Grittiness and Lethality in Game Combat vs in Read-Only Fiction

[Piperken]

Medievalish-Fantasy game systems do a fair job of emulating the injury and death rates seen among secondary characters and nameless mooks in read-only fiction, but a poor one of emulating the much lower injury and death rates among the protagonists - the characters who would be PCs in a game.

As evidence, I offer this list of injuries suffered by the nine members of the Fellowship in Lord of the Rings during the course of the story. I'm leaving out the purely magical effects, the fatigue, thirst, starvation, and exposure damage, and the injuries to characters other than members of the Fellowship...

...I count 17 examples of members of the Fellowship getting injured in the whole Lord of the Rings, with 5 of the examples being bramble and thorn scratches. And I note that Aragorn and Legolas do not get injured at all.

I submit that this is a low, low, low injury rate, compared to that typically seen in a tabletop game that covers the same amount of adventuring, run under either D&D rules or under some alternative rule set having about the same degree of crunch in its mechanics.

Yet, when I have gone back to read LotR again, I don't find myself saying ah, plot armor, followed by throwing my hands up in the air and hurling it at the television, where Legolas happens to be busy fighting Bolg in Battle of the Five Armies, doing you know... well...

One can argue that protagonists survive better than others in a book. I'd advocate if the story is well written, this doesn't come up. Plot armor is legitimate when it is blatant, contrived, overt and overused.

Echoing one or two others, I'd add that the Fellowship wasn't built for direct conflict, so at least for me as a reader, I didn't find the lack of injuries unusual. Frodo and the Hobbits barely left the Shire safely. They barely escaped being murdered in Bree, thanks to Strider. They barely made it out of Weathertop, with as many Ring Wraiths present.

Once the Fellowship was assembled and set off, they tried to avoid being caught or trapped, and for the most part when faced with the different allies of the Enemy, made prudent choices. Which I feel, bore out as to why their Company did not suffer worse (I consider Gandalf falling in Moria as a "death," in addition to Boromir).

 

[Piperken]

As an aside, I'm immensely grateful most fantasy rpg games/settings thankfully leave sepsis out of their game. Absent cool magic or amazing herbs, we'd all have more characters perishing left and right because of an accidental nick they neglected to treat.

(Bathrooms as well, one of my players recently mentioned how strange their party had been adventuring for nearly a week and some change in game time, yet not one of them has had problems from not going to the bathroom yet! )

 

[aramis erak]

How many of you killed a character over the objection of the player? I have.

I have. But never over the objections of the dice. In one D&D 5e case, the character got knocked down 6 times (0 HP), and got back up 6 times. The dice clearly objected to the death of the halfling.

 

[GrimCo]

I killed characters in abundance. But i give fair warning at session zero that my games are grim, gritty and more lethal than usual. But in most cases, if players are smart, they can avoid combat all together or sound tactical retreat (for that one, they do need to plan ahead, but there is always options to create safe escape avenue).

But, let's get to OP and LOTR and see our protagonists in D&D terms.
Gandalf- literal angel
Aragorn- for all intents and purposes, best race would be aasimar. He is also 90ih by the time of Fellowship, with decades of martial experience and training. So at least level 10 fighter/ranger mc.
Legolas - he is at least 500, but probably older, with damn lot of fighting experience, so lets say he is also around level 10
Gimli - around 140, lets say level 8-10
Boromir - 40, but with years of warfare experience, so at least fighter 6-8

Hobbits are lv 1 experts, Frodo maybe lv 2 as he is 50 at the start.

So, they are in effect, they are high tier 2, low tier 3 characters with one immortal celestial and 4 low level hirelings. Most of LOTR is actually tier 1 adventure. One time they run into high CR encounter (Balrog), Gandalf solos it.