Do players want challenging games, with a real chance of death?

[Emberashh]

I think its a common saying that death is typically the least interesting outcome. I think that tends to stem from death being more or less a break in the gameplay loop rather than just another part of it.

Games that do the souls-like thing of making death a part of the loop, as well as games that do afterlife mechanics (typically with resurrection as part of it), provide a decent enough way to work around that issue.

But I wonder if there's a way to do conventional die-and-start over in a way that works better than how its conventionally done.

From my perspective, while its usually true that death is uninteresting for the player whose character died, I've observed it isn't always the case for everyone else in the party. Them being able to experience grief, guilt, regret, etc and integrate them into their RP is very interesting but it tends to lose its bite if death isn't ever risked, or worse yet is too easily reversed.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I was pleased with a pickup-game I ran at a convention in the 1980s, for a bunch of level 1-2 OD&D and AD&D1e characters I'd never seen before. Their fight against a young green dragon ended in victory with only one PC still standing but no characters dead.

There's a dynamic a fair number of people seem to want where they want a sense of risk but not the reality. There's a couple ways to produce that, of varying degrees of acceptability.

 

[Wolfpack48]

Dying with meaning or for a heroic end is interesting.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Dying with meaning or for a heroic end is interesting.

It beats living on your knees.

 

[Jd Smith1]

How you play 5e is the problem then. Me and other dms i run with have never ran 5e in the eay you describe. And if you arent on itch.io and not looking at the new ks stuff coming out, you really dont know what the wider hobby is like now.

Because ichi is where its at? Sales would suggest the opposite.

So you run 5e with perma-death, no death saving throws, and a cap on HP?

 

[Jd Smith1]

Dying with meaning or for a heroic end is interesting.

You mean like a suicide bomber?

One you see a few violent deaths in RL, you come to realize that there's no meaning in the act of dying.

 

[ismrpg]

I think its a common saying that death is typically the least interesting outcome. I think that tends to stem from death being more or less a break in the gameplay loop rather than just another part of it.

Games that do the souls-like thing of making death a part of the loop, as well as games that do afterlife mechanics (typically with resurrection as part of it), provide a decent enough way to work around that issue.

But I wonder if there's a way to do conventional die-and-start over in a way that works better than how its conventionally done.

From my perspective, while its usually true that death is uninteresting for the player whose character died, I've observed it isn't always the case for everyone else in the party. Them being able to experience grief, guilt, regret, etc and integrate them into their RP is very interesting but it tends to lose its bite if death isn't ever risked, or worse yet is too easily reversed.

I like the idea of exploring the question you pose. Perhaps for another thread but hearing about ideas and concepts that give death meaning but without some of the problems. Thanks for the thoughts.

 

[Emberashh]

I like the idea of exploring the question you pose. Perhaps for another thread but hearing about ideas and concepts that give death meaning but without some of the problems. Thanks for the thoughts.

Its something I've been considering in particular as I start pondering certain aspects of my own game. One avenue for a fundamentally interesting "true death" is the idea of families and legacies.

I think part of the overall "Bloodline" mechanics in my game, my take on "Race", is going to end up diving into what the name implies, forging your own bloodlines. It'd probably be strongest between conventional Players but I think even with NPCs it'd be an okay way to go. Bloodlines would be another way to build up and strengthen other aspects of the game like Domains or Settlements, and in this context where death is very possible and presumably irreversible, it'd also make a game out of building up "spare" characters that the player can become attached to over time.

While I'm a bit nebulous on the mechanisms of getting started (whether or not to gamify romance and all that), I think the idea makes sense. Over in video game land, Bannerlord has a similar "Clan" system to what I'd envision, where your kids can be raised up as your own fiercely loyal vassals and companions, and if you enable death you as Player can hop into one of your kids as your new character. It creates a very rudimentary story machine if you can commit to it over a long period, as your original characters descendants continue to wage wars long after you got stabbed to death.

I haven't played it, but IIRC, Pendragon does something similar. Both serve as solid examples of how to make a character's death have some impact that goes beyond just their immediate loss.

In either case, the only lacking thing is making the death itself interesting, which I think would be important only so it isn't so anticlimactic if it happens. I can't remember which game it was, but there was the idea where you could go out with a bang, doing some crazy damage or some such for a turn but then you keel over. That'd certainly fit the bill for making the death fun, at least.

And in terms of practicality, something like this begs for easy to make characters if we want to maintain a similar death possibility across the entire game rather than just late game.

In the early game you'd most likely be starting over, but with survival over time you'll build up your Bloodline, and then you're able to stat, and potentially even play as many different characters, making it worthwhile to really stick with the same campaign over a very long period, simply because you'd be building up all that history, and because it'd be easy to not have the game get stale as you can always just swap out characters or even retire them.

And in turn, all of this provides a lot of narrative fodder. Imagine for example you've had a campaign going, and the players have all built up substantial bloodlines, but then one player's character inadvertently makes an enemy out of a big bad, who vows to end their bloodline. And imagine if they succeed! Even partially! A lot of juice there, and you wouldn't need to force it if the overall system can support all of these systemic interactions compounding over time.

 

[Wolfpack48]

You mean like a suicide bomber?

One you see a few violent deaths in RL, you come to realize that there's no meaning in the act of dying.

I was thinking more along the lines of saving your friends, family, your clan, the world, anything you believe in given a threat that can be averted through your act of heroism. It's giving meaning to that death. Random nihilistic death is indeed uninteresting and depressing.

 

[Celebrim]

I am of the opinion that death is the worst mechanic except for all the other options that you have.

I hate killing PC's. You spend a hundred hours or more building up that character's story and relationship with the world and then suddenly they die some silly meaningless death and no one enjoys it and all these story threads suddenly come to a dead end. You could argue that's realistic but realism alone is in my experience never enough to justify a mechanic. And players of course hate PC death for all those reasons and then some. It's like playing MtG and ripping up one of your cards when you lose. When you really lose a playing piece, it is a lost investment.

I do a lot to try to make it hard to die in my games because it does indeed suck. I almost always use some meta currency that amounts to a "get out of death" card, justified by some aspect of the universe being with the PCs and wanting them to succeed - the Force, the gods, or whatever. Nonetheless, PC's still die and sometimes with frightening regularity.

The trouble is the players don't want their characters to die but they also want to be in heroic action filled stories. This means that inevitably they want to put themselves into situations where death is a highly plausible and perhaps even expected result. In the stories, the heroes always make the choices that put them in situations to survive and succeed and live, and with the metacurrency and other advantages the PC's are given if the players make the right choices chances are they will succeed and live. But the trouble is that players aren't literary heroes and they make the wrong choices either because of failures of judgment or because of a lack of information.

And as collective and joint story tellers of this story, this raises a serious problem. If the players put themselves into situations where death is the plausible, logical, and expected result, how can we maintain the integrity of the story if death never occurs? If the heroes save themselves by their wits and resources then fine, but what if they don't? The first time the universe gives them a way out that's fine, but at some point being saved by something other than their wits or resources having the universe rescue them from their position means that even if they win or succeed they've really ceased to be the protagonists anyway. If the universe won't let the PC's fail, well then the meaning of the story is that the PCs are only tools in the hands of greater powers, continually failing only to be saved by the god in the machine. If the players don't want that to be what their story is about, if they don't want plot protection, if they don't want me the GM being the actual protagonist of the story, then they have to accept that death is a reasonable consequence in some situations because the alternative is ruining the story.