"Lethal" games?

[BrokeAndDrive]

Thread Summary:

What PnPs can be truly named lethal? Brutal? Murderous? Harder than punching a raging bull to death after he's gored both your biceps? Where if you still have your starting character after the third session, you're probably cheating?


Where I Blather About A Bunch Of Pointless Crap Because Threads Are Cooler If The Opening Post Is Twelve Paragraphs:

Odd question, I know. But I ask because sometimes, I get a streak of masochism and I want to die. Repeatedly. Gloriously.

I mean, how else can you explain that one weekend where I was ruthlessly slaughtered about five-thousand times before I beat Hell Revealed 2 on Ultra-Violence... WITH the Hard-Doom add-on? My head just started pounding from the memory of how much I yelled at my monitor. Did I mention I love Ghoul's Forest 3, because its gamestyle can be summed up as "one wrong move and you're DEAD"?

Or that I use similar mods in games like Morrowind and Oblivion where enemies do about quadruple damage just because it's more exciting?

Or that I've spent a few hours reading up on all the ways you can die in NetHack, and am seriously considering giving it a try? Ditto here.

Or that, with a rictus grin, I watch stuff like [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r86NLwCYXfk]this[/ame], [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUefYz6cDUY]this[/ame], and [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw4T0zBX8rc]this[/ame]* because it makes me so darn happy?

* I challenge anyone to re-enact THIS battle in D&D!!

Sometimes I just wanna get my ass kicked.

And now I'm curious as to how and where I can best receive this type of beating (yet still prevail, broken and bloody, manly tears spilling from where my eyes used to be) in tabletop gaming as well.

Something like, "You attempt to melee with the 300 ft. tall primordial, but he interrupts! You are summarily backhanded by one of his thousands of stone tentacles that are also made of lightning, cold, and the tears of orphans and you take *rolls dice* 134 damage and are pushed 30 squares and knocked prone and stunned. I'd say more, but you seem to require new underwear. I'd say the same thing about your character, but he doesn't need to worry about that, missing his lower half and all."

Yes, that sometimes is exhilarating for me!

There's gotta be other occasional gluttons for punishment out there who know where to get a fix.

 

[MortalPlague]

I can definitely appreciate the aim here. Being a fan of horror films has lent me a similar view of that sort of thing; sometimes it's fun to have a character get killed. It can be really cool to be the last one standing at the end of a vicious, visceral battle.

System-wise, I don't know of any which are quite that brutal. Paranoia is, but it's a completely different tone. Shadowrun has a pleasant lethality (having a weapon pointed at you is a big deal), but it's not the best for fantasy settings. I'd recommend taking a look at Conan d20 (has a feat, if I recall, that allows you to decapitate on a crit).

 

[Ariosto]

Something like, "You attempt to melee with the 300 ft. tall primordial, but he interrupts! You are summarily backhanded by one of his thousands of stone tentacles that are also made of lightning, cold, and the tears of orphans and you take *rolls dice* 134 damage and are pushed 30 squares and knocked prone and stunned. I'd say more, but you seem to require new underwear. I'd say the same thing about your character, but he doesn't need to worry about that, missing his lower half and all."

That suggests SenZar to me, or maybe Exalted, but I'm not very familiar with either.

Going back, The Arduin Grimoire had critical hits such as "99: Body split in twain, immediate death" -- which also did 10-100 points of damage. Plus a 20th level spell (for a magic-user with intelligence 40+ and experience level 39+, and costing 100 "mana points" ) to summon the Hounds of Tindalos. Also included were monsters such as the Ibathene: 30 to 50 hit dice, tongue so many feet long "wraps stickily, doing 1-12 to 2-24 crush (and then hauls those hit into its maw for a 6-60 to 8-80 bite), 2 claws for 3-36 to 5-50 each or instead 1 tail smash for 4-48 to 6-72." Welcome to Skull Tower and The Runes of Doom provided more awesomeness supplemental to popular fantasy rules sets circa 1977-78.

(Your "primordial" puts me in mind of Arduin's demons.)

TSR published Empire of the Petal Throne, a lot like D&D but set on an alien planet packed with stuff primed to kill humans (including other humans). There was a .5% chance of instant death with each hit, before even considering all the nasty (often enough "don't save, just die") poisons and spells and diseases and curses and artifacts.

Supplement II to the original D&D game included hit locations that work best with a good few hit points (the Blackmoor campaign having, so I gather, given characters 1-100, with level advancement giving saving throws to avoid taking hits). A humanoid character, for instance, got 15% of total HP (e.g., 40 x .15 = 6) in the head, destruction of which would cause instant death.

Not that a 1st-level character, lucky to have 6 points total in the more usual HP systems, needed a lot of help getting killed. With 4 points, death after two hits was more than 90% likely.

RuneQuest had/has a lot of detail on process, with rolls to hit and parry, armor by location, and so on. For well-equipped characters, deadliness was (I'm not up on the recent editions) perhaps less than with D&D Supp. II, but losing the use of limbs at least until healed (if not getting permanently crippled) was common enough. I found it slightly cumbersome beyond a point. For really superhuman stuff like the Crimson Bat and the Heroes able to fight it, I would rather go for good old D&D.

There's also Rolemaster, which combines features of different systems. There's a free download of HARP Lite, sort of a stripped-down version of RM, available at this page:

http://www.harphq.com/vault.htm#HARPlite

 

[Pielorinho]

Nothing, I think, beats the old Call of Cthulhu, in which Cthulhu's attack was to eat 1d6 PCs per turn.

 

[pogre]

I've often discussed running a con game with 24 players and three tables. Each table is running S1 Tomb of Horrors. When a PC gets killed, the player goes into the dead pool rotation and the next player up takes their spot with the caveat that you cannot return to the table that killed you last.

 

[Ariosto]

I think the Crimson Bat gulped down just 2 characters (or anything less than SIZ 50) per round. Bite 750% !! but Strike Rank 5 (with 12 SR/round).

The AD&D Deities & Demigods versions of Cthulhu and even Azathoth were perhaps not quite as scary in terms of sheer lethality as the CoC versions, from the perspective of a party of high-level characters. On the other hand, there was a good chance of going insane while still 100 or 1000 miles away!

 

[FireLance]

And now I'm curious as to how and where I can best receive this type of beating (yet still prevail, broken and bloody, manly tears spilling from where my eyes used to be) in tabletop gaming as well.

It depends on whether you want to prevail by luck or by skill.

Prevailing by luck is simple. Just ask your DM to pit you against tougher monsters. As the monsters get tougher (relative to your PCs) the chance of you prevailing will drop until you will only be able to prevail with a series of good rolls on your part and/or a series of bad rolls on the part of the monster.

Prevailing by skill may be more complicated. Perhaps one way to simulate this is to throw darts at a standard 20-sector dartboard instead of rolling a d20. Combine that with the previous idea of tougher monsters and your ability to prevail will depend on your skill at darts.

 

[Shades of Green]

Traveller is quite lethal; in both the Classic and Mongoose versions, a typical gunshot can cause a serious wound, and two will possibly kill you. Of course, if you use the Striker rules for Classic Traveller, every hit means rolling 2d6 on a table (adding the attack's penetration and subtracting the target's armor) where a result of 12 or more means instant death; so even a very weak pistol (penetration 0) has a 3% chance of killing an unarmored person with one shot, and rifles (penetration 3) have an 28% chance of killing an unarmored person in one hit, and that's not counting multiple hits from autofire...

So you should definitely use cover and ambushes and avoid combat if possible.

 

[Aus_Snow]

And now I'm curious as to how and where I can best receive this type of beating (yet still prevail, broken and bloody, manly tears spilling from where my eyes used to be) in tabletop gaming as well.

Honestly, most RPGs do exactly this, IME. Unless you house rule them, or whatever, that kind of "narrative" conceit tends to be a fairly prominent feature.

So. . . take your pick. Unless what you're saying what you want is (mechanically) detailed wounds and suchlike. Then, sure, check out RuneQuest or HARP or Rolemaster or The Riddle Of Steel, or well, many another "gritty" fantasy RPG.

 

[The Shaman]

2e Boot Hill is perhaps the most character-lethal roleplaying game I've played. Wounds come in minor, major, and mortal; a shoulder hit can kill your character outright, and a wound to the head is deadly sixty percent of the time.

Makes no difference how fast or accurate or tough you are; if you get hit, eventually you will die.