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<blockquote data-quote="Edgar Ironpelt" data-source="post: 8916242" data-attributes="member: 32075">And I'm the opposite. I'm an old-school dissident who has embraced that &quot;social contract&quot; and who will kit-bash like hell to eliminate elements that cut against that social contract in any of the old or old-style rule sets I've run. Only they were often bright shiny new systems when I first ran or played them. (I started back in 1978.) In fact, I could lay claim to being (in at least a minor way) one of the old-school rebels against the Old Ways who helped establish that social contract in the first place.I've hated the idea of &quot;easy character death&quot; for decades, and I'm not going to change now. What I want is for the PCs to be the major characters in the story, not secondary characters or redshirts. I want the PCs to be characters &quot;whose life is charmed, or else fate is sparing him for some other end.&quot; Even if a PC does die, &quot;like Boromir in Lord of the Rings,&quot; I want the fun of that PC having years and years of exciting adventures while not-dying, first.Also, I don't agree that a PC has 'earned' his heroism just because his player got lucky (or failed to get unlucky) with the dice, nor that a PC who dies from bad unlucky die rolls has 'earned' his ignoble death.IMHO, the place to accept and embrace character death in the service of culturing an emergent Story is as a GM, accepting and embracing that one's NPCs and monsters will lose and lose and die and die. Now it is really annoying as a GM to constantly play the losing side, and I suspect that to be a major contributor to the desire to have the players accept some of the losses and deaths. I've noticed that online discussions skew toward being GM-centric, with discussions that often are subtly about making the game better and more fun for the GMs, while assuming that this will somehow be more fun for the players as well. But players and GMs do have a conflict here. I try to GM by the 'golden rule' of trying to run the sort of game that I'd like to play in, and while this can sometimes be a wearying chore, it is one of my GM's duties to accept that.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Edgar Ironpelt, post: 8916242, member: 32075"] And I'm the opposite. I'm an old-school dissident who has embraced that "social contract" and who will kit-bash like hell to eliminate elements that cut against that social contract in any of the old or old-style rule sets I've run. Only they were often bright shiny new systems when I first ran or played them. (I started back in 1978.) In fact, I could lay claim to being (in at least a minor way) one of the old-school rebels against the Old Ways who helped establish that social contract in the first place. I've hated the idea of "easy character death" for [I]decades[/I], and I'm not going to change now. What I want is for the PCs to be the major characters in the story, not secondary characters or redshirts. I want the PCs to be characters "whose life is charmed, or else fate is sparing him for some other end." Even if a PC does die, "like Boromir in [I]Lord of the Rings,"[/I] I want the fun of that PC having years and years of exciting adventures while not-dying, first. Also, I don't agree that a PC has 'earned' his heroism just because his player got lucky (or failed to get unlucky) with the dice, nor that a PC who dies from bad unlucky die rolls has 'earned' his ignoble death. IMHO, the place to accept and embrace character death in the service of culturing an emergent Story is as a GM, accepting and embracing that one's NPCs and monsters will lose and lose and die and die. Now it is really annoying as a GM to constantly play the losing side, and I suspect that to be a major contributor to the desire to have the players accept some of the losses and deaths. I've noticed that online discussions skew toward being GM-centric, with discussions that often are subtly about making the game better and more fun for the GMs, while assuming that this will somehow be more fun for the players as well. But players and GMs do have a conflict here. I try to GM by the 'golden rule' of trying to run the sort of game that I'd like to play in, and while this can sometimes be a wearying chore, it is one of my GM's duties to accept that. [/QUOTE]

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