Death of Player Characters

[Gorgon Zee]

I haven't played Hillfolk. Honestly, I don't really have any desire to either.

I am a bit surprised that, as you say, you have posted in the past on this subject with no knowledge of the RPG that I think pretty much everyone who has read or played it would agree is the most relevant game to the discussion of "games that don't focus on combat". I strongly suggest you at the very least read it before commenting on this subject I the future. I really do think you'd enjoy it also, unless you really, really cannot imagine liking anything not focused on physical violence.

Provide some Call of Cthulhu examples that aren't one shots where combat is absolutely not the focus of the game? I've ran a bunch of CoC.

Oh cool, which campaigns did you run? It's possible you gravitated to more combat-focused ones like MASKS OF NYARLATHOTEP or MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, given your dislike of games with a dramatic or investigative focus. I've run/platyed both of those and MASKS is very combat-heavy. ORIENT EXPRESS is a mix0, but combat could take up most of the time in play if you like combat a lot.

I've run a few others also. BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (fantastic, highly recommended) starts with
has a very clear focus on surviving in the Antarctic, and the scenes that are most memorable for me are mechanically more about running away than combat! But even if you count "running away" as combat, most of the play time is about how to survive in the cold.

Oh, I should note that when you say "focus on combat" I'm assuming you mean that combat is what the players spend more time thinking about than anything else and/or the actual play time spends more time on combat scenes than any other type of scene. Let me know if you have a different definition in mind.

For a more detailed look, I'm going to choose a Trail of Cthulhu campaign I have run -- ETERNAL LIES -- as it nicely breaks sections down into scenes, so we can directly count how many focused it is on combat! I'll avoid spoilers on the content and look at the very first Act, which has 17 scenes. They break down as this:

No Combat Mentioned in the Scene: IIIII IIIII III
Combat Possible, but Not Expected: III
Combat is Likely:
Combat Certain: I

I choose the book and defend categories before counting (to reduce self-bias). Hence the tallying and empty categories. Without spoilers, the three scenes with possible combat are ones where either a failure in other skills, or a GM's desire to include combat, can make those scenes combat-focused.

As you can see, there is really no way to play this campaign that is combat-focused. My players played the whole campaign and never spent much time or thought on getting better at fighting (I am not counting planting explosives as combat -- no spoilers here, my players just love explosions). Even when faced with scenes that were "Combat Certain", they managed to avoid a couple of them. Not the one in act one, but in a later act they used their contacts to do the combat part of a "combat certain" scene.

OK, let's look at final acts. They tend to be more combat-focused. I'll do the same sort of analysis for the final act of Lynne Hardy's CHILDREN OF FEAR, and this is the first time I have read this chapter!

EDIT: After doing the analysis, it's a bit spoilery-y, so

Spoiler

No Combat Mentioned in the Scene: IIIII II
Combat Possible, but Not Expected: II
Combat is Likely: I
Combat Certain:

Actually, on reading it, it looks less combat-focused than the other analysis. The "combat likely scene" only occurs if another scene fails, and both the "combat possible" scenes have text like "if the keeper wants, they can ..." so very optional. My group would almost certainly not be fighting in this act.

In summary, I reject your hypothesis that Call of Cthulhu is focused on combat. If your group loves combat, you can drag it in, sure. But the expected and average experience is that combat is infrequent, and that players will focus on investigation as a main task and survival as a secondary one.

 

[Committed Hero]

Sure, but what does that have to do with what you are quoting?

There can be other challenges to an encounter beyond keeping your PC alive or slaying all the opposition.

I would also cite Tatters of the King as a combat-light CoC campaign. As well as the four purist adventures for Trail of Cthulhu written by Graham Walmsley.

 

[Celebrim]

I am a bit surprised that, as you say, you have posted in the past on this subject with no knowledge of the RPG that I think pretty much everyone who has read or played it would agree is the most relevant game to the discussion of "games that don't focus on combat". I strongly suggest you at the very least read it before commenting on this subject...

Oh good grief.

Let me explain Hillfolk by way of illustration. Back in high school me and some art nerd friends set up a creative exercise where we would write a few pages of a story in a notebook, and then pass the notebook to another member of the group and have them add to the story. We were all initially excited at first, but the game didn't even manage to make it a second time around because everyone hated how at least someone else was taking the story.

Robin Laws thinks that experience is the actual heart of roleplaying, and in his typical insulting manner (which I note you've successfully copied) explains how everyone else is doing it wrong and how the problem can be solved by giving each participant some tokens that allow them to compel other participants to write the story that they want. The idea being I guess that if everyone can compel the other creators at least some of the time then no one will be upset about the resulting story.

And the problem with that is that the resulting gameplay ends up not being like the process of being in a story, but like being the process of being a team of writers working on a script together.

The other problem, and maybe the more salient one, is that to play such a game successfully you really have to be the sort of group that could thrive playing "Whose Line is It Anyway?" or another sort of theater game. And honestly, it's not clear to me that the sort of group that can do that needs a Drama System with compels and tokens and such, and instead just lets happen what's best for the scene.

And incidentally, that's what these scene-based systems to me always seem to be best at - not creating story, as they claim, but creating scenes. That the scenes don't amount to anything seems irrelevant.

Thus, my disinterest in Hillfolk has nothing to do with my love of violence, but based on having read it and imagining how this is going to play out.

I really do think you'd enjoy it also, unless you really, really cannot imagine liking anything not focused on physical violence...given your dislike of games with a dramatic or investigative focus

The level of not understanding in that is so bad.

Let me know if you have a different definition in mind.

The definition I have in mind is how are challenges resolved, and in particular, how are challenges resolved in the climaxes of the story. For example, the classic movie "Lilies of the Field" with Sidney Portier has a series of challenges that don't revolve around combat. But the TV series the "A-Team" features stories that always are resolved by combat in the climax. The fact that only one scene of a typical "A-Team" episode involved combat and maybe 5 minutes of a 45 minute story arc is combat, doesn't make A-Team less focused on combat. From an RPG perspective, what's interesting about the "A-Team" story arc is that at the climax, and generally only at the climax, do we see all the characters working together to solve a problem. The scenes before that are either exposition and drama setting up the conflict, which doesn't really need a system, or else a montage challenges that are resolved individually by each team members particular non-combat skills - spot lighting that character but often having relatively low interplay and often with characters off stage. In a social RPG, extended periods "off stage" can be boring for the player in a way that you don't have to worry about in a TV show when the participant and the audience are different.

 

[Celebrim]

There can be other challenges to an encounter beyond keeping your PC alive or slaying all the opposition.

Yes, I'm aware of that. Again, what does that have to do with the passage you quoted?

I would also cite Tatters of the King as a combat-light CoC campaign.

I've heard that, but haven't read it. I have also heard that it was a CoC tourism adventure and almost a walking simulator where you see the sights but where there were relatively few choices to make just a bread crumb trail to follow to the end and that the clues were more or less the protagonists of the story. How successfully it's pulled off probably depends on whether the GM can pull off that trick in Half-Life or Half-Life 2 where following the breadcrumbs are so compelling you feel like you are making choices and being clever even though you aren't.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Robin Laws [...] explains how everyone else is doing it wrong [and] thinks that experience is the actual heart of roleplaying [ ... ] and how the problem can be solved by giving each participant some tokens that allow them to compel other participants to write the story that they want.

I'd like you to find the quote in Hillfolk where Robin Laws says everyone else is doing it wrong. I see him talking about how his system is aimed at people who want to role-play from a dramatic, rather than procedural point of view, but he's clear that that is a choice. He believes some people prefer drama and some prefer procedural resolutions.

Now, you state that you think Hillfolk is terrible based on your high school experience of making up a game with none of the mechanics that Hillfolk uses, and use that as a reason to "imagine" that Hillfolk doesn't play well. Could you maybe consider that that is why there are mechanics that Hillfolk which exactly address the issues that caused your high-school game to fail? That the tokens that you make dismissive remarks about would have fixed the issue that caused your games to collapse.

Maybe Robin Laws might be better at designing games than your high school friends?

The idea being I guess that if everyone can compel the other creators at least some of the time then no one will be upset about the resulting story.

You could also read the book, especially pages 6 and 28, and so not need to guess. Ideally, you could actually play the game before making statements about it, but that does honestly seem unlikely at this point.

And the problem with that is that the resulting gameplay ends up not being like the process of being in a story, but like being the process of being a team of writers working on a script together.

Which you have no experience of whatsoever as you've never played the game. So this is again your "imagination" and not actually anything you've ever tried, right?

Thus, my disinterest in Hillfolk has nothing to do with my love of violence, but based on having read it and imagining how this is going to play out.

So, I can either trust an author who consistently wins awards, has published multiple books on roleplaying, multiple game systems and whose games I have played and run in several times, with a lot of different people, or I could trust your opinion based on "imagining how this is going to play out".

I mean, you do see how weak your argument is sounding, right? Using your experience with your high-school friends in a game you invented and your "imagination" of how Hillfolk works as an argument to say that any game like Hillfolk is terrible? I am alone here -- is this a compelling argument to anyone else?

Hillfolk and Death of Player Characters
Apologies to other readers for our tangent, so let me at least give some info on how Hillfolk handles player death, so you can see how a dramatic system approaches this issue and I can contribute to the main thrust of this thread.

So first off, a cursory reading of Hillfolk is that it is all about setting up coöperative scenes and nicely building a story together. It definitely is about building a story together, but it is absolutely not nice. This game sets character against character and is by far the most PvP style of RPG I have ever played in or run. The essential mechanism is that players have drama tokens which they gain by being defeated in a dramatic conflict, and can spend to force outcomes (or defend against such forces).

In play, this often means that you are balancing immediate wins against future (emotional) power. If I agree to let you be the new hunt leader, I gain dramatic tokens I can later use, potentially against you. In one game I played I ousted a rival, who was then able to gain enough power to cause me to be permanently banned from the council, and I in turn had her exiled from the tribe. This description is a simplification, but probably good enough for a rough idea of how the game works. The essential point is -- it has a lot of inter-player conflict that drives the story. It's one of the least coöperative RPGs I have played and so if that's not your cup of tea, that would be my main reason for not recommending it to you.

Per rules, a successful dramatic scene can force a "significant concession" out of an opponent. Death would be a bit more than that, so I certainly don't by default allow forces which will logically imply the death of a character (E.G. "my goal in this scene is to make you feel so guilty you throw your life away in the upcoming battle") but players often will voluntarily accept major consequences like wounding, poisoning, loss of family members and so on. When I run DramaSystem as a one-shot, as the session draws to an end, people are much happier about character death, and so are much more interested in having that as a consequence (in much the same was as few people are that upset when their CoC character goes insane or dies in the last half hour of the slot). So for a character to die, there has to be a reason for it -- they don't get killed by random monster tables. They die because someone wants them dead, and because the character's player is OK with that. True to the system, there are no undramatic deaths!

 

[Bagpuss]

Provide some Call of Cthulhu examples that aren't one shots where combat is absolutely not the focus of the game? I've ran a bunch of CoC.

Been playing for 40 years and I can't think of a single Call of Cthulhu game I've played where combat was the focus of the game, rather than something to try to avoid at all costs. I guess Pulp Cthulhu is more combat focused but I've not played that version.

But examples of (none one shots) where combat isn't the focus, The Horror on the Orient Express, The Tatters of the King, The Vanishing Conjurer, The Children of Fear, Pax Cthulhuian, I could keep going on. All of the short scenarios light Dead Light and like also don't focus on combat, and stuff by none Chaosium publishers tends to avoid combat as well.

I'd like some examples of CoC where combat is the focus, rather than a sign something has gone drastically wrong in the investigation.

 

[Jd Smith1]

PC death is just part of the game. I never allow death-undoing elements, so all death is perma-death. (to be fair, I do not use 5e).

Its not controversial at all, IME.

 

[AnotherGuy]

PC death happens, but there are times where the story evolving at the table allows for these safety nets to exist. Of course there are storyline and sometimes mechanic consequences which arise with these.

a. Clones. So the players at the table know that they were cloned by Halaster and their release, although negotiated (long story to go into here) is but temporary.

b. Outsider (Mystaran) Reforged for Toril. PC died, arrived in the Fugue Plane, sat in judgement before Kelemvor, risking Wall of the Faithless, he was petitioned for by a PC/NPC Immortal for his soul to return to Mystara, PC opted to be reforged for the Forgotten Realm universe, severing his soul' connection to Mystara.

c. Duplicate due to Timeline Shenanigans. Played the Mysterious Isle and the Eye of Xxiphu.

d. Captured/Prisoner. A PC was captured alive to be interrogated, as the party were outsiders and represented an unknown entity to the Enemy.

e. Reincarnation. Have never had did this, but likely similar in feel to b above.

 

[Umbran]

I am a bit surprised that, as you say, you have posted in the past on this subject with no knowledge of the RPG that I think pretty much everyone who has read or played it would agree is the most relevant game to the discussion of "games that don't focus on combat".

Hillfolk is a clear, perhaps even seminal, example. But if that is the most relevant, what we are saying is that such games are really only relevant to theorists. Even in the non-D&D RPG space, Hillfolk is at this point mostly a curiosity.

I'd expect that today, something like Cthulhu Dark to be more relevant to discussion.

(Original two-page rules here: http://catchyourhare.com/files/Cthulhu Dark.pdf)

 

[Gorgon Zee]

Hillfolk is a clear, perhaps even seminal, example. But if that is the most relevant, what we are saying is that such games are really only relevant to theorists. Even in the non-D&D RPG space, Hillfolk is at this point mostly a curiosity.

I'd expect that today, something like Cthulhu Dark to be more relevant to discussion.

(Original two-page rules here: http://catchyourhare.com/files/Cthulhu Dark.pdf)

I'm not sure that saying that if the most relevant item is a curiosity, then all such games are curiosities. That seems a bit of an over-generalization. I'd actually expect that in most fields, the more extreme versions -- which are likely the clearest, examples -- are very likely to be curiosities. Certainly in theater, there are plays which are studied far more for their theory than actually performed. I've never seen Pirandello performed, but I don't think I could take anyone seriously as an authority on absurdist theater if they had never seen any of his works.

Having said that, I do agree that there are systems that are more popular and, although less clear in their objectives, are more likely to have been experienced. Cthulhu Dark (and also Call of Cthulhu) are good examples. I wouldn't expect most people to have experienced Hillfolk -- only those who want to be thought of as an expert in the area.