.

AMFV
2016-09-09, 09:30 AM
Sorry this reply comes a bit late. Had a lot on my plate at work these past few days.

Okay, so you said you can't CHOOSE to care about losing... then you say you can choose to be somewhat competitive. Well which is it?

They're different things. Like unrelated in many cases. Being competitive is putting an effort towards winning something. It doesn't necessarily even mean that you care about it or not. I've had many competitions where I was extremely competitive where I didn't give a crap if I won or lost. For example, when I was in Iraq, I and a friend made a bet about whether we could listen to the same song on repeat for an entire 12 hour shift (we picked a particularly annoying one). I was very competitive about this, but I didn't really care, beyond boredom's sake.



I don't think you quite understand about Poker and Chess.

Chess is merely an example I used to show that games are played without stakes and people fear loss and failure in those games. Chess is itself not exactly a niche, marginalized game. But other chess-like games include pretty much every video game you can imagine, and they're pretty popular. And also almost every board and non-gambling card game you can imagine, and those are fairly popular. And also pretty much any sport not played at a professional level. Given the popularity of all these games, and the seriousness with which they are played, I don't really think a case that people don't care about failure in those games can be made.

Well again, I think you're confusing being competitive and trying to win with "fearing failure". For example, in a video game that's single player, I generally try to perform as well as I can (to the point where I'll often add conditions that aren't present in the original game to make it more competitive and interesting). However, I don't really lose anything serious if I lose, I'll still enjoy the game. I'm not saying that there isn't room for that in Roleplaying games, or that roleplaying games that don't have any real-world consequences can't be fun or enjoyable, only that they aren't the same as those that have real world consequences.



And then you say Poker with stakes is more fun than Poker without stakes, and I agree with that. But are people actually more engaged in Poker because losing is so dramatic and meaningful in it? I don't think so. I think the attraction of Poker come from three sources. First, it offers the prospect of winning a lot of money. Second, it's considered an interesting intellectual challenge. Third, many people also consider it an emotional challenge. The ability for players to lose money in Poker *only exists to allow the other mechanic of other players being able to win a lot of money*. The failure consequence is in fact a factor that repulses people from the game. The only reason it is included is because the prospect of winning money is a factor of attraction that outweighs the prospect of losing a lot of money.


Certainly, Poker and other forms of gambling have other virtues other than loss. But consider this many people are willing to participate in competitions of other types where real world loss has pretty severe consequences (drag racing, was another example), that don't necessarily have the same possibility of payout.



Consider this: Your friends Alice and Bob are both hosting a poker game and both have invited you to play on the same day. Alice's game is simply Poker without stakes at all. You would play using some chips which are equally distributed to all players at the beginning of the game, and then the game stops when one player ends up with all the chips, at which point everyone calls it a night. In Bob's game, everyone has to bring fifty dollars with which to play. After one person ends up with all the money, he goes home with only his fifty dollars while every other player who has lost will take their fifty dollars and throw it into a fire. So Alice's game depends on your willingness to arbitrarily choose to believe that winning and losing matters while Bob's game has the drama of real life consequences, but does not have the positive factor of real poker that wasn't present in Alice's game. Which game would you rather play? So does giving real life consequences for in game failure seem like a good idea?

I'd rather play in Bob's game. If we're being honest. Now I'm not sure I like the idea of throwing $50 into a fire, but it'd be a lot more exciting than Alice's game. Although fifty bucks is pretty high stakes for a home poker game, so I'd have to be well off financially.


Right. But eventually after losing many fights (even if it's just a forced retreats) at that extreme rate, eventually one of those losses is extremely likely to TPK. But yeah, I associated 'losing' too strongly with TPK by putting them adjacent like that.

Well that depends, some games have losses more frequent, but due to other variables they have less frequent TPKs. That's kind of a thing where you can set things up differently Depending on how easy resurrection or flight is in that game system.



Also the party will contantly attrition down by individual losses, and need to constantly recruit replacements. Running high lethality campaign, even one with a far less than 50/50 loss rate per battle, both of that and TPKs occur pretty regularly. Setting up contingencies funds for Rez, and henchmen knowing where your party went with instructions to send in body recovery & extraction missions if needed, are both important aspects of that kind of game.

Certainly true! Depending on the accessibility of resurrection, which isn't a constant in high-lethality games. And can pretty strongly change the consequences


I'll also add the following:

1. What basically breaks down to "Some math homework" is not really much of a consequence. Also, what was said above about how Poker IS high-risk outside the game but also high-reward outside the game. Unless the players in your campaign get some kind of reward outside of a cool story (all games that don't suck can provide this, risk or no) then the additional risk is pointless.

Not really true, you must hang out with a very small group of people if you don't think that the average person would consider "some math homework" to be pretty awful. It's a pretty pretentious thing to claim that something is pointless, if it increases the tension and enjoyment of the game (as it does for me), then it isn't really pointless is it? You're applying your tastes to everybody ergo, you're making the assumption that most people don't mind math (which in my experience isn't the case), and you're making the assumption that doing things with extra risk is pointless (which isn't the case for everybody equally).

For me personally, I don't mind the math homework, but I do like adding risk to things (making it interesting on bets and what-not). Adding that extra degree of tension is certainly enjoyable for me. So dong that wouldn't make a game "pointless" see the Bob and Alice contrasting Poker game's above. I'd rather play in Bob's personally, even though that adds a risk condition that you would consider pointless. There's nothing wrong with playing in either game, but if it makes me enjoy the game more it isn't pointless. Of course if it makes others enjoy the game less than it's something that's pointed in a negative way.



2. Regarding Time Cost: I'm already at the session. What else am I gonna do? If it happens at the very end, well, I'll do it at the next session. I'm not losing any time I wouldn't already be spending. So no functional loss of time. Oh, and if I have to roll in the GMs presence I can guarantee I'm gonna make him split his attention between me and the game he's GMing and then we'll see who's feeling punished and annoyed. *shrug* If this is my tabletop time, I'm gonna make use of it. I'm not going to take time dedicated to other things and do tabletop stuff with it. Real life takes priority, always. So you can count on me to spend as many sessions as necessary bugging the GM throughout until my character is done. (And I'm also still present for the session, so you can't even give the non-participatory thing any real teeth.)


What else are you going to do at the session? Well, there's a big difference between spending time smoking and joking with your friends and spending time in a corner rolling up the sheet. Typically when somebody needs to reroll in most of the games, I've been in, they feel left out, so that's a real loss. Again you're making assumptions that because something has a certain emotional value for you, it's equivalent for everybody.

Typically I would ask the player to go sit away from the table, if they were disrupting the game for everybody else, that wouldn't be a request. If you're a veteran player and you're needing me to handhold you through character creation, I would definitely be able to pick out your motivations and I would personally be very annoyed, which in a high-lethality game is not the best place to put the GM.



3. It doesn't make me FEAR death. It makes death an annoyance. Sure, I want to avoid death... but I was already avoiding it because the point is to not die.


Possibly true, but I'd rather not be annoyed. Hell, if I'm playing in a typical home poker game (which usually has 5-20 dollar stakes), I'm not really fearing losing, that's an annoyance, since twenty bucks is around where an impulse purchase is for me. But it still makes the game more exciting. Certainly if the risk for loss was greater it would be even more exciting. But... that's typically beyond the threshold.

Also you're understating how much some people mind being excluded from the story section (since they aren't part of the group until they can be worked back in), and you're understating how much some people are annoyed by paperwork. You can't use your own framework as the universal one when evaluating a mechanic that is aimed at groups of people to which you don't belong.



Basically, leveraging character creation isn't just not useful, it's actually ineffective because at the WORST it's annoying. Hence why people in the thread are confused about why you'd use it as a threat. It's like threatening someone with a mild pinch on the bottom. For most that's not really a problem, and for some it's a turn-on. :P

Well again, it's a different sort of stakes to most people. It's not that big a stake, certainly. But it is a stake. After all there are many people who would consider being pinched deeply disturbing and painful. My point is that you can't exclude those folks when discussing this sort of mechanic. Hell I enjoy character creation, and I would still consider being excluded from the group a net loss.


I agree with this, but I also feel you can't just take resurrection away without taking into account SOMEHOW the fact that the rules are based on the possibility of resurrection (see all the instant death spells that start appearing in D&D more or less at the same level).

I mean, the fact that you're always a failed save away from death trivializes death at least as much as resurrection does. I won't get attached to something that can be arbitrarily taken away from me in any moment.

Actually, my own experience has been that until you reach very high levels in D&D people aren't interested in Rezzing their characters. I've offered to let low-level characters have quests to resurrect people, and they simply weren't interested. So I'm not sure that resurrection has as much of an impact as you'd expect.

After all, if your character died, then they can't have been that well constructed, so making a new one is a good way to avoid future death.

Edit: And as to the latter point. I'm not sure that's entirely true ether. I don't think it's just the amount of death that trivializes it. There's a lot of things that are involved in that, and frequent death may have that effect but it doesn't necessarily.

Tanarii
2016-09-09, 09:37 AM
Exactly.

In many systems, death is cheap not because it's easy to avoid or reverse, but because it's so easy to die.

Which game system was it in which the most important stat was your speed? Or at least, not having it be the lowest in the party for when you inevitably run away ... :smallbiggrin:

I want to say Call of the Cthulhu.

Cozzer
2016-09-09, 09:54 AM
@AMFV: I don't know, I'm probably more narrative-focused than the average D&D player (or better: than the average players that the D&D rules expect). So for me a character dying is a problem not because I've "lost" or because I have to spend time making a new character, but because his story ends midway with an anti-climax, which is really unsufferable for me. :P I'd be OK with as many defeats and deaths as the game wants if it let me keep playing the character until he gets a narratively suitable ending.

And... I don't know, my problem is not really with the chance of death, it's with the chance of a sudden death you can't do anything to avoid. Like, you approach defeatable enemies in the safest way possible but you lose initiative and fail a save, oops you're dead and your story is over. In a game were such a thing can happen, resurrection has to exist to make it playable to players like me. Of course, it might be different for others.

AMFV
2016-09-09, 10:07 AM
@AMFV: I don't know, I'm probably more narrative-focused than the average D&D player (or better: than the average players that the D&D rules expect). So for me a character dying is a problem not because I've "lost" or because I have to spend time making a new character, but because his story ends midway with an anti-climax, which is really unsufferable for me. :P I'd be OK with as many defeats and deaths as the game wants if it let me keep playing the character until he gets a narratively suitable ending.


I would certainly agree that different types of games have different values. As a DM, I tend to modify lethality to fit the tone of the game. And also to fit the preferences of each player.

Flickerdart
2016-09-09, 10:08 AM
This varies by the system and tone, but there's an ironclad rule:

The risk of critical failure must be lower than it appears to be.

Character death, in and of itself, is not fun. Yes, there are character arcs that are brought to a close by dying, but in general a dead PC means that someone doesn't get to play anymore. It's a subset of critical failure - even in games where you don't die, there are death-like outcomes (losing your power, losing your wealth, the BBEG succeeding). Having these outcomes exist is important because it makes it more exciting to avoid them.

If the risk of critical failure is lower than it seems, the game is fun - PCs frequently have brushes with death, which reminds them of its constant presence, but are able to survive, generally. They feel good when they escape the clutch of the grave. Most importantly, they recognize that death is possible and take actions to avoid it (bringing potions, learning resurrection spells, doing well in combat). When the PCs go to face Cthulhu, they expect to die, so dying doesn't feel bad, and surviving feels like a great achievement!

If the risk of critical failure is higher than it seems, the benefits gained from the constant presence of risk are reduced. The players do not experience the drama associated with risk, and do not prepare for risky situations. When critical failure happens (as it inevitably does) it blindsides the players, who rightfully feel cheated because the game pulled something on them that was outside of the social contract the game established. When the PCs go to face a random kobold, they do not expect to die, so dying feels terrible, and surviving is just par for the course.

Of course, if the risk of failure is about the same as it seems, then these things are about even, but balancing anything so finely is, practically speaking, impossible, if only because player skill will tip that balance (so you have PCs who never die and PCs who can't seem to stay alive).

Tanarii
2016-09-09, 10:15 AM
When the PCs go to face a random kobold, they do not expect to die, so dying feels terrible, and surviving is just par for the course.Tucker's Kobolds.

As you say, it's all about expectations. Edit: And sometimes someone turning them on their heads. At it's root, that's what Tucker's Kobolds were really about. Something that normally wouldn't be feared, becoming feared through hard-won experience.

JAL_1138
2016-09-09, 10:18 AM
Which game system was it in which the most important stat was your speed? Or at least, not having it be the lowest in the party for when you inevitably run away ... :smallbiggrin:

I want to say Call of the Cthulhu.

"I don't have to outrun the , I just have to outrun [i]you."

This is why you should always carry a weapon in such games. Sure, it won't hurt the actual monster, but you can hamstring someone and amscray.

Cozzer
2016-09-09, 10:20 AM
My personal experience says Flickerdart is completely right.

When I GM'ed, my players have been super tense about fights where I thought they were clearly at an advantage from the beginning to the end, and they were super happy about winning them. It's sometimes easy to forget that players don't know how many HP the enemies have remaining, or how soon will reinforcements arrive, or that the enemies can use their SUPER ATTACK just once or twice, or that the protective spell that is soaking most of the damage they deal is about to fade and so on.

So, when the fight ended, I was sort of "meh, I would have liked for that to have been a bit more tense and climatic"... and then I see my players talking with each other and it was clear that for them it WAS even more tense and climatic that I hoped it would be.

ImNotTrevor
2016-09-09, 12:23 PM
Not really true, you must hang out with a very small group of people if you don't think that the average person would consider "some math homework" to be pretty awful. It's a pretty pretentious thing to claim that something is pointless, if it increases the tension and enjoyment of the game (as it does for me), then it isn't really pointless is it? You're applying your tastes to everybody ergo, you're making the assumption that most people don't mind math (which in my experience isn't the case), and you're making the assumption that doing things with extra risk is pointless (which isn't the case for everybody equally).

For me personally, I don't mind the math homework, but I do like adding risk to things (making it interesting on bets and what-not). Adding that extra degree of tension is certainly enjoyable for me. So dong that wouldn't make a game "pointless" see the Bob and Alice contrasting Poker game's above. I'd rather play in Bob's personally, even though that adds a risk condition that you would consider pointless. There's nothing wrong with playing in either game, but if it makes me enjoy the game more it isn't pointless. Of course if it makes others enjoy the game less than it's something that's pointed in a negative way.

If the math you're doing for a tabletop game is more complex than add, subtract, and multiply then I suppose I can see people having a great deal of stress about it. But even so, at this point you're talking about playing into their intellectual insecurities for cheap tension, which is.... quite frankly it starts to toe the line of emotional abuse.

Adding risk is fine, but character death carries risks of its own either way. (And as a further note to why Poker isn't a great game to reference here, Poker has a winner. Tabletop RPGs very rarely follow suit.)



What else are you going to do at the session? Well, there's a big difference between spending time smoking and joking with your friends and spending time in a corner rolling up the sheet. Typically when somebody needs to reroll in most of the games, I've been in, they feel left out, so that's a real loss. Again you're making assumptions that because something has a certain emotional value for you, it's equivalent for everybody.

Typically I would ask the player to go sit away from the table, if they were disrupting the game for everybody else, that wouldn't be a request. If you're a veteran player and you're needing me to handhold you through character creation, I would definitely be able to pick out your motivations and I would personally be very annoyed, which in a high-lethality game is not the best place to put the GM.

Am I not allowed to listen? If something funny happens will you forbid the other players from telling me what happened? You better stick me in a room or force me to wear headphones, and at that point I'm just gonna be out because you'd be proving yourself to be not the kind of GM I want. Sure, I can't participate directly, but I'm dead, so duh. Not really losing anything I wouldn't already lose by virtue of being not-alive. And I'm still at the session, still listening, still enjoying snacks. No damn reason to move me if I can do it all right there, and if the point is to exclude me from the action then the punishment isn't character creation, it's social ostracization. Which is also borderline emotional abuse.

I would only be annoying if the GM insisted on keeping an eye out on my character generation. At which point he asked for it explicitly and I'm not going to spend non-tabletop time on tabletop matters no matter how the GM feels about how my punishment should go for dying. So I'm not going to be legitimately losing any time.



Possibly true, but I'd rather not be annoyed. Hell, if I'm playing in a typical home poker game (which usually has 5-20 dollar stakes), I'm not really fearing losing, that's an annoyance, since twenty bucks is around where an impulse purchase is for me. But it still makes the game more exciting. Certainly if the risk for loss was greater it would be even more exciting. But... that's typically beyond the threshold.

This doesn't, as far as I can tell, counter anything I'm saying except that losing 20 bucks is a-ok for you. In which case you're spending 20 bucks to a) have fun and b) maybe win additional money. I am also ok with spending 20 bucks for that purpose. If I'm spending 20 bucks to play go-fish with not even the chance of a payoff I'm gonna go and play it for free somewhere else because I'm not stupid and there's no reason for me to spend that 20 bucks. If I have to spend 20 bucks to hang out with my friends, I'm gonna find new friends.



Also you're understating how much some people mind being excluded from the story section (since they aren't part of the group until they can be worked back in), and you're understating how much some people are annoyed by paperwork. You can't use your own framework as the universal one when evaluating a mechanic that is aimed at groups of people to which you don't belong.

I'm not saying my preferences are universal, but I am saying that threatening people with math anxiety and being socially excluded is different from threatening them with character creation and both of those are... kinda messed up things to threaten people with, when you think about it.



Well again, it's a different sort of stakes to most people. It's not that big a stake, certainly. But it is a stake. After all there are many people who would consider being pinched deeply disturbing and painful. My point is that you can't exclude those folks when discussing this sort of mechanic. Hell I enjoy character creation, and I would still consider being excluded from the group a net loss.

Unless you're not allowed to sit at the table (in which case you're actually being punished with social exclusion, not suffering a natural consequence of character loss) then you're not actually being excluded. You can't roll, but you still experience the goings-on and can maybe even help with some book keeping. You can absolutely still be involved. So I don't see this as a natural consequence to include in the risk. This would be an imposed, additional punishment. And a really uncool one, as I've stated.

Pugwampy
2016-09-09, 12:31 PM
I consider an encounter well balanced if monsters are defeated and players only suffered one casualty

Flickerdart
2016-09-09, 12:35 PM
Tucker's Kobolds.

As you say, it's all about expectations. Edit: And sometimes someone turning them on their heads. At it's root, that's what Tucker's Kobolds were really about. Something that normally wouldn't be feared, becoming feared through hard-won experience.

Tucker's Kobolds, crucially, spends a lot of time setting up its basic premise. The PCs see fortifications, they see the kobolds using ambush tactics, they see their HP slowly depleting and their spells running out. They realize they are in trouble long before their last hit points slip through their cold, dead fingers.

Compare that to a kobold that walks up to the party and crits the fighter's head off.

AMFV
2016-09-09, 12:41 PM
If the math you're doing for a tabletop game is more complex than add, subtract, and multiply then I suppose I can see people having a great deal of stress about it. But even so, at this point you're talking about playing into their intellectual insecurities for cheap tension, which is.... quite frankly it starts to toe the line of emotional abuse.

You'll note that I was not taking the role of the DM in this scenario, but rather that of the player. I wouldn't mind having that as a potential risk in a game. It's not emotional abuse if it's an agreed on consequence, now if you're forcing somebody to play in that sort of game and they don't want to then yes, it's wrong. But that's something I've stated right from the start



Adding risk is fine, but character death carries risks of its own either way. (And as a further note to why Poker isn't a great game to reference here, Poker has a winner. Tabletop RPGs very rarely follow suit.)

That depends entirely on what sort of game you're playing.



Am I not allowed to listen? If something funny happens will you forbid the other players from telling me what happened? You better stick me in a room or force me to wear headphones, and at that point I'm just gonna be out because you'd be proving yourself to be not the kind of GM I want. Sure, I can't participate directly, but I'm dead, so duh. Not really losing anything I wouldn't already lose by virtue of being not-alive. And I'm still at the session, still listening, still enjoying snacks. No damn reason to move me if I can do it all right there, and if the point is to exclude me from the action then the punishment isn't character creation, it's social ostracization. Which is also borderline emotional abuse.

By that logic getting sent to a penalty box in a sporting event is emotional abuse. If that's the rules in that part of the game, then it's part of the game. We aren't forcing people to participate in the game, and the rules aren't a surprise.



This doesn't, as far as I can tell, counter anything I'm saying except that losing 20 bucks is a-ok for you. In which case you're spending 20 bucks to a) have fun and b) maybe win additional money. I am also ok with spending 20 bucks for that purpose. If I'm spending 20 bucks to play go-fish with not even the chance of a payoff I'm gonna go and play it for free somewhere else because I'm not stupid and there's no reason for me to spend that 20 bucks. If I have to spend 20 bucks to hang out with my friends, I'm gonna find new friends.

Then clearly you don't go to many sporting events with your friends, or to the movies, or to theme parks. There are many social events that cost money to participate in. There's nothing wrong with having that same sort of thing in other settings.



I'm not saying my preferences are universal, but I am saying that threatening people with math anxiety and being socially excluded is different from threatening them with character creation and both of those are... kinda messed up things to threaten people with, when you think about it.


Well car crashes are a nasty thing to threaten somebody with, but people still participate in car racing. Getting punched in the face is a VERY nasty thing to threaten somebody with, and people still go to boxing matches.



Unless you're not allowed to sit at the table (in which case you're actually being punished with social exclusion, not suffering a natural consequence of character loss) then you're not actually being excluded. You can't roll, but you still experience the goings-on and can maybe even help with some book keeping. You can absolutely still be involved. So I don't see this as a natural consequence to include in the risk. This would be an imposed, additional punishment. And a really uncool one, as I've stated.

That's not necessarily true, I mean it'd be fine to have a game where it was a presupposed thing. Also if you're making a character in a system where it's involved then you're not going to be able to pay that much attention to the rest of the game, at least if you want to do it well.

JAL_1138
2016-09-09, 12:49 PM
a kobold that walks up to the party and crits the fighter's head off.

Also known as "playing at first level in TSR-era D&D."

It's not an invalid mode of play to have ultra-high lethality or the potential of death from random pawn-level opponents. Plenty of people don't like it, but some do.

Consider the Viking at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. This Viking axeman fended off hordes of the English, wave after wave after wave, killing 40 of them without so much as a scratch...only to bite it when a random English spearman floated himself beneath the bridge in a half-barrel and stabbed the Viking in the 'nards through a gap in the planks.

Or, for that matter, David and Goliath. Random shepherd kid kills the greatest warrior an empire had ever seen with a single nat-20.

ImNotTrevor
2016-09-09, 01:00 PM
You'll note that I was not taking the role of the DM in this scenario, but rather that of the player. I wouldn't mind having that as a potential risk in a game. It's not emotional abuse if it's an agreed on consequence, now if you're forcing somebody to play in that sort of game and they don't want to then yes, it's wrong. But that's something I've stated right from the start




That depends entirely on what sort of game you're playing.

The fringe has already been accounted for as being fringe cases. They're uncommon and not really worth portraying as common since they aren't.



By that logic getting sent to a penalty box in a sporting event is emotional abuse. If that's the rules in that part of the game, then it's part of the game. We aren't forcing people to participate in the game, and the rules aren't a surprise.

Do you not see the obvious difference between something bad happening to your character that was only partially under your control and being excluded from an explicitly social game because of it and being sent to time-out for unsportsmanlike conduct/breaking the rules of your own volition in a competitive sport?



Then clearly you don't go to many sporting events with your friends, or to the movies, or to theme parks. There are many social events that cost money to participate in. There's nothing wrong with having that same sort of thing in other settings.

In those cases I get to hang out with friends AND enjoy something else at the same time. I get an additional benefit. I'm not gonna play 20 bucks to invite chad over to play vidya if I can find someone else who will hang out for free.
Impressive mental gymnastics, though.



Well car crashes are a nasty thing to threaten somebody with, but people still participate in car racing. Getting punched in the face is a VERY nasty thing to threaten somebody with, and people still go to boxing matches.

And both of those sports tend to have high rewards for the winner and are inherently competitive. So again this comparison is not apt. (Also, the people who go see those aren't usually threatened with violence. So... not sure where you were going here.)



That's not necessarily true, I mean it'd be fine to have a game where it was a presupposed thing. Also if you're making a character in a system where it's involved then you're not going to be able to pay that much attention to the rest of the game, at least if you want to do it well.
Who says I have to work fast? I can likely do most of my work during a combat since in most games combat is pretty slow and usually not much that is narratively important happens except the win/loss result or someone dying. And you'd be hard-pressed to miss it. There's really no sting to this if you think about it. *shrug*

Flickerdart
2016-09-09, 01:43 PM
Also known as "playing at first level in TSR-era D&D."

It's not an invalid mode of play to have ultra-high lethality or the potential of death from random pawn-level opponents. Plenty of people don't like it, but some do.
Sure, but nobody goes into OD&D thinking "my 1st level fighter is invincible." That's literally the point of every single one of my posts in the thread - you need to set up the threat before you can bring the threat to bear, or there's no payoff and everyone is unhappy.



Consider the Viking at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. This Viking axeman fended off hordes of the English, wave after wave after wave, killing 40 of them without so much as a scratch...only to bite it when a random English spearman floated himself beneath the bridge in a half-barrel and stabbed the Viking in the 'nards through a gap in the planks.
Nobody goes into war thinking they're invincible, either. The viking making his last stand on a bridge wasn't thinking "well this is fun and afterwards I'll pop down 'round the corner for some ale with the boys." He was fighting a literal army.



Or, for that matter, David and Goliath. Random shepherd kid kills the greatest warrior an empire had ever seen with a single nat-20.
The moral is "doubt ye not the power of cleric buffs" and not "whoops anything can happen I guess." I shall say no more on the topic due to the nature of the source material, but it's a really bad example for lots of reasons.

Jay R
2016-09-09, 03:12 PM
I'm not sure I agree with that... It again depends on your style of game. For a certain style of game, then death from randomness is a big part of the tone and nature of the game. Randomness inherently cannot be a result of excellent or poor play.

The random element is sufficiently covered by the words "rarely" and "often" in my original statement. I know that with even the best play, the dice can kill you, and even with the poorest level of play just attacking each encounter head on, the dice can save you.

Nonetheless, poor play leads to a higher chance of death than excellent play. If poor play rarely leads to death, then the game is too easy, and if excellent play often leads to character death, then the game is too lethal.


It's also worth noting that there are different ways to be excellent in play OD&D, for example, tended to reward outside the book type solutions that weren't present on character sheets. 3.5 on the other hand, tends to reward system master in character optimization. 4E tends to reward tactical acumen.

Yup. I didn't say, imply, or believe that the same tactics work under all rules. Excellent play usually wins both basketball and chess, but what is excellent play is not the same thing.


Ok I'm a strategy buff that knows the game rules inside out. I've been playing for almost 3 decades. I control all the opponents and can make them act in cohesion whereas my players,who have 4 years playing experience between them, don't always agree on tactics.

I guess given equal or even inferior foes I should manage either TPK or at least kill half the party if I play optimally.

Huh? I did not say or imply that DMs should use superior abilities to destroy the party. If the most excellent play that the players can manage often leads to character death, then the game is too lethal.

I recognize the possibility that a game too lethal for one party might be just right for another.


I'd substitute "character death" with "loss", where character death is one type of loss.

I would too, except when the thread topic is "How great should the risk of dying be?"

RazorChain
2016-09-09, 03:41 PM
I'm just going to throw it out there, some have aired that there should be some punishment involved in death. I ask does there need to be some sort of punishment for dying?

I mean a lot of the time it boils down to unlucky die roll (lucky on the part of the GM) or unbalanced encounter.

I'm pretty sure at least half the time when characters die in my game it mostly boils down to the above reasons

Pugwampy
2016-09-09, 04:16 PM
I ask does there need to be some sort of punishment for dying?

I totally agree with that . Losing gold coins for temple fees is more then enough . This game is too random to justify any death punishment or level loss .

What Dm keeps asking for more time wasting admin and party imbalance if some player the dice hates keeps dying and losing levels .

Flickerdart
2016-09-09, 04:26 PM
I'm just going to throw it out there, some have aired that there should be some punishment involved in death. I ask does there need to be some sort of punishment for dying?

I mean a lot of the time it boils down to unlucky die roll (lucky on the part of the GM) or unbalanced encounter.

I'm pretty sure at least half the time when characters die in my game it mostly boils down to the above reasons
This again comes back to the issue of expectations.

When the PCs go into battle, do they expect that they might die?

If they do recognize this risk, and die anyway, then death should carry some sort of punishment. Usually the punishment is that your PC is now dead. Whoops! Instead of spending resources on not dying, you chose not to spend those resources and died. Therefore, the penalty should be at least equal to the amount of resources it would have taken to stay alive. Otherwise, it is not worth living because it would cost more to remain alive than to die and then resurrect/roll up a new guy. An amusing example is in Pokemon GO, where Revives used to be much more common item drops than potions, so players often suicided their low-HP Pokemon into enemy gyms just so they could be healed.

If the PCs do not recognize the risk, and end up dying, it's the GM's fault for not setting up the expectations correctly. Whether it's an unbalanced encounter, a lucky roll, or the players expecting a heroic adventure and being greeted with "gritty and realistic" challenges, it's your responsibility as the GM to make the players aware that these things are possible. "I will try to challenge you, but I'm not perfect at balancing monsters, so some encounters might be overwhelming." Boom, now they're prepared, and if they don't tuck away an emergency GM-mistake-fixing bazooka into the thief's loot bag, they have only themselves to blame.

If you do not warn the players that you might mess up, and then punish them when your mistake kills their PCs, you are punishing them for your mistakes. If I have to explain to you why this is bad, you're not ready to sit in the GM chair.

kyoryu
2016-09-09, 04:33 PM
I would too, except when the thread topic is "How great should the risk of dying be?"

This is fair, except that the answer to "how great should the risk of dying be" is also dependent on the question "what forms of loss are there in the game?"

In most cases, the loudest advocates of "death all the time" seem to presume that there is no real loss condition except for death. So I think the concepts are pretty well twisted together.

RazorChain
2016-09-09, 09:20 PM
One of the things I do at work is Risk Assessment

Risk is Loss times Probability or L x P = R

So to answer the original question. Death is a high loss factor when you assess risk. So the question should rather be how great should the probability of dying be?

And then the answer: It depends on preventative measures and the amount of risk taken.

nrg89
2016-09-10, 12:37 AM
One of the things I do at work is Risk Assessment

Risk is Loss times Probability or L x P = R

So to answer the original question. Death is a high loss factor when you assess risk. So the question should rather be how great should the probability of dying be?

In hindsight, yep, the probability is what I was mostly after. My bad. And I work with data mining, so this is even more embarassing for me and I can't really use the "not my native language" card either because we have the same distinctions in Swedish too.

But I have nothing against posts about what the consequences should be when a character dies. These two parameters, the probability and what actually happens afterwards, constitutes risk so I think all is well.

Jay R
2016-09-10, 07:39 AM
One of the things I do at work is Risk Assessment

Risk is Loss times Probability or L x P = R

So to answer the original question. Death is a high loss factor when you assess risk. So the question should rather be how great should the probability of dying be?

And then the answer: It depends on preventative measures and the amount of risk taken.

Which is to say that it depends on how well the players play.

I started in original D&D - Gygaxian levels of lethality. One of my first eleven characters died at first level - because I played stupidly that time. Meanwhile, another player in the same worlds never got a character past first level.

So was the probability of death 9.09% or 100%. As soon as you realize that it's based on ability, the question becomes far more complex than a single number can represent.

Poor play should cause character death much more often than good play should., And bin my early experience, when people complain about it being too high, it's because they haven't learned to play well.

Poor play in D&D is just as common, and has just as much effect on the game, as poor play in chess, football, or any other game.

Tanarii
2016-09-10, 08:10 AM
I started in original D&D - Gygaxian levels of lethality.
Gygaxian Lethality had little to do with poor good play with a party of level 1 players. It was very much luck of the dice. Unless your DM was in the habit of giving away 2000 gp per player without any chance of combat, there was zero chance of no one in the party dying from combat.

Gygaxian play was either about:
1) The randomly surviving characters in a level one party finally earning 2000 gp so they can train, standing on the heaps of the randomly dying ones.
2) power leveling - new level one characters joining a established higher level party, and giving them gold to power level them. So long as the level one faced some threat in the adventure, this was a valid (and expected) tactic by Gygax.

When I say 'random' I don't mean smarter play (fighting in ranks, exploring carefully and thoughtfully, negotiating and/or fleeing) wouldn't enhance some characters chance of survival. But when 1-2 hits was instant death, and AC was low(ish), there was a massive random element. And many characters were going to die from random bad luck of the dice regardless of good play before 2000 gp per surviving member could be earned. This was a fact of Gygaxian lethality.

Edit: the 'best' way to play smart in a Gygaxian lethality campaign is to have 3-4 expendable Fighter PCs in the front rank. Assume they will die. Keep rolling new ones. Assume they will die too. Eventually the non-fighters sitting in the back ranks using missile fire will earn 2000 gp and can train to level 2. Keep this up until the guys in the back ranks are powerful enough they can power level some front rank fighters.

(Usually this requires multiple PCs per player, or getting creative with the henchmen rules.)

beargryllz
2016-09-10, 10:28 AM
We've lost 2 PCs in our current campaign, which is ongoing and spanned from lvl 1-8 so far. We lost one at lvl 3 and another at lvl 6 IIRC.

Any more deaths would be pretty demoralizing, but so far we are well-aware that the DM is perfectly comfortable instagibbing us if the dice demand it...

If we had all survived, it might have seemed like a cakewalk but I assure you we worked very hard to stay alive for as long as we have.

Koo Rehtorb
2016-09-10, 10:44 AM
I think our current death count is eight. Deaths at 1, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1. Finally starting to push up in level now so the next batch of deaths might arrive at 3 or even 4!

Jay R
2016-09-10, 08:44 PM
Gygaxian Lethality had little to do with poor good play with a party of level 1 players. It was very much luck of the dice. Unless your DM was in the habit of giving away 2000 gp per player without any chance of combat, there was zero chance of no one in the party dying from combat.

That's what people keep telling me. But of 11 1st level character, I had exactly one die, and that was to a stupid decision on my part.


Gygaxian play was either about:
1) The randomly surviving characters in a level one party finally earning 2000 gp so they can train, standing on the heaps of the randomly dying ones.
2) power leveling - new level one characters joining a established higher level party, and giving them gold to power level them. So long as the level one faced some threat in the adventure, this was a valid (and expected) tactic by Gygax.

The three best players I knew had no 1st level deaths except from PvP. The worst player I knew never got a PC up to 2nd level. He thought it was bad luck, too. But when your 1st level characters choose to enter Cockatrice Valley, walk past a bunch of statues of people looking up, and then, when they hear a heavy flapping above them, choose to stand and look up instead of running away, they didn't die "randomly".


When I say 'random' I don't mean smarter play (fighting in ranks, exploring carefully and thoughtfully, negotiating and/or fleeing) wouldn't enhance some characters chance of survival. But when 1-2 hits was instant death, and AC was low(ish), there was a massive random element. And many characters were going to die from random bad luck of the dice regardless of good play before 2000 gp per surviving member could be earned. This was a fact of Gygaxian lethality.

But if your Thief sneaks ahead, and sees the goblins coming, and the party sets a trap so most of them die to your arrows before they ever get to attack, and the rest run through your caltrops, the fact that one or two hits might kill you has less effect.


Edit: the 'best' way to play smart in a Gygaxian lethality campaign is to have 3-4 expendable Fighter PCs in the front rank. Assume they will die.

"Assume they will die"? No thanks. I agree that facing a reasonable challenge straight up is (and should be) a 50:50 proposition. But I never wanted to face an even challenge straight up, for the same reasons I fold in poker if the other guy's hand appears as strong as mine.

I saw a 1st level fighter kill 6 skeletons, alone. None of them ever got a shot at him. He ran down the corridor, turned a corner, and waited. He attacked the first one to appear, and ran (whether he hit it or not). Eventually, they were all dead. Standing and facing them would have made him an "expendable Fighter", so he didn't.


Keep rolling new ones. Assume they will die too. Eventually the non-fighters sitting in the back ranks using missile fire will earn 2000 gp and can train to level 2.

I prefer slipping around people and taking their gold, getting 2,000 xps without ever killing anyone.


Keep this up until the guys in the back ranks are powerful enough they can power level some front rank fighters.

(Usually this requires multiple PCs per player, or getting creative with the henchmen rules.)

But it's not what we did. It's what people described later, but it's not what we actually did.

kyoryu
2016-09-10, 08:47 PM
Edit: the 'best' way to play smart in a Gygaxian lethality campaign...

The best way to play in a Gygaxian-lethality level campaign (especially at low levels) is to make sure you aren't getting to-hit rolls made at you.

Traps. Ambushes. Flaming oil. Running like hell when appropriate.

Koo Rehtorb
2016-09-10, 08:48 PM
Gygaxian Lethality had little to do with poor good play with a party of level 1 players. It was very much luck of the dice. Unless your DM was in the habit of giving away 2000 gp per player without any chance of combat, there was zero chance of no one in the party dying from combat.

This is why whenever you're rolling dice for something that has a chance of killing you in OD&D you've failed. Good players know that you pick up the dice as a last resort.

Tanarii
2016-09-11, 03:18 AM
But if your Thief sneaks ahead, and sees the goblins coming, and the party sets a trap so most of them die to your arrows before they ever get to attack, and the rest run through your caltrops, the fact that one or two hits might kill you has less effect.

&

I saw a 1st level fighter kill 6 skeletons, alone. None of them ever got a shot at him. He ran down the corridor, turned a corner, and waited. He attacked the first one to appear, and ran (whether he hit it or not). Eventually, they were all dead. Standing and facing them would have made him an "expendable Fighter", so he didn't.
Ah. I was assuming the DM wouldn't be stupid either.

Lorsa
2016-09-11, 04:53 AM
Another one of those fascinating threads, as people seem to feel very strongly for what ultimately comes down to a difference of preference.

Speaking purely from a player perspective, there is no real reason why you should fear character death as such. It's a fictional character, it's not real. The only way it really impacts you as a player is through whatever emotional attachment you have to the character and the story threads that depend on said character.

Interestingly enough, that emotional attachment is what makes RPGs great in my opinion. The stronger attachment, the better game. So obviously, if everything works out the way it should, me as a player will fear character death, and I will try to avoid it as much as possible.

Speaking from a character perspective (the one I should have when roleplaying), obviously I should fear death. I mean, most humans do (then again you don't always play humans, but let's assume most living beings fear death). The actual probability of dying has very little to do with our fear, it's more about the percieved risk. That is, some people feel the fear of death when they encounter spiders, some when they ride a roller coaster, some when they go parachuting, yet these things are not very likely to actually kill you. So, even low probability death events is usually sufficient for people to feel AFRAID (yes, with capital letters).

So, looking at it purely from the character's perspective, I don't see how high death probability would mean more involvement, or greater fear, or whatever. The character should always take death seriously, even if the probability is 1%.

The issue, of course, becomes if you, as a player, knows that the probability is 0%, even if the character-percieved probability is higher. If the GM actively shields your character from death, then you know there's no risk, so it can be hard to roleplay as though there is one. However, I don't think characters has to actually die for there to be a probability. As long as you know it could have happened, that's enough for me. It's all in the 1%.

Speaking of the GM though, I think every death is technically the GMs fault. I mean, the GM has the power to decide over the outcome of all actions. Therefore, (s)he is to blame for everything that happens. However, there might be mitigating factors, where players would prefer their characters to die before having them saved by the GM. Upholding logical consequences of actions and verisimilitude can often be more important than having your character staying alive. If I play a normal mortal and jump off a cliff, I expect the character to die. Anything else would be weird. As long as the GM's and the players' expectations align, everything is fine.

Character death is a major pain in the ass though. Unless you have specifically set up the party and campaign in such a way that characters are easily replacable, it can be anywhere from difficult to impossible to get a new character introduced. Making this process purposefully harder by having more difficult character generation or whatever is just stupid. There is no reason whatsoever why you need to make it HARDER for new characters to join in again, or somehow punish a player for having his character die by making the new character weakened. Well, some types of campaigns do warrant weaker new characters, but most really don't. Making your players fear character death by having their new character be arbitrarily weaker is, in my opinion, rather stupid. Players fear character death because of their emotional investment. You generally don't need added stuff.

I also happen to be in the camp that thinks that too high probability of character death means I will attempt to be less emotionally invested in the character (which generally leads to me being less involved in the game in general). So yeah, if the probability is too high (like in some of the swedish games the OP mentioned), I will just stop caring (just like I stopped caring about characters in Game of Thrones). So for me, low probability is better than high.

When speaking of "how great should the probability of dying be?", I think it's important to speak of specific situations. You can't really speak of "per session probability", that is just stupid. As a GM, you can easily achieve 100% probability of 1 death per session. Rocks fall, you die and all that. What you have to do is speak of the probability per specific situation.

How large should the probability of dying be in a fight? If you jump off a cliff? From getting hit once with a sword? Etc, etc. It will obviously depend on the type of game you want. If you want to have regular fights, the probability of dying from one really can't be all that great. D&D editions from 3 and forward, sort of assume a couple of fights per day, so the probability of death per fight really can't be that high. Or a whole party couldn't even get past a single adventuring day.

Other games assume like one fight per month or year, and these can get away with having more much lethal combat system. So yeah, figure out what kind of game you want, and decide your probabilities from that. I like games where the probability of character death is pretty low (as long as I don't do anything stupid like fighting a clearly superior foe or jumping off a cliff or whatever). There should always be a threat of death, of course, but it doesn't need to be all that high. I mean, there is only a 0.15% probability that I will die during the coming year, but that's obviously high enough for me to, generally speaking, fear death.

Jay R
2016-09-11, 07:23 AM
Once you talk about "the probability of death", you've already made an assumption that it's mostly random.

I don't want a low probability or a high probability. I want a situation that will kill my character if I play stupidly.

What's the probability of losing a chess game? Barring the low likelihood of a draw, it's obviously 50%. But when a great chess player and a novice sit down to play, neither is facing a 50% probability of loss.


Ah. I was assuming the DM wouldn't be stupid either.

Insult received.

But he wasn't stupid. Clever ambushes can work, and skeletons are mindless.

Cosi
2016-09-11, 09:24 AM
Once you talk about "the probability of death", you've already made an assumption that it's mostly random.

It's always going to be at least a little random, because the game uses dice. In anything approaching a fair fight, it's going to be possible to die if you roll a bunch of 1s while the other guy rolls a bunch of 20s. That's unlikely, but possible. How far you should be able to shift from those assumptions while still dying is a question that is useful to ask. You can still have certain death, it just requires you to push things far enough that even the trailing end of the bell curve kills you.

Koo Rehtorb
2016-09-11, 09:26 AM
In any game that involves randomness the key to good play is minimizing the effects of randomness as much as possible.

Tanarii
2016-09-11, 12:27 PM
Insult received.lol okay yeah, sorry about that. I take your point that within the parameters of a combat-as-war approach and enemies behaving realisticaly (air ""s), a party can dramatically improve their chances of survival.

I just don't think it's possible to make it to level 2 with an entire party intact unless the DM is holding your hand, or you're running away from everything except the most minor of threats. In a open Gygaxian-style campaign (ie more than one party, multiple sessions covering the same in-game time frame, campaign time proceeds apace with or without characters) doing the latter might mean a specific character will live, but he'll take much longer to level past the danger zone than anyone else. If you *really* want to keep someone alive (because of great stat roll or something) it might be possible to play it that way and keep him standing.

Lorsa
2016-09-12, 02:11 PM
Once you talk about "the probability of death", you've already made an assumption that it's mostly random.

I don't want a low probability or a high probability. I want a situation that will kill my character if I play stupidly.

What's the probability of losing a chess game? Barring the low likelihood of a draw, it's obviously 50%. But when a great chess player and a novice sit down to play, neither is facing a 50% probability of loss.

Yes, but the reverse should also be true. When facing a foe that you are clearly superior to, the probability of winning should be... well... really high. And it's here the game mechanics come into play, and sort of decide what constitutes "stupidly".

I mean, for all intents and purposes, "playing stupidly" means "engaging in a situation with high likelyhood of death". In some games, this means just about ANY fight whatsoever, as for example in the swedish game Eon, there's a non-insignificant chance a peasant with a dagger will kill a well-trained knight with plate armor in one hit. So here "playing stupid" means "being in a fight".

The problem is, some people like fights in the roleplaying games. In fact, many do. So when "playing smart" and "playing the game you want" contradicts each other, what do you do?

Jay R
2016-09-13, 03:55 PM
I just don't think it's possible to make it to level 2 with an entire party intact unless the DM is holding your hand, or you're running away from everything except the most minor of threats.

But we did. And the DM was clearly not holding our hands, because one player's characters died constantly.

The goal is not to merely "run away from" threats, but to investigate them, and make a plan to defeat them safely, or to lead them away from their treasure. In early D&D, you didn't have to defeat threats. Most xps came from getting treasure.


Yes, but the reverse should also be true. When facing a foe that you are clearly superior to, the probability of winning should be... well... really high. And it's here the game mechanics come into play, and sort of decide what constitutes "stupidly".

I mean, for all intents and purposes, "playing stupidly" means "engaging in a situation with high likelyhood of death". In some games, this means just about ANY fight whatsoever, as for example in the swedish game Eon, there's a non-insignificant chance a peasant with a dagger will kill a well-trained knight with plate armor in one hit. So here "playing stupid" means "being in a fight".

No, it means entering a fight by engaging the enemy in the front, without a careful plan. A first level party should do more sneaking than a fifth level party.


The problem is, some people like fights in the roleplaying games. In fact, many do. So when "playing smart" and "playing the game you want" contradicts each other, what do you do?

The same thing you do playing chess if you like trading your queen for the enemy's pawn. Change "playing the game you want" to be trying to win it.

Run fights in which you start off with an avalanche, or an ambush, so that the enemy are mostly defeated before you are engaged in melee. Avoid fights until you can win them.

Tanarii
2016-09-13, 03:59 PM
But we did. And the DM was clearly not holding our hands, because one player's characters died constantly.

The goal is not to merely "run away from" threats, but to investigate them, and make a plan to defeat them safely, or to lead them away from their treasure. In early D&D, you didn't have to defeat threats. Most xps came from getting treasure.Yes, which is why I said earlier that a DM could just hand out 2000gp per character, making it easy mode. But in most DM's games, there's a limit to how often you can 'lure the enemy away from the treasure / into a trap' over and over again, and still gain significant rewards.

Koo Rehtorb
2016-09-13, 04:10 PM
If the DM is dead set on making you fight stuff then he might be playing the wrong edition.

Tanarii
2016-09-13, 04:22 PM
If the DM is dead set on making you fight stuff then he might be playing the wrong edition.If the DM is dead set on letting you get cash on easy mode, he might be playing the right edition?

Edit: I've rarely seen a AD&D 1e or BECMI DM that let you get away constantly without any combat, just because GP = XP.

kyoryu
2016-09-13, 04:40 PM
The problem is, some people like fights in the roleplaying games. In fact, many do. So when "playing smart" and "playing the game you want" contradicts each other, what do you do?

If by "fights" you mean "heroic fights where the PCs wade into battle and stand toe to toe with fearsome beasts".... then play a game that supports that. Old-school D&D really doesn't. I've heard the terms "combat as sport" and "combat as war" before. Old-school D&D is definitely in the "combat as war" camp. It's survival horror, not heroic fantasy.

And I say this with no rancor or judgement. All games do some things better than others. Find a game that does well at the things you like doing.

Tanarii
2016-09-13, 04:51 PM
I've heard the terms "combat as sport" and "combat as war" before. Old-school D&D is definitely in the "combat as war" camp.Unsurprising that it's in the CaW camp, given that the terms were coined during the run-up to 5e to differentiate between Combat as War editions (oD&D, BECMI, AD&D 1e & to a degree baseline 2e) and Combat as Sport editions (to a degree 2e Combat & Tactics / 3e, definitely 3.5e/Pathfinder & 4e).

icefractal
2016-09-13, 05:34 PM
Unsurprising that it's in the CaW camp, given that the terms were coined during the run-up to 5e to differentiate between Combat as War editions (oD&D, BECMI, AD&D 1e & to a degree baseline 2e) and Combat as Sport editions (to a degree 2e Combat & Tactics / 3e, definitely 3.5e/Pathfinder & 4e).Earlier than that. They were coined during 4E, and more often than not the purpose of using them was to say that 4E sucked.

While there is a legitimate point about different rule-sets encouraging different approaches to combat, I'm leery about those particular terms, as they've too often been used as "My fictional warrior defeating fictional enemies is authentic, unlike when those MMO-playing kids do it."

Tanarii
2016-09-13, 05:56 PM
Earlier than that. They were coined during 4E, and more often than not the purpose of using them was to say that 4E sucked.Well yes, during the run up to 5e was during 4e. And yes, it was a way of defending the older editions compared to the more current editions. Or more, a call for change. But it was specifically because of the run up to 5e that the term was coined. By which I mean, it was a response to the announcement of 5e/DNDNext in Jan 2012, with the term in regards to D&D being 'coined' on EnWorld specifically in regards to playstyles "…and how to reconcile them in 5ed" in Feb 2012.

icefractal
2016-09-13, 06:26 PM
You sure about that? I'm pretty sure I remember it showing up in early 4E, not late. Also, 3.x was mostly considered to be in the CaW camp at the time.

Although it's entirely possible different places used it different ways, come to think of it.

Jay R
2016-09-13, 06:39 PM
Well yes, during the run up to 5e was during 4e. And yes, it was a way of defending the older editions compared to the more current editions. Or more, a call for change. But it was specifically because of the run up to 5e that the term was coined. By which I mean, it was a response to the announcement of 5e/DNDNext in Jan 2012, with the term in regards to D&D being 'coined' on EnWorld specifically in regards to playstyles "…and how to reconcile them in 5ed" in Feb 2012.

That may have been the introduction in this context, but the idea pre-dates that discussion. In 19th century fencing, they distinguished between the "jeu de soldat" (play of the soldier), the "jeu de salle" (play of the fencing academy), the "jeu de terrain" (play of the dueling ground), and the "jeu de fantastique' (fanciful or over-elaborate play).

Vitruviansquid
2016-09-13, 07:21 PM
If a game wanted combat to look a certain way, its rules would've incentivized it. If you want to play standing toe to toe with the foe in chivalrous combat, you want to find a system where that is best. If you want to obsessively plan your encounters and decide combats before they start, you'd play the different system that incentivizes it.

AMFV
2016-09-13, 07:28 PM
I'm not entirely sure that the different risks of death are really a matter of "Combat as War" vs. "Combat as Sport". The risk of character death in some games where combat is treated like war isn't that high, although randomness may be more important. Whereas in games where it's "combat as sport" if the game is more challenging death will be more prevalent.

I would say where the discussions intersect would be mostly in the randomness of death. "CaW" would have a very high risk of random death relative to CaS, however the overall risk of death would be more game-dependent, and then genre dependent as well. In a CaS game based around horror tropes and clever strategy to avoid them, death may be very common, the game difficulty itself would be very high. Whereas in a CaW game where you have abundant tools to avoid combat, death isn't going to be as prevalent. So in CaS games it has more to do with intended difficulty and genre conventions, in CaS games it has a lot to do with tools provided and setting.

Jay R
2016-09-13, 08:26 PM
If by "fights" you mean "heroic fights where the PCs wade into battle and stand toe to toe with fearsome beasts".... then play a game that supports that. Old-school D&D really doesn't. I've heard the terms "combat as sport" and "combat as war" before. Old-school D&D is definitely in the "combat as war" camp. It's survival horror, not heroic fantasy.

And I say this with no rancor or judgement. All games do some things better than others. Find a game that does well at the things you like doing.

Oh, well done! This was better said than I could do. Everybody, throw out my inadequate attempts to express this thought and substitute kyoryu's.

Tanarii
2016-09-13, 09:08 PM
You sure about that? I'm pretty sure I remember it showing up in early 4E, not late. Also, 3.x was mostly considered to be in the CaW camp at the time.Yes, I'm sure. Here's the post that brought the terms to D&D:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?317715-Very-Long-Combat-as-Sport-vs-Combat-as-War-a-Key-Difference-in-D-amp-D-Play-Styles


Although it's entirely possible different places used it different ways, come to think of it.The concepts are not new. If you read Daztur's post, he explicitly references the concepts being a part of MMORPG PvP discussions. Although it's not necessarily clear that the now-popular 'Combat as' appellation for the concepts came from the MMO blog context, vs him using them for emphasis and them catching on as official labels. He's definitely the one who solidified those labels in a D&D context. I suppose though it's possible to consider 'coined' too strong a word for what he did though.

AMFV
2016-09-13, 10:23 PM
If by "fights" you mean "heroic fights where the PCs wade into battle and stand toe to toe with fearsome beasts".... then play a game that supports that. Old-school D&D really doesn't. I've heard the terms "combat as sport" and "combat as war" before. Old-school D&D is definitely in the "combat as war" camp. It's survival horror, not heroic fantasy.

And I say this with no rancor or judgement. All games do some things better than others. Find a game that does well at the things you like doing.

Well said. Although one thing that's getting lost in the shuffle. Even in the same game at the same table, there can be a lot of variety. If you look at Old School D&D modules, they were very very varied and diverse, there were some that fit your "survival horror" definition to a T, including large trap filled mazes, but there were also open world exploration, haunted houses, and a lot of others. In the same way that adventures can vary, so too can the threat of death in the game.

The only thing I would say is that it's important to let players know when there's a shift in tone and in threat of death. Because it really doesn't need to be consistent to have a world that makes sense or a game that makes narrative sense.

nrg89
2016-09-14, 03:07 AM
I mean, for all intents and purposes, "playing stupidly" means "engaging in a situation with high likelyhood of death". In some games, this means just about ANY fight whatsoever, as for example in the swedish game Eon, there's a non-insignificant chance a peasant with a dagger will kill a well-trained knight with plate armor in one hit. So here "playing stupid" means "being in a fight".




No, it means entering a fight by engaging the enemy in the front, without a careful plan. A first level party should do more sneaking than a fifth level party.

Actually, I think Lorsa is being too fair to Eon's random deaths, I've suffered brain trauma and died in Eon from a pillow fight and if that's not a cheap death I don't know what is. It doesn't matter how prepared you are in that game, the specter of death is hovering over you at all times biding it's time.

So, Jay, how do you protect yourself from that? Sneaking doesn't always work, you're not stupid if you snuck into a place without mapping out every square inch of the floor first, resulting in one of the floor boards creaking and a frightened person throwing a bust right on top of your head. That's a random death right there not resulting in stupidity, unless everyone who actually exposes themselves to any risk whatsoever is stupid.

Personally, I'm a bit torn because Eon really does make you fear for your life. An intelligent player, no matter how carefully he's built his character, is not going to mess with something the rules says will be game over. In contrast to 3.5 ,where I can think of several ways level 10+ characters will take out enemies the rules says they have no shot of defeating for another 5 levels. That fear makes you stop and think, in 3.x you start thinking way into the battle once it's made abundantly clear that this is not going to go well, and you often have more than enough time to split.
But, if the deaths are too cheap you never build any attachment to your character. You also don't feel very accomplished as a character but rather like you suck, and that's not a very fun fantasy to escape into.

RazorChain
2016-09-14, 03:52 AM
Actually, I think Lorsa is being too fair to Eon's random deaths, I've suffered brain trauma and died in Eon from a pillow fight and if that's not a cheap death I don't know what is. It doesn't matter how prepared you are in that game, the specter of death is hovering over you at all times biding it's time.

So, Jay, how do you protect yourself from that? Sneaking doesn't always work, you're not stupid if you snuck into a place without mapping out every square inch of the floor first, resulting in one of the floor boards creaking and a frightened person throwing a bust right on top of your head. That's a random death right there not resulting in stupidity, unless everyone who actually exposes themselves to any risk whatsoever is stupid.

Personally, I'm a bit torn because Eon really does make you fear for your life. An intelligent player, no matter how carefully he's built his character, is not going to mess with something the rules says will be game over. In contrast to 3.5 ,where I can think of several ways level 10+ characters will take out enemies the rules says they have no shot of defeating for another 5 levels. That fear makes you stop and think, in 3.x you start thinking way into the battle once it's made abundantly clear that this is not going to go well, and you often have more than enough time to split.
But, if the deaths are too cheap you never build any attachment to your character. You also don't feel very accomplished as a character but rather like you suck, and that's not a very fun fantasy to escape into.

I like those kind of games, where the character know when they are way over their head. When a unit of city guards is still a threat even after the PC's get better and combat should never be taken lightly. Of course it's always a calculated risk but hey that single goblin might roll a critical hit, get triple damage and hit location brain! It's 0.01% chance but it might happen.

Jay R
2016-09-14, 09:10 AM
Actually, I think Lorsa is being too fair to Eon's random deaths, I've suffered brain trauma and died in Eon from a pillow fight and if that's not a cheap death I don't know what is. It doesn't matter how prepared you are in that game, the specter of death is hovering over you at all times biding it's time.

So, Jay, how do you protect yourself from that?

I wouldn't. While I don't know the game, based on your description, it appears to be an example of my early statement - "If excellent play often leads to character death, then the game is too lethal."

My original statement, and my basic position on games in general, is the following:

If poor play rarely leads to character death, then the game is too easy. If excellent play often leads to character death, then the game is too lethal.

This would help us answer the question if we had any agreement on what the terms "poor play" and "excellent play" mean.

After that, I've just been disagreeing with the people claiming early D&D was impossible to survive, or that deaths in it were random, and those remarks have been specific to original D&D. I readily concede that it's possible to design a game where death is really random, but I haven't played any.

Lorsa
2016-09-14, 09:20 AM
No, it means entering a fight by engaging the enemy in the front, without a careful plan. A first level party should do more sneaking than a fifth level party.

Yes, this is what my friends are usually doing when playing low level D&D. They sneak around (often in forests I've found), try to take out unaware opponents with ranged attacks, hide again, use tanglefoot bags, more hiding, more ranged attacks etc...

However, in Eon, a game that was referred to by the OP (if not by name), sneaking can actually kill you. Or well, I don't know that for sure, but I DO know that walking a regular overland travel movement in D&D terms requires a marching roll, which has a fairly high chance of botching, which can result in you tripping over and breaking your ankle, which in turn requires a pain and trauma roll to see if you die. So basically, in Eon, WALKING can kill you.

Also, the death probability doesn't really change all that much from first level to fifth (or fifteen) level (Eon doesn't have levels, but equivalent). Having a skilled character in Eon doesn't actually change your chance of survival all that much. The only skill you need is being lucky (as a player) with die rolls.

I like games where a fifth level fighter is much more likely to survive a one-on-one with a first level fighter than the first level fighter is. In Eon, it really matters very little.




The same thing you do playing chess if you like trading your queen for the enemy's pawn. Change "playing the game you want" to be trying to win it.

Run fights in which you start off with an avalanche, or an ambush, so that the enemy are mostly defeated before you are engaged in melee. Avoid fights until you can win them.

That implies that there will ever come a time when you can win fights. Some games are so deadly it just doesn't happen, as mentioned above. Also, quite likely you will simply die from your own trap, like stumbling and getting caught in the avalanche you are trying to create for your foes. Should all else fail, your character will most likely die from the supposed "cure" for a disease you randomly contracted.



If by "fights" you mean "heroic fights where the PCs wade into battle and stand toe to toe with fearsome beasts".... then play a game that supports that. Old-school D&D really doesn't. I've heard the terms "combat as sport" and "combat as war" before. Old-school D&D is definitely in the "combat as war" camp. It's survival horror, not heroic fantasy.

And I say this with no rancor or judgement. All games do some things better than others. Find a game that does well at the things you like doing.

I am well aware that you fall in the "whatever floats your boat" camp, but I am glad you acknowledge the lack of judgement.

However, by "fights" I mean something like "dirty melee with the low trained thugs that attempted to be highway robbers and assaulted your well-trained adventurer". My players certainly expect that standing toe to toe with fearsome beasts should be dangerous. They do expect to stand toe to toe with a generic goblin though. Something that simply isn't possible in the game the OP was thinking about.

I mean not sure how the older D&D editions would do with the "fight melee against a single goblin", but from 3e and forward, it seems to fulfill this criteria quite well.



I'm not entirely sure that the different risks of death are really a matter of "Combat as War" vs. "Combat as Sport". The risk of character death in some games where combat is treated like war isn't that high, although randomness may be more important. Whereas in games where it's "combat as sport" if the game is more challenging death will be more prevalent.

I would say where the discussions intersect would be mostly in the randomness of death. "CaW" would have a very high risk of random death relative to CaS, however the overall risk of death would be more game-dependent, and then genre dependent as well. In a CaS game based around horror tropes and clever strategy to avoid them, death may be very common, the game difficulty itself would be very high. Whereas in a CaW game where you have abundant tools to avoid combat, death isn't going to be as prevalent. So in CaS games it has more to do with intended difficulty and genre conventions, in CaS games it has a lot to do with tools provided and setting.

Yes, this I think is more or less what I was thinking about, and what I have a problem with.

I like games where the death risk is mostly dependent on the situation and the character (and player) skill. This means that I, as a GM, can make sure the characters don't get faced with too high risk without their control, and that I, as a player, can avoid the type of places/situations/monsters that has a bit red sign with "danger" on top of them.

However, some games are so random that this is impossible. ANY foe, good or bad, can easily kill the characters. Basically, everything has a red danger sign on top of it. This, to me, leads to a quite boring game, as you simply don't want to engage in any fight whatsoever.

If the death risk is mostly uncontrollable by both GM and player, it's not very fun for me. Too much randomness just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe I am a control freak?

When a guy punching you in the stomach in a bar fight can kill you with one hit, the system is too deadly in my opinion.



Oh, well done! This was better said than I could do. Everybody, throw out my inadequate attempts to express this thought and substitute kyoryu's.

You are usually very good at expressing your thoughts. Then again, so is kyoryu.

However, I wasn't aware my comments were directed towards oD&D in specific, which seems to be what you got caught up in. In fact, I have no idea how deadly oD&D is, but I imagine it to be a lot less deadly than the swedish game Eon, or Neotech, or Coriolis, or Noir for that matter.

Sidenote: in Noir, you can shoot autofire against more than one target, say three targets. This involves only one attack roll. You roll two d10's, and if they show the same number, it becomes a critical success or critical failure. Depending on the target number. For attack rolls, the target number depends on the defender's defense roll. So if you shoot three people, you can critical hit two and critically fail against one. A critical fail means, for example, that the gun runs out of ammo. The question is, how can this happen for the guy standing in the middle of a sweeping shot against three opponents where you critically hit the other two? Maybe I should put it in the silly rule section, but I just want to highlight how...stupid... some swedish games can be.

Lorsa
2016-09-14, 09:33 AM
Actually, I think Lorsa is being too fair to Eon's random deaths, I've suffered brain trauma and died in Eon from a pillow fight and if that's not a cheap death I don't know what is. It doesn't matter how prepared you are in that game, the specter of death is hovering over you at all times biding it's time.

Well, yes, I was too fair to it. To be honest, it is one of the games I hate the most because the only thing it can do is to portray a narrative of a downward spiral into greater misery, with the inevitable death waiting just a few sessions away.

I mean, if that's what you want, it's a great system! If that was what would interest me, my choice would be heroin. Then at least I'd feel good during the downwards spiral.

nrg89
2016-09-14, 10:12 AM
However, I wasn't aware my comments were directed towards oD&D in specific, which seems to be what you got caught up in. In fact, I have no idea how deadly oD&D is, but I imagine it to be a lot less deadly than the swedish game Eon, or Neotech, or Coriolis, or Noir for that matter.

Neotech actually touches on another issue raised in this thread; the risk of failure.

Neotech is, like it's fantasy sister, super lethal but since the rules for cerebral implants are so vague they easily become absolutely broken in ways not meant by the designers. If I remember correctly, law 22 is the equivalent of ten ace attorneys and two people with a Ph.D in law working for you around the clock. You can buy an implant with 25 in law. You can also buy an implant with 25 in economics and go to the stock market.
So, in that game it actually makes sense to avoid combat entirely and resolve everything with your skills instead, provided you can pony up the dough. The probability that you will die in combat is so high that you don't do what the game wants you to do and the probability of failure in the other walks of life is so low that the game could easily be a session with everyone describing their dream mansions and what their day to day life would be. And, the consequences for failure of any other action but combat is laughable. I was once sentenced to death row in a country, got the sentence knocked down to 10 years after a law check. The country didn't allow another appeal, but with another law check I found a loophole and could file for appeal again. I made a perfect check and got off scot free after a grand total of three months in custody (my checks also made the courts speed up the proceedings, for some reason).

Unless the GM intervenes, and this I think is my definition of when a game is broken; when the GM has to cheat in order to save you from a cheap death, or say "no, you cannot do that" to something that's perfectly acceptable in the rules for the game to be a tense but possible challenge, it's in desperate need of a fix. At least when it comes up in campaign after campaign after campaign.

(I have no idea how we can give out Nobel prizes but not create a solid, balanced RPG engine. As a kid I thought 3.5 was the best system I'd ever seen after playing so many Swedish games.)

kyoryu
2016-09-14, 10:24 AM
Even in the same game at the same table, there can be a lot of variety. If you look at Old School D&D modules, they were very very varied and diverse, there were some that fit your "survival horror" definition to a T, including large trap filled mazes, but there were also open world exploration, haunted houses, and a lot of others. In the same way that adventures can vary, so too can the threat of death in the game.

Sure. System matters, but it's not the only thing that matters. Old-school D&D leans towards deadly. It has mechanics designed specifically to kill characters with a single roll! It's easier to kill people than to knock them out... I could go on and on.

That doesn't mean that a given table/scenario can't downplay these factors, but the *system* part of the equation is pretty heavily biased in favor of deadliness.



I am well aware that you fall in the "whatever floats your boat" camp, but I am glad you acknowledge the lack of judgement.

More accurately, I'm in the "different games are different, and that's awesome! How does this change play? What's the right system for you? THIS IS ALL SO COOL!" camp.


However, by "fights" I mean something like "dirty melee with the low trained thugs that attempted to be highway robbers and assaulted your well-trained adventurer". My players certainly expect that standing toe to toe with fearsome beasts should be dangerous. They do expect to stand toe to toe with a generic goblin though. Something that simply isn't possible in the game the OP was thinking about.

That's a sucker move in early D&D. At first level, a few bad rolls would screw you, without a lot of margin between "oh, I should run now" and "dead".


I mean not sure how the older D&D editions would do with the "fight melee against a single goblin", but from 3e and forward, it seems to fulfill this criteria quite well.

I don't really think 3.x does it well, either, to be honest. Critical hits mean that you're one bad roll away from death at first level. And, again, Save or Die effects...

Compare this with something like Fate, where you *literally* cannot ever have a die result that *forces* a character to die. Even if a character is Taken Out, it's up to the player/GM doing the taking out what happens.

Lorsa
2016-09-15, 02:45 AM
Neotech actually touches on another issue raised in this thread; the risk of failure.

Yeah, Neotech just plays weirdly. I also remember how my character become a millionaire only to loose it all and spend two years in prison. And that was during character creation...



More accurately, I'm in the "different games are different, and that's awesome! How does this change play? What's the right system for you? THIS IS ALL SO COOL!" camp.

A good camp to be in, I think.



That's a sucker move in early D&D. At first level, a few bad rolls would screw you, without a lot of margin between "oh, I should run now" and "dead".

I agree. It's less of a sucker move at fifth level though. The thing is, the system does allow it at some point. Some systems don't, as any fight, regardless of opponent, at any level, is incredibly lethal. To the point where it's move past the realm of realism and into absurdity.




I don't really think 3.x does it well, either, to be honest. Critical hits mean that you're one bad roll away from death at first level. And, again, Save or Die effects...

Compare this with something like Fate, where you *literally* cannot ever have a die result that *forces* a character to die. Even if a character is Taken Out, it's up to the player/GM doing the taking out what happens.

I downloaded the Fate corebook recently, but haven't gotten around to reading it through yet. Not quite sure when I'd get the chance to try it unfortunately, which diminishes my motivation slightly. Looking to host an online game at some point?

In any case, I don't think 3.x does it that well either. But it certainly does it better than some other stuff I've seen. Once you get to third level, critical hits are less of insta-kill and I try to avoid the SoD effects if possible. I remember I used one once only to figure out they suck.

nrg89
2016-09-15, 03:54 AM
I don't really think 3.x does it well, either, to be honest. Critical hits mean that you're one bad roll away from death at first level. And, again, Save or Die effects...

Compare this with something like Fate, where you *literally* cannot ever have a die result that *forces* a character to die. Even if a character is Taken Out, it's up to the player/GM doing the taking out what happens.

I still have not read Fate yet but this sort of breaks immersion for me. I think the exposure to risk should be voluntary but wether or not it resulted in something bad should be random. If the players and the GM has too much control over the outcome, it's not a game anymore but a story. Where should the control end? For me, the character's death. Real people, and most fictional characters too, don't know how something's going to end and that's what creates tension. We have hopes, of course, but we shouldn't really know what will happen because we're participating in something bigger than ourselves, which means that we can't control everything because then it would be lesser than ourselves.

Ok, being a bit philosophical here, but pressing on even though others are afraid it's what makes a hero. You're afraid of the unknown, if you know it's not dangerous you're not afraid anymore. This should not go overboard, we assume walking or pillow fights will not kill us, but having complete control over what happens to my character would make me feel disconnected from it.

Conradine
2016-09-15, 04:00 AM
The risk should be appropriate to the kind of game you are playing with your players.
Also, it should still be internally consistent with the game world.

Cluedrew
2016-09-15, 06:55 AM
I think the exposure to risk should be voluntary but wether or not it resulted in something bad should be random.As far as I can tell most of FATE's consequences (including the actual consequences mechanic) while not entirely random can be force on you. Still they tend to be flexible in form, but fixed in magnitude. So something bad happens to you, but you get to decide exactly what bad thing that is, but not that a bad thing happens. In that regard it still meets your requirement.

However I will agree with you on one thing: FATE is defiantly geared towards the telling of a story as opposed to being about the fights themselves. And dead people can make it hard to tell interesting stories.

obryn
2016-09-15, 08:03 AM
So, funny story. Not ha-ha, just timely - and brief, but relevant. Contains spoilers for the Zeitgeist campaign.


So in my current game, the ethically ambiguous enemies that are playing the role of 'big bads' have just succeeded in making a number of changes to the metaphysics of the campaign's setting. Among many other changes, it is now literally impossible for sentient creatures to die from straight-up hit point damage. If you want them dead-dead, you need to push it beyond that point, and then take an intentional action to coup-de-grace. (Or, you can kill them with non-HP stuff like suffocation or sufficient grievous bodily harm from environmental effects that 'you'll get better' becomes absurd. But not in the course of normal combat or warfare, where one thing is trying to kill another thing.)


Funny enough, this is epic-tier (23rd level) 4e D&D, and this has already saved two characters in the game. It's also already making a pretty sizable impact on the setting and playing into their future plans.

----

Back on topic, like I said upthread, I don't even see why this is an argument. I've run games with low lethality and high lethality. It's all about the sorts of game you want to run. I've run both, and will probably run both in the future.

obryn
2016-09-15, 08:14 AM
As far as I can tell most of FATE's consequences (including the actual consequences mechanic) while not entirely random can be force on you. Still they tend to be flexible in form, but fixed in magnitude. So something bad happens to you, but you get to decide exactly what bad thing that is, but not that a bad thing happens. In that regard it still meets your requirement.

However I will agree with you on one thing: FATE is defiantly geared towards the telling of a story as opposed to being about the fights themselves. And dead people can make it hard to tell interesting stories.
I dunno if this is unique to just certain implementations I've read, but here's how FATE handles it. It seems pretty sensible to me.

Any time before you make a die roll - in this case, most often a Defend roll against an Attack - you can choose to Concede the conflict instead. If you concede, your opponent gets what they want (e.g., your character out of the fight) but you get a say in what happens to you. You've lost, and you can't undermine the victory, but you can avoid whatever dire terribleness might result from a total defeat.

If you make that die roll, and you can't absorb the Stress, you're Taken Out. When an enemy takes you out, they get to decide what happens to you, up to and including death.

So say I'm running a fantasy game, and I'm fighting an Owlbear. So far it's been evenly matched and we're both down, but the Owlbear gets to attack. It rolls pretty high and I need to decide if I'm just going to be left for dead or if I want to try and block the attack and maybe beat that feathery abomination. I can take my chances and try to roll to Defend ... or I can just Concede, get a Fate point for not dragging things out, and declare that the Owlbear knocks me out and I roll down a cliff where it can't eat me.

kyoryu
2016-09-15, 10:35 AM
If you make that die roll, and you can't absorb the Stress, you're Taken Out. When an enemy takes you out, they get to decide what happens to you, up to and including death.

Correct. If the owlbear takes you out, the GM decides what that means. Which *can* mean death, but doesn't *have to*.

This is in contrast to D&D where often times the dice say "you're dead" without the GM really intending for a killing blow to really be happening.

I'm not claiming anything is better than anything else, here. What I *am* claiming is that the lethality level of D&D is comparatively high.

Though, interestingly, in my experience I can run Fate much "harder" in comparison, to the point where the PCs often "lose" and find themselves getting in deeper and deeper trouble. This is kind of where I get my general formula of "tension = negative consequences * chance they'll happen" formula. While generally the negative consequences on the table in a Fate game won't be death, they can still be fairly harsh, and they occur *much more frequently* than death does in most games. I've never had a player say my Fate games are "easy mode".

Cozzer
2016-09-15, 10:46 AM
FATE is a bit peculiar in that you're not just playing as the character, you sometimes play as the director of the story, in a way.

You can choose to have bad things happen to your character to get narrative bonuses later on, or you can choose to "fold" from a conflict, but that doesn't mean your character chooses it too. Maybe you concede from a fight and your character misses a step and falls into the river and gets away, despite being an honorable warrior who would never run from a fight.

It's a different paradigm from D&D-style roleplaying, where you are supposed to make every choice in-character and the GM handles all the "director" stuff.

Cluedrew
2016-09-15, 08:41 PM
To Cozzer: I've sometimes heard it called a story telling game because of that focus. That it is not really about getting into your character's head but instead deciding what would make a more interesting story. I suppose most role-playing games have a bit of both. Plus bits and pieces of others, a lot of games have lots of little ideas thrown in.

Knaight
2016-09-16, 12:11 AM
FATE is a bit peculiar in that you're not just playing as the character, you sometimes play as the director of the story, in a way.


The jargon hers is "author stance" as distinguished from "actor stance", and these both mean exactly what you'd expect. FATE has a dose of author stance added to what is fundamentally an actor stance system, and while that seems like a lot for D&D players it's nothing compared to games like Microscope, Shock: Social Science Fiction, Fiasco, and the GM side of most things that have a GM.

Balmas
2016-09-16, 02:16 AM
As a general rule, I feel that there should always be a risk of a player dying if they're fighting a creature of approximately equal CR to them. To do otherwise robs the players of the satisfaction of succeeding in their objective. It's like if you played Pacman, but without ghosts; the lack of risk and challenge makes it little more than an exercise in mutual self-congratulation on having made such awesome characters.

Now, I can admit that such a gameplay has its place in things like free-form RPs, story-driven things, etcetera. Theme also plays a part; games like Apocalypse World have a much larger portion of control given to the players, and a lot of the drama comes from every player pulling in a different direction to get what they want. In situations like that, death is special; you need to figure out what is worth dying for, and death really means something.

However, if we're talking D&D 3.X, or systems where the primary focus of the system is negotiating combat, then I feel there should be a risk of failure to match the potential rewards of success.

Tanarii
2016-09-16, 08:45 AM
I was looking in the 1e DMG for something yesterday, and this caught my eye:


As AD&D is an ongoing game of fantasy adventuring, it is important to allow participants to generate a viable character of the race and profes-sion which he or she desires. While it is possible to generate some fairly playable characters by rolling 3d6, there is often an extended period of attempts at finding a suitable one due to quirks of the dice. Furthermore, these rather marginal characters tend to have short life expectancy - which tends to discourage new players, as does having to make do with some character of a race and/or class which he or she really can't or won't identify with. Character generation, then, is a serious matter, and it is recommended that the following systems be used. Four alternatives are offered for player characters:
What's interesting here is Gygax, who is generally renowned as a (somewhat) killer DM, is saying that a short life expectancy will tend to discourage new players.

further on:


The character faces death in many forms. The most common, death due to combat, is no great matter in most cases, for the character can often be brought back by means of a clerical spell or an alter reality or wish. Of
course, recovery of damage sustained might be a problem, but that is not insurmountable.Here, he's acknowledging the system has built in checks to bring characters back to life. ie reducing the deadliness of combat.

But most importantly, in running the game:

Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonably severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done. It is very demoralizing to the players to lose a cared-for-player character when they have played well. When they have done something stupid or have not taken precautions, then let the dice fall where they may! Again, if you have available ample means of raising characters from the dead, even death is not too severe; remember, however, the constitu-tion-based limit to resurrections. Yet one die roll that you should NEVER tamper with is the SYSTEM SHOCK ROLL to be raised from the dead. If a character fails that roll, which he or she should make him or herself, he or she is FOREVER DEAD. There MUST be some final death or immortality will take over and again the game will become boring because the player characters will have 9+ lives each!Interestingly, what he's saying could be a summary of most of the points of view of this thread: There must be some threat or the game will become boring. Random dice killing off a character is (in the long run) acceptable. But might wish to use your judgement on if the player was playing particularly well or poorly in a specific situation to decide if you're going to override the dice.

obryn
2016-09-16, 09:34 AM
The jargon hers is "author stance" as distinguished from "actor stance", and these both mean exactly what you'd expect. FATE has a dose of author stance added to what is fundamentally an actor stance system, and while that seems like a lot for D&D players it's nothing compared to games like Microscope, Shock: Social Science Fiction, Fiasco, and the GM side of most things that have a GM.
Yeah, FATE is largely a traditionally-structured RPG.

In D&D, metagame currency like Action Points serves a similar sort of 'author stance' role.


As a general rule, I feel that there should always be a risk of a player dying if they're fighting a creature of approximately equal CR to them. To do otherwise robs the players of the satisfaction of succeeding in their objective. It's like if you played Pacman, but without ghosts; the lack of risk and challenge makes it little more than an exercise in mutual self-congratulation on having made such awesome characters.
First off, I have a general rule against killing my players. Last time it got messy, what with the cops and turning my house into a crime scene and so on. :smallwink:

Anyway! "Character death" shouldn't be the only failure state for a character or a campaign. There's many, many more ways to fail in your objectives. It could be as simple as "You don't get the treasure you want" or as complex as "Now the pantheon of gods is dead." Pacman's a terrible example because Pacman doesn't have any hopes, dreams, or goals that you'd expect in the ongoing narrative of an RPG.

Cozzer
2016-09-16, 09:57 AM
As a general rule, I feel that there should always be a risk of a player dying if they're fighting a creature of approximately equal CR to them. To do otherwise robs the players of the satisfaction of succeeding in their objective. It's like if you played Pacman, but without ghosts; the lack of risk and challenge makes it little more than an exercise in mutual self-congratulation on having made such awesome characters.

My (emphasis on "my") problem with this attitude is... well, suppose you have a 10% chance of your character dying in an average encounter, even if you play well in a tactical sense. It means you have probably less than 10% chances of getting to the end of the campaign with your character still alive (unlessy you allow for resurrection, of course). I'd never bother investing in a story that would never get to its climax, so every characters made in such an environment would be a cartboard cutout.

If my character dies, I want it to be a consequence of a dangerous choice I made. If it's estabilished early in the story that every fight is dangerous in an unavoidable way and if the GM lets characters make other choices, then I'm ok with it. If the GM says "well, every fight is dangerous so even if you play optimally a random critical can kill you forever" and then pushes the character into a dungeon where enemies attack on sight, then it's cartboard cutout time.

(Again, I'm not saying my style is better than yours. I'm just trying to explain why disliking character death does not necessarily mean disliking character failure.)

obryn
2016-09-16, 10:50 AM
My (emphasis on "my") problem with this attitude is... well, suppose you have a 10% chance of your character dying in an average encounter, even if you play well in a tactical sense. It means you have probably less than 10% chances of getting to the end of the campaign with your character still alive (unlessy you allow for resurrection, of course).
Notably, it's not the default assumption in any games that use CR.

In fact, I'd say that CR/Level/etc. is engineered in such a way that character death will be rare (while maintaining some challenge). Because, yes, if your character has a 10% chance of dying every encounter, you're not making it past a level or two. The odds are very much not in your favor.

kyoryu
2016-09-16, 11:04 AM
Anyway! "Character death" shouldn't be the only failure state for a character or a campaign. There's many, many more ways to fail in your objectives. It could be as simple as "You don't get the treasure you want" or as complex as "Now the pantheon of gods is dead." Pacman's a terrible example because Pacman doesn't have any hopes, dreams, or goals that you'd expect in the ongoing narrative of an RPG.

In most story-based games, yeah. The nice thing about less "permanent" failure states is that they can be used far more frequently. Instead of giving the PCs 95% chance of winning, you can give them 50% chance of winning (or less!) without worry.

Jay R
2016-09-16, 12:28 PM
I think that PC death needs to be an ever-present danger. But actual death should be extremely rare.

Dying is a real possibility in my games, but almost never happens. If I had a TPK (I never have), then they would probably wake up chained to the oars of a ship.

Once, as a player, I had to remove another player's PC from the game - at least for the rest of the session. I'd already knocked him unconscious, but knew that if I left him tied up or locked up, he would escape and stop me. I discussed with the DM that the most tactically correct thing for me to do was to kill him (in front of the player, of course). Then I shanghaied him. I sold him to a ship sailing away. He escaped, of course, but still couldn't return to where we were until that adventure was over.