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<blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9006223" data-attributes="member: 71699">I like this point. I sometimes think about the calculations of lethality in RPG in terms of poker stakes, where the chips are time-invested. That sniper is a wager of a few minutes to maybe an hour or two (for a recurring or highly-detailed NPC). The player-character is a wager of at minimum a few minutes up to in some cases hundreds of hours. (Hence lethality gradients intuitively curve downward at higher levels.)That's on the one hand, and on the other hand sometimes we're seeking a specific experience and the costs don't bother us: we're committed anyway. Say I have a character that I've enjoyed playing for every one of its 100 hours, killed by that sniper in hour 101. And that sniper, say a GM spent an hour of care creating an NPC effectively in my service. It's not a poker game and neither of us will leave the table with any of our time back, so in a sense it is the moment-to-moment that matters.Hence I think you rightly invoke an emotional component (or at least, that is how I understand &quot;and blood&quot;.) In a GM'd game, GM is ordinarily assumed to have no emotional investment in the sniper. (They might, I'm speaking only of what I've observed folk normally do and say.) Maybe that in itself is a bad thing? Like, if we want to challenge GM power, perhaps we've equal grounds for challenging GM lack of emotional engagement in their characters? (Totally speculative, I just wanted to get that question out there!)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="clearstream, post: 9006223, member: 71699"] I like this point. I sometimes think about the calculations of lethality in RPG in terms of poker stakes, where the chips are time-invested. That sniper is a wager of a few minutes to maybe an hour or two (for a recurring or highly-detailed NPC). The player-character is a wager of at minimum a few minutes up to in some cases hundreds of hours. (Hence lethality gradients intuitively curve downward at higher levels.) That's on the one hand, and on the other hand sometimes we're seeking a specific experience and the costs don't bother us: we're committed anyway. Say I have a character that I've enjoyed playing for every one of its 100 hours, killed by that sniper in hour 101. And that sniper, say a GM spent an hour of care creating an NPC effectively in my service. It's not a poker game and neither of us will leave the table with any of our time back, so in a sense it is the moment-to-moment that matters. Hence I think you rightly invoke an emotional component (or at least, that is how I understand "and blood".) In a GM'd game, GM is ordinarily assumed to have no emotional investment in the sniper. (They might, I'm speaking only of what I've observed folk normally do and say.) Maybe that in itself is a bad thing? Like, if we want to challenge GM power, perhaps we've equal grounds for challenging GM lack of emotional engagement in their characters? (Totally speculative, I just wanted to get that question out there!) [/QUOTE]

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