Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[Thomas Shey]

Tales From the Loop is an RPG about kids in a strange 1980s that never was. The rules of the game are that the player-characters cannot die. It would be bending the rules to say that they can.

Now you know of a game where the PCs cannot die. This is also not the only one, just an example where it is explicitly a rule. So stop saying it's true of all RPGs.

Feel free to say "It's true of the one RPG I play" but stop assuming that's the only game, or that other people are incapable of coming up with meaningful stakes beyond character death.

And just to be specific, in an example from the genre I was referring to, Prowlers and Paragons Unlimited Edition only has death as an optional rule, and one only expected to be used for certain subgenres.

 

[Lanefan]

It is, now let's take the example of my AD&D ranger character. At level one he sets out with his friends to make their fortune. Demogorgon worshipers murder the whole party except him. Do I just shake my head and go find some new PCs to adventure with? No! These jerks murdered my friends.

The character spends the next 10 years (of actual time) tracking them all down, destroying them, their cult, other demons, and finally Demogorgon itself. In the process he becomes totally twisted by his obsession until he's barely distinguishable from a demon himself.

Fine for you (and a cool story) but what about the other players - what did they get to do in the meantime?

What good would dying partway through that story be? The GM in that game totally understood that. Not that death was totally off the table I guess, but pointless death, snuffed by some random orc? Heck no! The character's story was too good to waste like that!

@bloodtide is right in this much: the moment a story gets too good to lose, there's a problem. This more commonly arises as a GM issue, frequently leading to railroads and-or trampling of player agency as the GM tries to stick to a "too good" story; but this shows it can be a player-side issue as well.

 

[The Shadow]

That last one is EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED. Did I win? The character thinks so, everyone else is SLIGHTLY less sure...

It... It didn't sound like one of his friends persuaded him from his destructive path with tears...

 

[Thomas Shey]

Huh. Fate, which is my go-to example, doesn't exactly force things to go wrong for the characters. It's more that bad die-rolls are inevitable in the long run, in which case one must either "succeed at a cost" or else take one's lumps. Of course, Compels can bring about bad situations, but in areas you signed up for, so to speak. (And reward you with precious Fate points!)

I suspect that's the distinction he's making though; to be effective in Fate, you pretty much have to get Fate points from somewhere, which means in practice things have to go "wrong" at least some of the time. So you can't really strive toward unmixed success and expect to get there; it doesn't, perhaps, put its thumb on the scale the way PbtA games do, but its going to be very hard to get strong successes (and the die system routinely used is flat enough this is very noticable) unless you're willing to accept some failures. Some games will at least allow you to try to play in a fashion where that's possible, with careful and thoughtful play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But it's not just "random encounters" it's all encounters except that once a year ultra rare "Shakespearean tragedy kind of way". So that does that does basically apply to all encounters. And it's up to the player and DM to build up an encounter: you can't fight the evil lich on the edge of the cliff minutes before midnight when the lich will summon undead-chtoolu, UNLESS you take the time to build that and plan and play it all out.

Oh yes you can! That is exactly what games like Blades in the Dark DO! I mean, its not a Cthulhu genre game, but it is QUITE possible for a player to create an analogous sort of scenario. It will take a LOT of scenes/scores and it will probably not be something that is planned exactly from day one, but it will be an organic outgrowth of the forces acting on the PC, the player's imagination, etc.

I'm on the side that anything including chracter death is possible. The poster is on the other side that gives the player character plot armor.


YES it is, THIS is exactly what it is: The character MUST do the pre written plot. Just like a movie or TV show.

Though sure, it's different then the "solo DM pre written plot" : It's worse. It's either the PLAYERS pre written plot or the DM/Players pre written plot. Any way it's a pre written plot, and all are bad.

There is a THIRD OPTION, which is to play to find out what dramatic and exciting things actually happen. And beyond that, to synthesize that story out of character motivations, participant imagination, spur-of-the-moment improvisation, etc. Like in a BitD game, there IS no plan, at all. The GM doesn't have one, the players probably don't have one, it just EMERGES out of play. That's how the ranger thing was too, nobody planned it, nobody knew where it was going, I just played the character true to a certain (albeit extreme and fairly one-dimensional over all) concept that just came from random dice and happenstance at first. These games are VERY organic.

 

[The Shadow]

Fine for you (and a cool story) but what about the other players - what did they get to do in the meantime?

I'm quite sure they had their own plots going on. If they felt they were being overshadowed by the ranger, I certainly hope they spoke up. But in the sort of group that does this kind of thing, it's pretty much taken for granted that everyone has their own subplots. (They might not be as worldshaking as killing Demogorgon, but so what?)

@bloodtide is right in this much: the moment a story gets too good to lose, there's a problem. This more commonly arises as a GM issue, frequently leading to railroads and-or trampling of player agency as the GM tries to stick to a "too good" story; but this shows it can be a player-side issue as well.

You think this is a problem because, like @bloodtide, you aren't grasping what we're saying. There is no railroad here. None.

 

[The Shadow]

I suspect that's the distinction he's making though; to be effective in Fate, you pretty much have to get Fate points from somewhere, which means in practice things have to go "wrong" at least some of the time. So you can't really strive toward unmixed success and expect to get there; it doesn't, perhaps, put its thumb on the scale the way PbtA games do, but its going to be very hard to get strong successes (and the die system routinely used is flat enough this is very noticable) unless you're willing to accept some failures. Some games will at least allow you to try to play in a fashion where that's possible, with careful and thoughtful play.

Yes, we eventually resolved that. I agree that if one wants a record of unbroken success through superior planning, Fate is probably not going to be a satisfactory game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm usually in that camp too as a player.

I wonder if some people on here view hit points as having properties not too far from meta currency

Its certainly at least got a leg in each camp.

• It doesn't really map to something exactly in the game world, unlike, say encumberence in pounds or movement speed .
• You can spend it for doing things. "I've got 180hp, so I cannonball off of the 40 foot cliff to the road below to catch up to them."

I can even imagine some on here saying HP annoy them more than meta-currencies because it tries to act like it has some interpretability but doesn't narrate into the game naturally in many cases. (Or really at all by RAW?).

That would be me. I can live with it these days, but I much prefer a fairly realistic wounding type system with a layer of metacurrancy you can throw between it and danger than something as vague and wishy-washy as D&D style hits.

 

[Lanefan]

This is the exact dichotomy we're talking about! You're assuming that if the character won't die meaninglessly to any random orc, that therefore he will succeed in everything he does!

The dichotomy is that the character can either die in play or it can't. Whether or not the character succeeds in its goals is a different equation.

If it can't die then it can't die, end of argument.

But if it can die against one thing then - assuming a good-faith neutral-arbiter GM who lets the dice fall where they may - the whims of random chance dictate there's a possibility, however small, of it dying any time it puts itself at risk. And sometimes, like it or not, the whims of random chance are just gonna insist on having their say.

To have it that the character can die only in certain dramatically-appropriate scenes/situations but not in other more mundane scenarios tells me there's a problem with both internal campaign/setting consistency and willingness to honour die rolls; the exception, of course, being in-fiction set-ups where the character's fate has somehow been determined in advance and you're playing out the route it takes to get there.

 

[Lanefan]

As any sort of argument for such shallow RP somehow NOT being shallow, don't buy it.

Shallow RP, huh.

Dismissiveness duly noted.