Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9536778" data-attributes="member: 6801228">I was referring to other media, such as novels and shows, since my larger point was about the use of Character Death as a story telling device. I want to make that clear, because you are now asking me to give an example from a different medium. But, actually, I do have a current actual game I am running where we have something similar. Not exact, because I tend not to kill PCs in my games if it can be avoided, but it presents the point rather well. I started an Eberron game by gathering a group of players and giving them a mission from a Dragon-marked house. All of the PCs signed a magical non-disclosure agreement to keep their mission a secret. The mission was to collect blood samples from various monsters. A simple premise that would have us moving across the country and fighting rare monsters. I lost one player to a sudden schedule change, so their character was written out of the story. I lost another player who simply stopped responding. We then lost another player to a car accident, she was alive, but in need of physical therapy and no longer felt up to the game. By this point, we had not even reached our first destination, and I was down to two players. And yes, I am aware, I am not talking about character death here explicitly, but let us look at the situation I found myself in. The only way to add characters to the group... would be to add people who already work for the Dragonmarked house. Who somehow, for some reason, without anyone letting the House know, suddenly showed up to replace the missing PCs. Who would also have to be given some of the highly-trained griffons which I was using to allow them to more easily travel (And was originally thinking might get stolen to add another layer to the plot). And, I need to do this, because either they had to have signed the contract in the backstory before the character was introduced, or suddenly they are on a mission that they can tell no one about, who they cannot reveal the details to, and who has no investment in the plot because they don't work for the group that hired the original PCs to undergo the entire plot of the adventure. It isn't a perfect 1 to 1 to the issues faced in novels or TV series like I was originally talking about, but it should be pretty clear how the initial mission, the driving force behind the game, can be easily lost when you are constantly replacing people with individuals with no connection to the plot. And if they DO have a connection to the plot, you need to contrive reasons for them to be there, when previously... they weren't. Less Quantum Ogre and more Quantum Agent of the Crown.</blockquote>

Verification