Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, I am actually not THAT attached to a PC. I mean, I've played 1000's of characters in RPGs. I would say its more like, say, you were trying to forge a fine sword. You go through a bunch of steps, and you get to a certain point, and you screw it up. Well, you're going to go back and start over, but there's probably a moment of frisson, that point where the whole mental model of what you were doing crumbles. It is just, after all, a PC.

But in something like our BitD game, the death of a PC would just be weird. Its hard to work out where you go with that. I mean, some deaths might be pretty cool, but it is not a game where you could easily just bring in another PC, it would definitely change the direction and content. It might well work out OK, but it is pretty weird to think of something like that being just random. I would kinda want to have fun with it at least! "Some Bluecoat gunned you down in a back ally" probably doesn't cut it.

And that sounds like a lot of fun, but in a game like D&D it is absolutely not what I want. Totally cool in a game like Blades In The Dark (as I understand the game).

 

[Lanefan]

Also, in the sorts of campaign I play, there is no "larger story". The PCs are the main characters of the story.

At the moment. Two years and twelve adventures down the road the party lineup might have ship-of-Theseus-ed its way into a complete turnover, and at that point those are the main characters in what is still the same (emergent) story!

If they were all to die, it'd be a different campaign entirely. I suspect this is another major difference between us.

Characters A,B,C,D and E start the campaign.

During adventure 1, A dies and B gets captured, replaced by F and G.
Adventure 2 starts with C,D,E,F,G. E dies, B gets rescued, H replaces E.
Adventure 3 starts with B,C,D,F,G,H. C dies; player turnover sees F retire and I join.
Adventure 4 starts with B,D,G,H,I. G dies, replaced by J. H and I split off to form their own party, replaced by K and L here.
Adventure 5 starts with B,D,J,K,L. D and J die, replaced by M and N.
Adventure 6 starts with B,K,L,M,N. B dies, replaced by H and I, who return.

And so, adventure 7 starts with H,I,K,L,M,N. At this point the whole lineup has turned over at least once, and in some cases twice; yet there's no question that it's still the same story and still the same campaign.

And in case you think the above is a ridiculous example just to prove a point, I'll lob this in: I've DMed parties that had more turnover than this within a single adventure.

 

[Lanefan]

They have trouble making a new one, due to how much they invested in the prior one. People often get attached to a character, and losing it is then a major thing.

Which is part of why I discourage players from growing attached to their characters. Yes, in the moment you and the character are ideally one and the same, but at the same time, maintain the bigger-picture ability to make a clean break and move on if-when that character for whatever reason can no longer be played.

"The story," they were invested in was the story of their character in the campaign, not the campaign as a whole.

Except given that the story of the campaign as a whole is and must be* bigger than the story of any individual character** I put that down as a player issue.

* - unless the group is playing out a campaign that is the story of one character specifically, with all the other PCs there only as support; which while certainly a valid way to play is also a serious outlier.
** - exception: DM+single-player games where there's only one PC.

A new character is not, for them, a continuation of the old story, but a new story, that is calling for a new investment from them. Just like you can't swap in a new person for a friend who has left, some can't just swap in a new character. They effectively need to build a new relationship before the game experience is anywhere near equivalent.

Be emotional as a character; be dispassionate as a player.

 

[Lanefan]

But, as I mentioned to someone else - the player is often not invested in "the game's story" overall. They were invested in their character's story in the game.

A player can't or won't look beyond their own character(s) and see the bigger picture of the campaign isn't someone I want to game with, be it as DM or fellow player.

You referred to loss of "your playing piece" upthread. Imagine, for a moment, that the character isn't "a playing piece". It is something with more emotional attachment than that.

Yeah, but it often isn't like misplacing a pawn from a plastic chess set you found in the closet. It can be more like misplacing the hand-carved knight you always favored from the chess set your grandfather gave you for your first chess club tournament win. You'll get over it, but you aren't just going to slap any old other piece in there immediately, either.

Let's just say my experiences with players getting (too) attached to their characters are entirely negative, and leave it there.

 

[pemerton]

I am speaking generally, yes. In the sort of dangerous situation commonly faced by adventurers, where death should be a possibility, I want it to be.

Does that mean you don't use the AC & hp mechanic to resolve a single crossbow bolt shot at a 3rd level fighter on full hp?

 

[Lanefan]

Here is the post to which you are replying:

Suppose the thing you did was to support a coup. And the coup fails. And now you're banished - and have probably lost much of your wealth and fame in the process. Why would you not care?​

Your reply strikes me as an utter non-sequitur. It appears to me that many revolutionaries are "ready to pay the price" in the sense that a failed attempt at revolution can lead to exile, death, imprisonment etc, they are aware of this, and they proceed regardless. But most of these failed revolutionaries also care, in that (i) they would prefer not to suffer those losses, and (ii) they would prefer their revolution to succeed rather than fail.

Obviously. But in the scenario presented it did fail, and now I-as-revolutionary have to square with that. I mean, I suppose I could just go and throw myself on the king's justice (and thus at the meta-level almost certainly roleplay my PC out of the game either through it being executed or having to serve a lengthy jail sentence). Or, I could go and hide somewhere and bemoan my sorry fate until the cows come home (meta: great for the dramatic roleplay side but not very group-oriented and boring as hell after the first ten minutes). Or, I could find a way to gather a group around myself and set off for faraway lands; and after we adventure our little faces off over there and get stinkin' rich in the process, come back and try this revolution business again (meta: provide both the DM and the other players with something to grab for out of this failed revolution story).

There are so many assumptions built into this it's hard to know how to start unpacking them.

Here are the two obvious ones: that the character has no emotional connection to the coup or its cause; and that the character has no emotional connection to their homeland. Again, history is replete with counter-examples to those two assumptions, and so there is no reason why those assumptions should be true in RPGing.

Or the character has great emotional connection and is roleplayed as burying that emotion deep; wich from the outside observer's view would produce about the same characterizations as a result.

This is a spurious distinction, or at least a gerrymandered one. If you define failure = character death (or similar loss of the player's playing piece then by definition other sorts of loss or setback do not constitute failures. But so what? Why is your definition of failure of any interest? What does it actually tell us about the nature of RPGing, or the nature of stakes in fiction? My suggestion is that it tells us nothing about either.

It tells me a lot about the nature of the stakes and how to approach them: if the stakes are a mere setback for the character, that's considerably less to worry about than if the stakes are an outright failure and-or inability for that character's career to continue.

In @Lanefan's terms, then, there is no failure here as the new character can continue to pursue the same goals. (And in a traditional D&D game where the players play their PCs as a party pursuing the opportunities for adventure provided by the GM, typically this is exactly what will happen.)

And in this you are correct, in that the primary goals being pursued are those of the party as a whole (which in party play strikes me as being the point of the exercise anyway). If all a player cares about is the goals etc. of an individual character, why play in a party-based game or system?

 

[S'mon]

Is a problem with emulating a lot of popular fiction using many ttRPGs

What are you trying to emulate? The experience of being a character in that popular fiction? The experience of watching (or creating) that popular fiction?

IME it's usually the former. If you are emulating the experience of being Indiana Jones - Indy knows he is highly competent, he does NOT know he's not going to die. Same with Han Solo. If your goal is to emulate the experience of being characters like these in their fictional universes, IMO you cannot give them total plot immunity.

 

[Lanefan]

One thing that all stories depend upon is contrivance, in the sense of non-random concatenations of events. For instance, characters turn up "at the appropriate time", or sequences of events unfold so as to provide interwoven opportunities for realisation, catharsis etc. How RPGing produces these contrivances can vary - eg it can be GM side, player-side, both (independently of one another) or both (cooperative). It can be linked to resolution mechanics, or left "free-floating". One element of these contrivances is the endurance, despite sometimes even severe physical suffering, of the protagonist at least until some sort of climax occurs.

And in any media, it doesn't take much for those contrivances to pull me out of the story; coincidence can only explain so much and after that, it just becomes absurd.

That said, there's a few specific places in RPGing where absudr degrees of contrivance are IMO not only acceptable, but highly useful; the most common of which is getting a new PC into the game/party/scene.

Therefore, when I read a post from someone who is happy with hit points but rejects metacurrency and/or story contrivances, what I infer is that they are playing a RPG in which story and drama do not figure prominently, in which PCs are not thought of first and foremost as protagonists, and in which the main goal of play, from the player side, is to struggle against obstacles which have little meaning beyond "being there", and which pose no profound threat other than having to start over (eg with a new character). In the case of posters like @Lanefan and @bloodtide, this impression is reinforced by the suggestion that players won't care about the fiction as long as they still have their playing piece available to them.

I think there's a bit of misrepresentation in there.

Drama doesn't figure much in our games, this is true; mostly because none of us are really interested in all the angst etc. that comes with that territory But it does often arise in one way: romances etc. between PCs or between PCs and NPCs.

But story does. And the PCs are first and foremost the protagonists. BUT: here's the difference: the PCs are the protagonists not in themselves, but as the party they comprise; and the story that figures prominently is the story of the party as a whole.

This goes, at least in part, to the issue of "obstacles" that I mentioned above.

Every time the play of the game makes the table care about and focus on some bit of fiction that does not speak to what is at stake, and every time it makes the table engage in a mechanical process whose connection to what is at stake is opaque at best, it distracts from the stuff that we (ostensibly) care about and therefore makes it harder to maintain our caring about it.

Sometimes it becomes difficult to see the forest for all the trees trying to whack you in the face, yes. And that's fine.

Here are some things that D&D tends to make participants care about, even though it typically won't speak to things that are at stake: how much time has passed (spell durations, recovery cycles, etc); how much distance has been traversed or how far things are from one another (movement rates, spell ranges, etc); whose turn it is (initiative cycles in combat); how frequently an ability can be used (spells are the stand-out here); tallies of numbers (eg hit points) whose connection to the fiction is often tenuous at best; etc.

Which kind of mirrors the real world. What's at stake might be making your store sales goal for the month of March or else you get demoted, but what you care about right now is that the store's toilet has backed up and everyone including you is busy trying to deal with that. Not everything has to speak to the main goal or stakes.

D&D also tends to have many player-side abilities whose impact on the fiction is independent of what is at stake. This can mean that stuff that is high stakes resolves very easily (anti-climax) or stuff that is low-stakes is very challenging (at the table, in the fiction, or both) to resolve.

The former often manifests as an unexpectedly easy player-side win either due to good luck or good planning, and I'm cool with that. The latter often manifests as appearing to be low statkes in the here and now but in fact being just a part of a much higher-stakes situation.

For example: in a typical dungeon crawl there might be (depending on which route the party takes and-or how thoroughly they decide to clean the place out) something like 5 to 15 minor combats or encounters, each of whcih individually is pretty low stakes but when taken in aggregate are more significant, in that the stakes of aggregate success is to earn the right to take on the BBEG at the end.

 

[Lanefan]

I mentioned what I thought were some more exciting ways to lose wealth - eg being banished from one's homeland due to political changes of fortune.

How does that not make sense in the setting? How is losing your wealth due to a dragon's breath more realistic - for a start, that posits that all or most of the character's wealth is stuff that they are wearing and carrying, and how is that realistic?

It's realistic in the setting, in some games anyway, for two reasons:

One: most of a PC's wealth is going to go into buying, commissioning, or otherwise acquiring magic items; most of which will stay with the PC as odds are high those items are intended to help that PC be a better adventurer..
Two: unless a party or PC has a secure home base or unless the setting has a secure banking system that doesn't rip you off (not something I'm accustomed to), the safest place for a PC's wealth is usually with the PC and party.

In the real world the Paris salons of the 1920s included among their attendees White Russians in exile. Some of these people has lost all or most of their wealth due to their flight. None of them ever lost their wealth due to a lightning bolt spell! So I'm not sure how the latter is more realistic than the former.

Not sure how many people have ever been able to cast Lightning Bolt spells in Russia, but in many RPG settings Lightning Bolt spells are a known hazard.

 

[S'mon]

The idea that RPGing, even FRPGing, is "pointless" if the PCs can't die is just wrong. Fiction in other media doesn't depend upon the prospect of death to generate drama and tension. RPGing doesn't need to either.

You can have Narrativist play without the possibility of PC death. The game addresses some Dramatic Premise. Or you can have some light Dramatist story-creation type game without the possibility of PC death: let's cooperate to create something that looks like a Prince Valiant adventure.

What you can't do IMO is create the experience of 'being Conan' in a Conanesque adventure, if the player playing Conan knows his PC can't die. In this kind of situation I find the possibility of character death vital for immersion.