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  1. - Top - End - #1
    Halfling in the Playground
     
    Beholder

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    Feb 2019

    Default Designing games with high-mortality

    I'm thinking about working on a horror style game, a result of which may be a high PC mortality rate. How do other games deal with this, and how would you deal with it? Do you just assume that the player of a dead character just leaves (assuming no replacement characters) or continues to play through a different role in the game? If the second, what kind of role? What good options might there be to limit players dying before the final act of the adventure? Do you have any other thoughts that may be useful?

    Thanks in advance.

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    Orc in the Playground
     
    ElfRangerGuy

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    Default Re: Designing games with high-mortality

    Possibly the 'death' mechanic institutes some kind of set back. Something that is party wide, possibly coming into play only at the final act. At least at that point it would be a case of 'we all lose together' so that players are not left sitting at the table bored.

    In conjunction with that or separately you could have a stable of NPC's that have the 'job' of dying in place of the party members at least for the first few deaths. Their scream draws the attention of the stalking monster so they grab him first, or she pushes you out of the way of the trap and gets impaled instead of you. That kind of thing. Something like that would emphasize the high mortality but also let players stay around longer, at least until the NPC's are gone...
    You surrender after you're dead. Lan Mandragoran

  3. - Top - End - #3
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    WolfInSheepsClothing

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    Default Re: Designing games with high-mortality

    Quote Originally Posted by notXanathar View Post
    I'm thinking about working on a horror style game, a result of which may be a high PC mortality rate. How do other games deal with this, and how would you deal with it? Do you just assume that the player of a dead character just leaves (assuming no replacement characters) or continues to play through a different role in the game? If the second, what kind of role? What good options might there be to limit players dying before the final act of the adventure? Do you have any other thoughts that may be useful?

    Thanks in advance.
    I ran a game based on WWI-style trench warfare (but with magic instead of artillary) and I really wanted to hammer home the horror of it. I told my players from the start that the campaign would be lethal, and as such rather than have them come up with detailed background for their PCs (who were unlikely to make it through even the first encounter) each would would instead invent a minor nation which is involved in this war, and their characters would each be raw recruits from said nation. Whenever a PC died, the next round they would simply come to inhabit one of the other faceless multitude of allied NPC soldiers nearby them.

    The first encounter saw the enemy charge their trenches, launching fireballs at randomly selected positions and killing scores in one burst, lobbing "skeleton bombs" behind their lines (modified bags of holding packed with 20 skeletons each, engineered to invert the bag and release the skeletons on impact) as expected, the PCs really had no chance and some players lost a character every round.

    Once the first encounter was over the players were free to write the backstory for whatever surviving PC they were left with, and begin to become attached to them as characters as the campaign settled into slightly more survivable storytelling.

  4. - Top - End - #4
    Dwarf in the Playground
     
    NecromancerGuy

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    Default Re: Designing games with high-mortality

    The standard way to handle high mortality is to allow players to bring in new characters frequently, possibly multiple times per session. That's not what I'd recommend for horror games though: horror often takes place in isolated locations where new characters showing up would break immersion, and horror benefits from death (and other setbacks) being lasting and impactful. Showing up to a game with a stack of character sheets implies a certain sort of callousness that doesn't sit well with horror.

    Another solution would be to have dead characters remain with the party "in spirit," and assist the surviving members to a limited extent by granting bonuses that are reflections of the class features that those characters had while alive. For example, fighters might be able to give any character the effect of one feat for one round per encounter. This would require a fair amount of homebrewing.

    Yet another solution would be to have players whose characters are on the other side of death move themselves to the other side of the DM screen, where they each help the DM by controlling monsters. That way, the remaining players face a growing number of opponents physically at the table as well as in-game. It's a fairly common trope for horror to have characters face the ghosts or zombies of their departed companions, and having them played by the players of those companions could be extra-creepy.

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    Colossus in the Playground
     
    Segev's Avatar

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    Default Re: Designing games with high-mortality

    How much of "the horror game" do you have already planned out? Do you know what your horror is, and how it kills?

    One way to handle it would be a sort of existential "you don't know you're dead" horror: Either they keep moving after dying wtihout realizing it, or their ghosts are solid enough to be deceptive to themselves and others. Play it straight for the most part, but don't tell players concrete facts about how dead they are or are not. Have a mechanic for K.O.ing without killing, and have that fade to black on characters who are K.O.'d. They wake up later, ready for the next scene. And...even if they die...they wake up later, ready for the next scene. If you go with it being their ghost, you can have part of the horror later on being discovering their own bodies and realizing they're already dead.

    By doing this, even after they die, they fear death, and can be K.O.'d (even unto death).

    Depending on how much you want to instill a creeping dread, you can have a degeneration mechanic that makes the dead characters feel worse and worse as time goes on. Or you could have it affect the living characters, instead. Maybe its a permanent (for the duration of the game, anyway; this is obviously a one-shot concept) wounds thing, so they get more and more hurt from injury. When they die, the permanent wounds stop but something else starts afflicting them. Try to keep the difference subtle, and ideally they won't realize there's a correlation between ceasing to suffer permanent wounds from getting injured and the onset of random afflictions.

    Wait for them to get cocky about how the DM isn't "letting them die" and the like to show them the first body of one of those who did die.

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    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    Breccia's Avatar

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    Default Re: Designing games with high-mortality

    Quote Originally Posted by notXanathar View Post
    Do you just assume that the player of a dead character just leaves (assuming no replacement characters)
    Only in a one-shot.

    I know you're trying to run a horror game, and the fear of meaningful death/loss is pretty common. But for good gameplay, sometimes you have to sacrifice some realism. Nobody wants to be Boromir'd and watch the rest of the campaign while having nothing to do. They'll leave.

    One option is to have dead PCs start playing villains or monsters.

  7. - Top - End - #7
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    Breccia's Avatar

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    Default Re: Designing games with high-mortality

    Quote Originally Posted by Damon_Tor View Post
    Once the first encounter was over the players were free to write the backstory for whatever surviving PC they were left with, and begin to become attached to them as characters as the campaign settled into slightly more survivable storytelling.
    In or out of the context of this thread, I love this setup.

  8. - Top - End - #8
    Titan in the Playground
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    Default Re: Designing games with high-mortality

    General thoughts from playing in one high mortality game.

    If the mortality is too high, the sense of horror surprisingly diminishes. If you only think of your character as a piece on the board that is going to be killed, the tension and fear of death plummets.

    To this end, there now becomes a tension where you want death as a threat, but also want to keep the player invested in their character.

    In one game of high mortality I played, you gained experience that would partially carry over to your replacements. The game itself didn’t use levels but for ease of explanation, let’s say you got to level 3 before your character died, then your replacement character would start with enough bonuses that you’re effectively level 2 and all future replacements can only go up from there.

    I’d suggest a slightly different system. Where replacements effective level (or skills or boons or whatever) is based off of how long lived and effective their last character was. So the players are encouraged to keep their characters surviving and performing whatever tasks the game wants them to do (ex. Perhaps they get an additional boon based off of each clue they find or creepy tome they open). Trying to keep them alive helps the player grow attached. But they still effectively have one strong back up character in case they lose them due to the high mortality of the game.

    I’d also probably make part of character creation that you have to give your character some sort of traits/phobias and goals, with the stated point that this helps the GM design the campaign around horrifying these characters but the actual goal is to make your players actually roleplay their character instead of again just seeing them as expendable pieces which can really lower the horror potential.

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    Ogre in the Playground
     
    Planetar

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    Default Re: Designing games with high-mortality

    If you aim at a high mortality game (which is far from the only way to do horror), here are few advices:
    You want to control the session so that there is only two group of scenes where character are likely to die.

    One at the end of the scenario, as a big finale. Deaths during the finale are usually not that much an issue, as the players will not be waiting for long, and observing the resolution of the scenario should be interesting enough.

    One at beginning/middle of the scenario, where you a group of NPCs ready as replacements for the dead players (cops?).

    Outside of those two moments, you want to avoid death, and either
    (a) Go for non-death horrors (mutilation, madness like hallucinations, etc)
    (b) Accelerate the scenario to reach almost immediately the moment when replacement characters can arrive, or the finale => it is better to have a session shorter than expected, but intense and interesting all along, rather than over-extending a session where one or more players are already out.

    If you aim for a campaign rather than a single game, you will need to significantly reduce mortality, otherwise death might lose its meaning. You can get along with playing family members that went to avenge the death, but you can only get that far before it becomes ridiculous and undermine the tone.

  10. - Top - End - #10
    Ogre in the Playground
     
    WolfInSheepsClothing

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    Default Re: Designing games with high-mortality

    You could also come up with a variety of scenarios where the players keep playing even after they die. Vampires come to mind here.

    Intellect Devourers or Dybbuks or something similar might also work. In a campaign I played a while back a PC got replaced by an intellect devourerer and I decided the best way to handle this was to allow the player to keep playing, just with the secret knowledge that he was now an intellect devourerer piloting his old character around. He was a spy for BBEG for a while and when it became clear one of them was a traitor things absolutely took a horror turn when I instructed the PC-turned-devourer to lock the party inside their own base and eliminate them.

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    Dwarf in the Playground
     
    ClericGuy

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    Default Re: Designing games with high-mortality

    My DM liked to kill the PCs. We could bring people back, but it came at a cost. The first time it would just be an RP thing, like preferring the dark or having severe insomnia. The second time would be a mechanical thing, like having a hard time seeing in daylight the way Drow do. The third time would be serious, like wisdom or intelligence penalties or always having a point of exhaustion. You don't get to come back a fourth time.

    He also gave us a wound at half health and a scar every time HP hit zero. Like losing a limb or an eye. It really made us think about what we were doing and made us spend a lot of time running away from crazy monsters instead of trying to blast our way through. That kind of thing really pushes the run and hide, prey-type instinct that you need for horror stories.

    It was also really fun to RP a crew of hardened adventurers with missing limbs, severe deformities, and a smorgasbord of mental health issues trying to navigate a quiet village or a royal court. It also explained why every tavern owner was a badass former adventurer; the smart ones get out while they can. And it kept us from going murder-hobo because one travelling merchant with a knife might get lucky and take somebody's fingers. Overall, adding those permanent effects made the game more slow-paced and RP focused. Highly recommended.
    Last edited by SandyAndy; 2021-06-30 at 12:03 PM. Reason: Fixing a word

  12. - Top - End - #12
    Troll in the Playground
     
    Lacco's Avatar

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    Default Re: Designing games with high-mortality

    I would also suggest looking at this thread from long, long time ago.

    Managing High Lethality Games

    EDIT: Oh, there was a lot of unnecessary stuff there...
    Last edited by Lacco; 2021-06-30 at 02:19 PM.
    Call me Laco or Ladislav (if you need to be formal). Avatar comes from the talented linklele.
    Formerly GMing: Riddle of Steel: Soldiers of Fortune

    Quote Originally Posted by Kol Korran View Post
    Instead of having an adventure, from which a cool unexpected story may rise, you had a story, with an adventure built and designed to enable the story, but also ensure (or close to ensure) it happens.

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