EzekielRaiden said:
bloodtide said:
The death of a character is not the end of the game. You can keep playing.
But you can't keep playing that character.
Yes, only the player gets to grow and learn.
I want to quickly dig into this, because I think this is a more fundamental disconnect than it might first appear, and really key a lot of the tensions we generally seem to see when there is a clash in approach. Let me try and build this out and explain it in a way that I think makes sense. Edit: This is long. Apologies.
Many people who propose Old School methods refer to "skilled play", ie they describe what their character does, sometimes in excruciating detail at the most absurd end of the spectrum, and if their character dies anyways, they have then learned something that they will apply the next time. There is a classic skit I remember about a rogue going down a trapped hallway, and giving increasingly specific instructions to the DM for how the rogue moves and acts to overcome the trap. The end goal of this style of play seems to be to make the player more skilled at playing the game. It is a similar approach to how Dark Souls games approach puzzle design. Die enough times to figure out the skills needed, then progress to the next area.
I do not have the goal of becoming a better DnD player. In large part, that is because I am already generally a better DnD player than many of the people I do play with. I could polish up and get better certainly, but since I am already a highly-skilled player, I don't see the point. This is why I tend to see such things where it is suggested to describe every movement with precision to be such a drag. I know I could do it, but I don't see the point in doing it, because the inherent point is to "get better" at something I am already very good at, with the end goal of... doing that precise, "skilled" approach all the time, polishing my skills even further.
I think this might also be the origin of "metagaming". A DM would look at a level 1 thief urchin, whose player just successfully described how to precisely disable multiple high level traps in a level 13 dungeon, and exclaim "your character would not know to do that!", or a player who had faced off against a specific type of monster and precisely targeted their weakpoints. And this would have confused the players, who had been told that the entire goal of the game was to train them as players to be better at the game. Not being allowed to utilize their player knowledge in-game would be like learning chess, but being told you couldn't use advanced strategies because the board was reset. The point was to learn this exact information to use in this exact way... wasn't it?
And this might be the seed for where the split occurred. Because for me, I don't play DnD to get better at playing DnD. I'm not here to improve myself as a person. I'm not here to learn how to play more optimally. I play DnD to be entertained by the story. And when a character dies, the story is altered. Sometimes in small ways, sometimes in large ways. For example, picture the Thundercats. Now kill off Lion-o and replace him with Optimus Prime. Not, Optimus Prime as a cat-man, full on firetruck, robot, from Cybertron Optimus Prime. Sure, the show
could continue... but is it Thundercats anymore?
Yes, when a character dies in DnD you can replace them and keep playing DnD, but how is that different from just starting a new campaign? Well, actually, one of the ways it is different is that all the parts of the story you WERE interacting with are still technically there, but gone. Let's say you were playing one of the twins, and you and that player loved the twin dynamic and were having a blast. Well, if one of the twins dies... you can't keep playing that dynamic. No new character you bring to the table is the Twin, with all their expeirences and inside jokes. And trying to force that same relationship feels weird. You can keep playing the game, but the instance of the game has fundamentally altered. You are no longer playing the same game, just the same ruleset.
Which, again, for some groups or some situations, that is fine. If you aren't playing a game that has deep ties between the characters, then it can work out. But I've rarely seen that in "new school" style games. Even if none of the PCs have deep ties to each other, they often have ties to villains or plots that the DM
really wants to show off. I have an Eberron game where one of the PCs owes a debt to an evil priest. IF that player leaves the game, if that character is replaced... I don't get to show off the evil priest! That would suck, I'm really looking forward to that.
But, this sometimes gets misinterpretted. People think that because we don't want the character's to die, we are playing "easy mode", because for those people, the point of the game is to encourage them to get more skilled at playing the game. The PC is a learning tool, and how can you learn the best way to avoid dying to traps if the traps can't kill you? You may as well be playing with nerf weapons, right? How can you challenge yourself as a player if you don't have things on the bleeding edge of your skills? But, that isn't what is happening. We want to challenge the characters, but usually in specific ways. We are building a story. You don't challenge Sherlock Holmes by making him incapable of catching a common burglar, that ruins the entire point of Sherlock Holmes, you challenge him (modernly) by having him fight his drug addiction, or deal with the grand sweeping plans of Moriarty. But you also need to show off that he IS Sherlock Holmes, if Moriarty could be overcome by a sixth-grader with a calculator, then that is a boring story (unless you are going for comedy), so you need challenges that Holmes passes, to show his skill to show "this is why him defeating Moriarty is such a big deal".
But I am not Sherlock Holmes, I am not going to remember that Three Years ago IRL the DM described the woman at the party as having a purple stain on the sleeve of her dress, and combine that with the clue that the blackberry harvest was poor this year, to unravel the plot.... but that's fine. I am not attempting to actually gain the skills of Sherlock Holmes by playing this game, I just want to play him as an actor might, fulfilling the role.
And this leads to why "new school" often set limits for the characters. I played a Paladin who was a Guardsman in Neverwinter, and was massively patriotic. A half-elf married to a half-orc shepherdess and deeply in love with her. I specifically told the DM that I was NOT interested in a story beat where his wife cheated on him. I knew our characters would be gone from the city for long times, and sure, it could make sense... but it wasn't a story I was interested in exploring. However, I DID tell the DM that my character had worked with revolutionaries who hated the current Regent of the city, who was originally from Waterdeep. Because my character was a patriot and a guard... but that didn't mean he LIKED the government as it stood. He wanted change. This was a flaw, a challenge for my character, and he did eventually have to save the Regent from death in one of the stories, and he didn't like doing that. One of my DMs called these sorts of things "hooks" another called them "knives", because the entire point is to give the DM something to drive into the heart of your character, cause pain and distress, and drive the plot forwards. To cause growth and learning for the CHARACTER, because that is what we care about.
I have seen players jump feet-first into a heroic sacrifice, heck, I nearly pulled one recently, when my character who has sworn to serve the royal line was faced with an impossible fight and a goal of saving the heir. He was fully willing to grab her, jump out of a window, and throw her (she can fly) while he plummeted to the ground and likely died. It fit with exactly who the character was, his goals, his motivations, and I would have been sad if it happened that way (this was before major story beats for this same character) but it would have been a really satisfying moment of fulfilling the character. Same character, same campaign, another turns out unwinnable fight... and I'm not happy with how that one turned out, but I would have been even more frustrated if we'd just been slaughtered by the NPC, because there was no weight to it. He was a seemingly random NPC that was WAY stronger than we anticipated and beat our entire party like a drum, slaughtering civilians in the process.
If the campaign had ended with us retainers dying to save the heir from the BBEG in a final desperate attempt after they ambushed us? Cool. Seriously, I would talk about that for months. If it ended with us dying to rando-knight and his guards, because it turns out they were double our level? That would suck. It wouldn't be satisfying. And it wouldn't fulfill the goal of the game, which is being a fun, entertaining story. Which doesn't mean it needs to be pre-written to follow a script, but does usually mean that if there is a way to make sure that the cast stays the same... we should take it, because ripping out cast members and replacing them often means that the story doesn't care about the cast.
