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Do players want challenging games, with a real chance of death?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9217338" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I am of the opinion that death is the worst mechanic except for all the other options that you have. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 9217338, member: 4937"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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