You're making a huge and bizarre assumption that the group in general will be excited about having essentially wasted several hours creating PCs who are all now dead, and doing an adventure that they definitely aren't going to finish. Doesn't make sense.
If they had fun in the moments of the char-gen process and the play as long as it lasted, the time wasn't wasted.
Did I waste my time playing the last character I ran in the rogue-like computer game I play? Not at all. Even though it died (and they all do, I've yet to beat the game) I still had fun keeping it going as long as it did, and thus the time wasn't* wasted.
* - in my view; those who think I should be doing something more productive might see it differently.
That's not just a "hot take", that's judgmental in quite a knee-jerk way, flatly insulting to a lot of people here reading it, and shows an apparent serious lack of broad experience of different players/groups/games on your part.
You're showing what looks very much like a lack of real/broad experience here, presumably because you're quickly pushing people out of your group if they don't respond super-positively having their PCs killed. You pretty much directly say that with "had". You're selecting hard for players who love to die,
Not quite. I'm "selecting hard" for players who are willing and able to accept the losses with the wins.
which is preventing you from seeing players who don't, but are also good players - instead you're only left with people who hate dying, but who think "bad RPG sessions are better than no RPG sessions", which is not great, and who generally aren't a lot of fun to play with.
You're also conflating setbacks, and your losing your PC and all the emotional investment, actual effort involved in creating them and so on, and that's flatly nonsensical.
A setback is a setback. The difference is that an in-character setback stays in character and can be dealt with there, while losing a character outright is a setback at the table level.
It's just not the same thing. In reality, many players who love their PCs, love setbacks. To the point where entire games basically use this as a major mechanic - Chronicles of Darkness (i.e. the nWoD) is essentially designed around this - the chances of losing your character without something wild happening are close to nil (not like Russian Roulette like some OSRs or early D&D). The chances of setbacks? Basically 100%, and some of them are going to be absolute whoppers.
If players operated like you say, neither the oWoD, nor the nWoD would have been at all successful, nor would many other RPGs. But they were successful, which frankly, immediately disproves your theory.
Even on a more straightforward level, a lot of players who care about their characters will to huge lengths to keep going - they won't get upset by "setbacks" - on the contrary, those motivate them to find ways around them so they can keep playing their character and keep their character alive.
This last I assume for all. Sometimes, though, your efforts to keep said character alive are going to fail no matter what you do; dice can be nasty things.
There are players who give up at setbacks or get excessively upset by them - they're usually just people aren't having any fun generally - usually due to a DM/player, game/player or player/group mismatch*.
Someone giving up or getting excessively upset by setbacks, where setbacks are a known part of the game, can't IMO look anywhere but the mirror to sort it.
If you see players giving up, and you immediately paint "BAD PEOPLE" or "BAD PLAYERS" on them, as you're claiming you do, without thinking more carefully about the causes, well, that's your choice, but it doesn't mean you're right. My experience is that if people are giving up at just setbacks, you probably need to change something up.
Yes, in that case I do need to change something up: the players at the table.
That can mean that the player is just not going to be a good fit, sure. It does not mean they are a bad person (all the worst people I've ever played with weren't giver-uppers, they were game-wreckers).
I can handle a game-wrecker far more easily than a tantrum-thrower (I've had one or two of these).
But it can also mean that maybe that adventure is really boring. Maybe this game system isn't really working out. Maybe this person is generally unhappy with their character.
True, some adventures don't work out; often enough the players will let me know out-of-character, and I'm glad they do. If someone's unhappy with their character they're always free to retire it and bang out something new - I encourage my players to have a stable of characters in the setting, so if they get bored playing one they can - at the next reasonable in-game opportunity - cycle in another.
I mean the latter is surprisingly common in my experience - I had one of my players is the main group who was really having problems with setbacks the party was facing, and just seemed frustrated, and we talked - and figured out he should play a different character for a while, and then he had a great time (and even eventually went back to the first character!).
Fair enough.
* = There is another group which is "literally children" (including teenagers) who it's very much down to a personality/emotional development/home life/hormones and so on. Kids who couldn't handle a PC dying on a Tuesday might well be able to on Tuesday next week because they're in a different mood etc. but I'm largely excluding them because that's whole other discussion.
Indeed; and I haven't DMed anyone under 20 in a very long time. That said, college-age players can be the best in that their play often boils down to high intelligence, low wisdom.
www.cnn.com
