HeavyG said:
Balancing the need for consequences for failure (you don't want your players to feel their PCs are invincible) with the need to keep characters alive in a harsh environment so you can keep telling their stories (you don't want your players to become afraid of heroics) is hard.
It's what the debate about easier or harder resurrection boils to, really.
I've found that if you want your PCs to brave meaningful dangers, you need to either :
- Keep them alive via DM fiat
- Allow for easy resurrection
or
- Accept that they'll be making new characters all the time and that you better not make the stories too personal
Let's face it, it's a dice-based game, no player is going to roll high all the time, so depending on your players to play smart is not going to let them survive to 20th level by itself. (This goes for most RPGs, I feel.)
Which is why we have option 4: keep them alive via player fiat. That's pretty much teh whole point behind ASP/hero points/luck points/etc. Give the players a powerful bit of script-override, but one they have to ration carefully. They need to be powerful enough that the player can save the character from Certain Doom (or just Evil Dice), at least some of the time, yet not so plentiful that they never need fear defeat.
Solution number 3 is unacceptable if you want to involve the player's characters in your story in a deep and meaningful (long term) way.
The problem with the first two solutions is that it makes the players cocky, if they know about them.
The only solution, I feel, is to give the PCs script immunity (possibly with agreed upon caveats), but to make penalties for failure very meaningful.
Another option is to simply give the players more authorial control, period. Things like Storypath Cards or the Torg Drama Deck are a great way to do this. So is making the players intermediaries between the randomizer and the character/world. Card-based games often do this, by letting the player draw and hold several cards, which they can then spend however they want. So they can choose when to fail (by spending the crappy cards) and when to succeed (by spending the awesome cards). They don't succeed or fail any more than a dice-randomized game (well, assuming equal range, variability, yada yada yada), but the overall effect is less random. You could do this with D&D pretty easily: have each player roll, say, 20d20 at the beginning of a combat. And then, each time they need a d20 roll, they use on of those. Once they're all gone, they roll another 20d20, and so on. The distribution should still be just as random/average over the long haul, but they can choose to, say, do poorly at first and save the good rolls to triumph in the end (or just guarantee running away). Heck, i suppose you could even forgo rolling altogether, and have each person tick off the results 1-20 from a checklist, in whatever order they want, and they can't start over again until they've used them all. Oh, and if you have a group that would abuse this, only GM-instigated rolls count. They can't just decide to go off into the forest and "hunt squirrels" to use up all their low rolls.
So what I do is, if the dice indicate that a PC dies, the blow will knock him unconscious instead, but the character will suffer a permanent disability instead. Like, say, losing an arm. Or maybe the pretty boy skirt-chaser swordsman will suffer a disfiguring scar (i.e. a fate worse than death
).
Another possibility is delayed consequences: when the dice indicate that the PC should die, and it's "wrong" for the game, the PC gets a "black mark" instead. The PC survives (perhaps maimed, perhaps not, depending on the game), but that player now "owes" the GM a death. At some point in the near future (that session, that adventure, that story arc--whatever works for the group), that character *will* die, but the player can choose a suitably-dramatic situation to do it in. I'll leave it up to the group whether the player can choose a situation they'd be guaranteed to die in anyway, or if, for it to be a "proper" sacrifice, it has to be in a situation that, if the player gave 100%, they'd make it through.
