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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2247315" data-attributes="member: 27012">In reality, I think many GMs take on this role, too, and protect their players from meaningless deaths.  I've played with such GMs to varying degrees.  Many don't but many also do.As you mention later, a lot depends on whether the GM is trying to run a game about other character in the Firefly setting or run adventures that play like Firefly stories.That sort of thing can and does happen when an author wants to make their story more gritty and realistic.  For example, I could imagine your speculated death of Jayne happening at the hands of a nameless goon in meaningless firefight, though the author needs to be willing to expend a main protagonist on the theme that people die for stupid reasons rather than use their death to illustrate some more emotionally uplifting theme such as death out of self-sacrifice or demonstrating how really evil the Bad Guy really is.  This sort of thing does happen in American television (sometimes for actor-related reasons like Henry Blake in M*A*S*H or Tasha Yar on Star Trek:TNG), but not often.  And when it does happen well (like the quick high-profile death at the beginning of the movie Executive Decision), it's often notable because it is unusual.Would an event produced by a random role be scripted like the "random" death of a character on a television show?   Of course not.  But if you want a scripted game, I'm not sure why you are rolling dice or using rules that generate unscripted events in the first place.  But the story implications of a scripted "random" death or a real random death are close enough.I have watched plenty of Japanese TV dramas (the 12 one-hour episode dramas) that had a character die a senseless death, ended on a down note, and even one that had the main point-of-view character die before the last episode.  I really enjoyed them because they were so unpredictable for me (alas, Fujisankei no longer shows them with subtitles in the US).  It's a very different experience watching a story unfold when you don't assume that anyone is going to make it to the final episode and don't assume that everything will all work out well in the end.</blockquote>

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