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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 9472763" data-attributes="member: 75787">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?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.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?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 CharactersApologies 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!</blockquote>

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