Killer DMs

[Barastrondo]

Ok, but I presume then that:

a) They are never the target of these assasination plots.
b) Whatever powerful group is behind the assassination plots hasn't realized that these meddling kids are always the ones foiling their plans.

You speak as though there is one powerful group behind all the assassination plots. So far the PCs have

(a) foiled one assassination plot in one city, and gotten the person responsible for hiring the assassins sent out on a suicide tour of duty

(b) earned the favor of an assassin's guild in another city (the same guild as in the previous city, just a different chapter) by helping them out

(c) cashed that favor in in a third city to get in good with the assassins of same said guild

(d) prevented another assassination attempt in said third city, contracted by a different and wholly unrelated person and employing rival assassins to the guild the PCs are in good with

(e) begun negotiations with assassins of the first guild in a fourth city, to target the different and wholly unrelated person from City Three who is cut off from his House resources and causing trouble.

These are just the assassin-related subplots. All sorts of other trouble is quite separate.

In the meantime, the PCs have benefited from the fact that most of them are expensive targets -- it costs a lot to assassinate a House Sespech necromancer, particularly if you want all of her well-connected friends gone as well -- and that they tend to financially ruin their opposition as part of their meddling. It might change when they start swinging above their pay grade. Of course, their opponents can always afford cheap assassins instead of the good stuff -- but in a swashbuckler game, a plausible simulation of a cheap assassin attempt is ideal in ways it wouldn't be for a "The Guy With The Bigger Pocketbook Wins" scenario.

But sure, I was using the most extreme cases when I talked about enraged beserkers, hunger crazed ghouls, and mindless slimes but they've faced a lot of different enemies with a lot of different motives: bandits, possessed townsfolk, crazed nihilist cults, illegal fight clubs, grave robbers, invading sahuaghin armies, opium dealers, a gluttonous ghoul king, disgraced noblemen, evil fertility cults, corrupt merchant companies, and necromancers with goals so complex and surprising that I can't reveal them publicly yet.

Ha ha, yep! That's about how D&D games tend to run. Did your fight club involved trained apes? (Mine involved trained apes. You get a gorilla in gladiator armor miniature painted, you look for excuses to use it.)

Nonetheless, the PC's often realize that the easiest way to deal with certain problems is just kill the antagonist, and it's not like their enemies are stupid. If it doesn't make a lot of sense to be merciful, then there isn't going to be mercy.

There's some level of "the easiest way to deal with certain problems is just kill the antagonist" in any D&D game, but really, in an intrigue-laden swashbuckler, I find that it's very satisfying when it's not the case. You could kill all the members of the aspiring Sorcerous House, maybe, but that would infuriate their Prince patron -- so you need to catch them in the act. You could kill the bastard who nearly started a civil war -- but that's the father of one character's fiancee, and one of the group is very concerned about the ramifications of kinslaying. When both sides have powerful allies, it plays out more like a chess game where you try to set the other guys up where you can kill them without the ramifications being worse than just having them alive. I very much enjoy this style of play. It's the sort of thing that sometimes could stand relationship maps to keep track of who's in league with whom and can act freely against whom: but a lot of fun for us.

Seriously, hunger crazed ghouls are more merciful than politicians and regents who feel their power (or path to it) is threatened. You ever read/seen Hamlet? Wasn't exactly a module where everyone enjoyed plot protection and no one could die. So exactly where do you plot your game between worrying about the doilies matching at the party for the retiring head of the lamp lighter's guild and poison armed assassins attacking PC's in their sleep?

Have you read Scaramouche? Princess Bride? Count of Monte Cristo? Phoenix Guards? Locke Lamora? All of these things lie within the yawning excluded middle between No Danger and You Die, No Save. My game's somewhere in there too.

To clarify, one of the more entertaining sequences in The Phoenix Guards is where a variety of escalating assassination attempts are made on the PCs, but they take the form of hiring bandits and the like in order to make it look "accidental" and not like an outright assassination. These play out in grand fashion, with the protagonists managing to avoid or deal with increasingly dangerous odds. Within the political context of the book, these attempts make sense -- it's how things are done if you don't want to expose your hand to the powerful forces that you're trying to undermine -- and they also have the benefit of being mightily entertaining. Ambuscades make for fantastic scenes.

If the PCs were the only thing a villain organization had to worry about, yeah, things might play out pretty differently. But the interesting thing about an intrigue-heavy setting is that you have full license to create villains who are concerned with their plots against other powerful entities (the Crown, a prince, a rival House, etc.) at the point where the PCs get involved. It's kind of like Yojimbo or its derivatives: the PCs are the catalyst that takes an existing struggle and explodes it one way or the other. Not that there's anything wrong with villain organizations that are in control of every aspect of their function, and have nothing to worry about but the PCs -- but I find them kinda dull by compare, personally.

 

[neko ewen]

All players should care if a character lives or dies. And this is a big disconnect for 'Safe Games'. As the players know for a fact they won't die, they can sit back, relax and even goof off. They know that no matter what happens, the DM will handwave it so it won't be death. A player can be on his cell phone during a dragon attack and know 100% that his character won't be killed.

In my deadly game, the players must pay attention at all times. Death is everywhere. And if the player does like a character, they must be extra careful to keep that character alive. They won't take a risk that a player with plot armor will take. Also the players do develop strong attachments to the world, and 'play hard' to keep them. If a character gets something, they want to keep it. So, again, they will be careful and smart.

Too often in a safe game you see the player of the 'chosen one' not care at all....they know the plot armor will keep them safe. Worse, a safe game can feel hollow. "We made it to level 13 in the "has very different meanings between a safe game where the DM held each characters hand and made sure they made it to the end and my killer style where the players know without a doubt that they made it to the end with no handwaving by the DM.

I kept clicking the quote button on your posts, but you kept repeating the same wrong points over and over. Your characterization of a non-lethal RPG experience is just factually wrong. Whether or not the PCs are likely to die isn't related to how seriously the players take things. What matters is whether the characters have something at stake, and death is one of the less interesting things that can be at stake on account of how unless someone goes out of their way to make it otherwise, it reduces the player's participation in the game to zero. The difference is that "succeed or you die" takes so little work compared to the likes of "succeed or your marriage falls apart."

Or to put it another way, in my more dramatic games, players pay attention because there's compelling stuff going on, and not because they're risking the possibility of losing a character and not being able to participate in the game.

I agree, I don't see how Player Character death can normally be interchanged with other sorts of failure. I can see it in some cases - the monsters leave the PCs for dead, then go on to do bad things because the PCs didn't stop them. And a mixed PC-NPC group may suffer deaths of NPCs while PCs don't die, like a US TV show serial where some of the cast have 5-year contracts and the rest don't. Too much of this can really strain disbelief, though.

One of the many assumptions that RPGs really badly need to stop making so ridiculously universal is that PCs should at all times being doing stuff where they're risking their lives.

 

[prosfilaes]

And that is just like fiction. You know the main characters will never die.

That's circular; the reason they are main characters is because they live so long. Could be the red-shirts were PCs played by the same guy, every night.

All players should care if a character lives or dies. And this is a big disconnect for 'Safe Games'. ... Too often in a safe game you see the player of the 'chosen one' not care at all....they know the plot armor will keep them safe.

In my impression, too often in a killer game, the players don't care at all; why bother getting attached to a character when they're going to die and be replaced by another one? You learn a certain detachment; why make family for a character if you're know they're just going to be grieving quickly? What difference does it make if the Fred the Fourth doesn't defeat the villain; Fred the Fifth will be along shortly enough.

 

[prosfilaes]

One of the many assumptions that RPGs really badly need to stop making so ridiculously universal is that PCs should at all times being doing stuff where they're risking their lives.

Er, what about Prime Time Adventures? InSpectre? the Men in Black RPG? That's three off the top of my head. Purist Trail of Cthulhu doesn't have much violence, and PCs are much more likely to go mad then just die. And if there's not more, maybe it's because there's not a lot of demand for it. Violent action is a quick and easy way to make conflict. Someone could make a romance RPG, but it don't see there being much demand for it among the roleplayer demographic. You can do violenceless mysteries, but they're a bit challenging to pull off. There's a reason Raymond Chandler said “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”; it works.

 

[S'mon]

One of the many assumptions that RPGs really badly need to stop making so ridiculously universal is that PCs should at all times being doing stuff where they're risking their lives.

Surely it varies by RPG? But many of the most popular RPGs like D&D do assume that most screen time is spent on life-risking activties.

 

[Barastrondo]

Surely it varies by RPG? But many of the most popular RPGs like D&D do assume that most screen time is spent on life-risking activties.

Yeah, but not every RPG needs to have life-risking activities all the time. Not that I think they do, mind.

I think of classic D&D games I played back in the day, and the stuff that kept us with this bizarre hobby was the pacing. The rooms in the dungeon that are empty, but contain clues about what's going on. The time spent back at the tavern, making contacts. This stuff was already there, and it continued to be there in the games I've been involved with.

Not that RPGs are literary vehicles, but the basic idea of pacing -- of alternating adrenaline with more low-key spots of rising tension or denouement -- is still pretty useful. Not all players are adrenalin junkies who lose interest the moment you have a rest stop. Some prefer the slow build, and pay more attention to the critical climax precisely because it's been properly built up.

Personally, I find too much tension to defeat the purpose: if I'm supposed to be on the edge of my seat for four hours, I'm gonna find something else to do. I favor rising and falling action, and the freedom to spend an entire evening on social activities if that's what the players are in the mood for instead of being bound to the constant "go go go" mode. I totally accept that other players are wired differently. And if some of them think that I'm somehow doing my players a disservice for running a game that doesn't suit an adrenalin junkie, though, they're welcome to be completely in the wrong.

 

[bloodtide]

The type of game you describe would feel hollow to me because if someone dies every session it gets hard to form any attachments. It would be just like a video game.

Also it would be hard to keep introducing new characters. Does your group just handwave it away and do the you look trust worthy join us?

In my games, it makes players fight twice as hard to keep a character alive, not only theirs, but the whole group. People don't want to loose the attachment to the character and to the group. So they fight to stay alive.

Intruding new characters is not hard, players come ready with back-ups. And it can be as much fun making new attachments as it is just using the same old attachments over and over again.

You are making some assumptions I don't understand. You seem to be saying there is two ways to play high death count or no death count.

There is a middle ground where death can happen but be rare.

I don't recall posting that...are you reading my posts in a mirror or something?

But if your not a killer DM, then death is rare. But it depends on your defination of the word(as per the Ye Old Woman trick where she says ''it's ok for you to game once in a while. Now to a gamer 'once in a while' is like once every two weeks, to the woman it 'one every six months(or never, ever again)'.

While lots of players like the safe game, I've found plenty that like the deadly game. After playing in a game where they only loose a couple HP in a dozen battles, they find it very refreshing when characters can and will die. While in a safe game the character will be just fine at the end of the adventure, lots of players much more like the thrill of having a beathen and bloody character. (Compare say Harry Potter at the end of any Harry Potter movie and John Mclaine at the end of Die Hard.)

Also your comment about TV is not my experience when I watch it I know that the Enterprise is not going to be destroyed and everyone is going to die. What I find interesting is how do they fix the problem. Having the characters die is not going to make it more on the edge of my seat.

As a matter of fact where TV is concerned I wouldn't enjoy as much it if a character died every week. I might still watch but I wouldn't develop any attachment to the characters. It is why I am not a huge fan of Game of Thrones.

My favorite book series Katherine Kurtz's Deryni has character death but it is not the whole sale slaughter as Game of Thrones.

I'm a huge Game of Thrones fan, go figure

 

[Barastrondo]

While in a safe game the character will be just fine at the end of the adventure, lots of players much more like the thrill of having a beathen and bloody character. (Compare say Harry Potter at the end of any Harry Potter movie and John Mclaine at the end of Die Hard.)

This is a false dichotomy. Players who would like to keep playing the same character may also enjoy the thrill of having a beaten and bloody character, much like Harry Potter and John McClane (both of whom enjoyed "plot immunity" all the same). I haven't killed a character all year, but hard-won victories happen all the time.

See, it sort of works like this: If you reduce swinginess, and the players have lots of defensive options, then you can hit them reliably hard, beat them down, and figure that they have a pretty good chance of coming through in the end all the same if their teamwork's good. You can then do it again in a follow-up encounter, as many times as is necessary.

"Safe" means a lot of things. To many of us, it means lessened swinginess, and the enemies also having to earn a kill with teamwork (which the players have tools to disrupt). I'm not going to say your idea of a "safe game" is a straw man, because there may be games out there like that, but it's so far from universal it's terrible at generalization.

 

[Elf Witch]

In my games, it makes players fight twice as hard to keep a character alive, not only theirs, but the whole group. People don't want to loose the attachment to the character and to the group. So they fight to stay alive.

Intruding new characters is not hard, players come ready with back-ups. And it can be as much fun making new attachments as it is just using the same old attachments over and over again.



I don't recall posting that...are you reading my posts in a mirror or something?

But if your not a killer DM, then death is rare. But it depends on your defination of the word(as per the Ye Old Woman trick where she says ''it's ok for you to game once in a while. Now to a gamer 'once in a while' is like once every two weeks, to the woman it 'one every six months(or never, ever again)'.

While lots of players like the safe game, I've found plenty that like the deadly game. After playing in a game where they only loose a couple HP in a dozen battles, they find it very refreshing when characters can and will die. While in a safe game the character will be just fine at the end of the adventure, lots of players much more like the thrill of having a beathen and bloody character. (Compare say Harry Potter at the end of any Harry Potter movie and John Mclaine at the end of Die Hard.)


I'm a huge Game of Thrones fan, go figure

Like I said that has not been my experience at all in my 30 years of gaming. I have never seen people fight to keep their characters alive in a high death game. The characters are disposable and that is how they are treated. We all had back up characters ready to go but none of them had backgrounds most of the table could not remember their character names much less anyone else character name.

We did not play as well as a team because since there were constantly new characters that we had not formed attachments to so we would not go out of our way to save them.

Now your players may be different and if they are that's great. And if your game works for you and your players then that is all that matters.

I think you missed my question. I am not saying having back up characters ready I was asking how you introduce them to the party do they just show up, do they have ties to the party already. Story wise how do you fit them in a way that makes the story make sense?

In the games I play in when a person brings in a new character because of death or wanting a change they don't just magically appear and are accepted. The DM and the player work together to find a reason that it makes sense to the story.

For example in one game we had several new characters one was a slave who saw my character being strangled and took a big risk to save my life. A risk that sent him to the games. Because of this we rescued him and with his help finished our mission and took him with us to our country where slavery was outlawed.

Another example we had been captured and in the cell was a bard he helped in the escape and came with us. When we got to our home city we found another mission awaiting us to the city which happened to be the bards home.

I am not the only one who seems to think that you are saying there are safe games and killer games several other people have pointed out to you that there is a middle ground.

Even if death is rare it is always there hanging over your head. So every combat could be the one where you die. You never know when it is going to happen so it keeps you on your toes. And the longer you play your character the more it matters to you that you don't lose them. And when it happens it is profoundly shocking to the players.

If you have death every session then it is expected the players go into the game session knowing someone is going to die. When it happens there is no shock because they expect it what they may feel is relief that it was not there turn to die today.

You keep saying that safe games the players don't invest in their characters as much because they have not fought so hard to keep them alive.

That is simply not true in my game. My players invest in their characters to the point that they actually take time out of their busy lives to write game journals, they search for the perfect miniature. When death has happened you can tell that the player who lost the character is upset and so is the party. Not angry upset but genuinely feeling a loss. That death had meaning to the entire table. Which is why I don't take death off the table but make it rare.

My party works together as a team to make sure no one dies and they make smart plans and use good tactics. They are never blase about combat and you can see them get tense and worried when the combat looks like it is going against them.

 

[Hautamaki]

I could go either way... I have 2 players who only ever lost 1 PC each to me in a year of regular gaming. I have 2 other players who lost nearly 20 each; same group. So is it that I'm a killer DM with two amazingly lucky/skilled players? Or am I just an average DM with 2 amazingly unlucky/foolish players? I'm honestly not sure lol.