Is Dying Such a Bad Thing?

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

I see with "play it cautious because it's realistically smart" two problems: what real people would most often do, and being smart.

Most real people wouldn't be caught doing what the PCs are doing........or they would be caught dead. So by real statistics the characters are very unlikely to be doing what they're doing. It takes a special kind of person to do what PCs do most of the time, so in that sense you can't treat them realistically because one part of the realism has already been thrown out the window.

Being smart is a two-parter:
1. If we're still going for realism then it's logical that not everyone who gets into the PCs dangerous business will survive. There have to be some people that get weeded out for reasons of the survivors learning.
2. Not everyone that plays this game is smart enough to survive even being cautious. I know I'm not: the only caution I can manage is "Don't get anywhere near something dangerous." Kind of kills a game.

 

[The Shaman]

I see with "play it cautious because it's realistically smart" two problems: what real people would most often do, and being smart.

Real people with dangerous jobs manage their risks, but sometimes, if they are careless or unlucky, they can get killed anyway.

 

[Mallus]

D'Artagnan, Porthos, and Athos all die in the course of the Musketeers' saga, and the circumstances of Captain Alatriste's death are foretold by Íñigo Balboa.

I didn't mean to suggest all adventure story protagonists live to fight another day (in yet another sequel) only that a subset of popular characters did, and that the readership sees this foreknowledge of the heroes survival as a feature, not a bug.

In any case, as Odhanan and I each pointed out, one of the appeals of roleplaying games is the ability to do away with some of the expectations of genre fiction and replace them with a different experience.

And it's a good point. It's just not a place where I want the games to diverge from the fiction. It's a convention I like, for a number of reasons.

 

[Umbran]

The statements are not A is B and A is not-B. The statements are A = B and A =/= B. By changing the parameter of the statement, you merely demonstrate that my point is invalid for a similarly worded statement with different meaning, and different framing.

It is rational to say that a lion is a feline, and a lion is a mammal (B and not-B); it is not rational to say that a lion is a feline and a lion is not a feline.

Nice try, but not proper logic.

Well, if you want to get really, really, picky, then "A is B" is not "A = B".

Equality means something very specific in logic, and saying "The sky is blue" is not the same as "The sky is equal to blue." This is readily seen because logical equality is reflexive and transitive. So, if the sky is blue, and my cooler is blue, it would follow that the sky is my cooler, which is patently untrue.

It then follows that the proper statement isn't "A =/= B" either - because we were not talking about logical equivalence in the first place.

So, we are more talking about statements of the form:

"A has trait B" and "A does not have trait B", or "A is B" and "A (is not) B". For which most of my suggestions do still hold up well, with some small modification for the change in denotation.

 

[Raven Crowking]

So, we are more talking about statements of the form:

"A has trait B" and "A does not have trait B", or "A is B" and "A (is not) B". For which most of my suggestions do still hold up well, with some small modification for the change in denotation.

Only as specific subsets of the statement already made (i.e., at least one party being incorrect in his or her statement, either intentionally or not). And, therefore, I think, more in the nature of being obscuring than revealing. Of course, it is quite evident that you love to argue with me, so I assume that this is the reason for your prior post, rather than intentional obscuring a valid point.


RC

 

[maddman75]

I will say that for my games, a TPK is a game ender. Why? Because my games are about the PCs. My Hunter game is about this family of monster hunters. If they all die, we could certainly play more Hunter but it wouldn't be the same. The stories and antagonists are all built to play off the PCs. Why would I use them with different PCs? Our CoC games are based off a newspaper company, Buffy is a clique of friends at a high school.

Essentially everything that's interesting is tied up in the PCs, so there's not really anything to continue. I prefer games where it is easy to take someone down but hard to actually kill them. Works much better for my style.

 

[Wolf1066]

I don't see how it's genre breaking. In a sense, cyberpunk - and that style you describe - is more reminiscent of many movies, comics and games. Anything by Tarantino for instance, or anything with "The Punisher" on it. The "Villain just shoots an underling/random person to make a point" is a classic trope. Hell, Vader was pretty hard on the commanding officers.

And we have ruthless people who kill without asking questions, or murder one another freely. They just exist outside of the US. Cartels, unstable African countries, and so on.

However, such characters as the Punisher or Vader are outside the norm for society as a whole. Not even Tarantino portrays the whole world as a Law of The Gun badlands.

Cyberpunk 2020 freely (and inaccurately) mixes Post-Apocalyptic genre society with Cyberpunk ethos.

The central characters in most Cyberpunk literature are also "outside the norm" - but the rest of the world is not too different from the average citizens of today (get up, go to work, avoid that section of town, don't tangle with the gangs, don't tick off your employer etc.) IOW, a Specialist's World (to quote Peter Christian), where many do not have weapons, weapons can be purchased but are regulated, certain people (Police etc) carry weapons routinely and gangs and other criminals do what they bloody like.

Cyberpunk 2020 is written in such a way to convey the idea that everyone can run about willy-nilly and shoot anyone that annoys them - a "Duelist's World" where the "right" goes to whoever most accurately shoots first. In that regard, it is genre-breaking.

There's plenty of scope to play vigilantes, criminals, cops, gangsters, soldiers, corporate killers etc in a Specialist's World - but the consequences are different and it's handled differently than in a Duelist's World. In a Specialist's World you have constraints even against killing in self defence - like "obligation to retreat" or "shoot to stop" or "non-escalation" rules, you need to have the law on your side and/or a damn good lawyer.

It means that the average citizen does not pose much of a threat to the team - who are, as SilvercatMoonpaw2 notes, doing things that the average Joe does not do (and therefore presumably better trained than John and Jane Doe).

It also means that the players can't just shoot the place up like a B-movie cop.

@SilvercatMoonpaw2: you are quite correct and this is where the mechanics of CharGen come in. In AD&D type games the characters start out pretty green and inexperienced. In Cyberpunk, Traveller, Serenity and a number of other games, they have a background that gives them various skills and they can start out quite proficient in a number of areas - more than capable of defending themselves should the need arise.

In theory, the characters are of the calibre to be doing the kind of risky stuff they're doing.

The only major problem is that the players aren't always trained cops, soldiers, solos or hardened gangsters and therefore don't necessarily know how a true professional, such as they are playing, would proceed under various circumstances - that can blow away the realism.

I'm sure ValhallaGH's ex Military Cyberpunk character would behave a lot more realistically than any of my players...

 

[Wolf1066]

I see with "play it cautious because it's realistically smart" two problems: what real people would most often do, and being smart.

By "playing smart" I mean "that organisation out-guns us, let's not take it on in a frontal attack" - then find a more devious way to take care of it.

Or make sure you have a weapon that is effective against the threat.

The risk of death is still there - but it's a lot less certain than saying "I reckon the four of us should charge the gang fortress..."

And if you have no need to take on the organisation, then you don't do it. If they get in the way of your goals, then work out how to take them down with minimal personal risk.

Most real people wouldn't be caught doing what the PCs are doing........or they would be caught dead. So by real statistics the characters are very unlikely to be doing what they're doing. It takes a special kind of person to do what PCs do most of the time, so in that sense you can't treat them realistically because one part of the realism has already been thrown out the window.

One presumes that the central characters of the game aren't average Joes and actually have some sort of training that enables them to do what they do.

Being smart is a two-parter:
1. If we're still going for realism then it's logical that not everyone who gets into the PCs dangerous business will survive. There have to be some people that get weeded out for reasons of the survivors learning.

And if starting with completely green characters with minimal skills, this will occur. Starting with characters with more experience (so presumably spent the last x years surviving that weeding out process), there is still the possibility that they be killed, but it's not as high.

Depends on how much initial experience the game system gives to "new" characters.

2. Not everyone that plays this game is smart enough to survive even being cautious. I know I'm not: the only caution I can manage is "Don't get anywhere near something dangerous." Kind of kills a game.

It depends on the scope of the game.

If the danger is a cave full of monsters that your party must wipe out in order to get half a kingdom, then "being cautious" will not work.

If the danger is a local gang that keeps terrorising the neighbourhood, a few well-placed booby traps could make a serious dent in their numbers while you're safely miles away.

Sniping at them from behing hard cover with a high-powered rifle (and the area between you and them booby-trapped or mined in case they try to close on you) might also be effective.

There are still risks of it going horribly wrong, but they have been lessened.

And if it does go horribly wrong, the character dies. Not a lot can be done about that.