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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8448256" data-attributes="member: 6670763">When I started to really work myself into the mysteries of classic 70s dungeon crawling, one thing that started to become clear about campaigns in which very fragile characters with minimal stats keep going into dungeons day in and out for the sake of exploring dungeons, is that you have to approach characters very differently than in contemporary D&D editions.One thing that is frequently said is that character death in this type of game is not a big issue because the minimalistic stats with no skills and feats and only one spell at first level means new characters can be done in five minutes. What this really means is that characters are replaceable. You use them until they break and then replace them.This goes together with a quite different understanding of story. The story in such a game is not a retelling of a character's life with all the ambitions, turns, payoffs, and resolutions, but rather the antics, stunts, and shenanigans that happen from scene to scene. Story is not about specific characters pursuing goals over months or years and their relationships. It's the problem solving in the moment.I believe Darkest Dungeon is not a bad comparison for how the relationships between players and characters works. In Darkest Dungeon, you control a roster of 10 to 20 adventurers that inevitably get worn out by the ordeal, and the key to making progress is to not waste time and resources on trying to bering every character back to fighting shape, but to kick most of them back out into the cold and replace them with new recruits, whose job is to make the money needed to pay for the required treatment of your elite veterans. And inevitably you will get very much attached to some of the long running members of your crew, which you remember getting knocked out four times in a fight but coming back against all odds and helping the party to victory, and then later being the only survivor against a boss who killed the entire rest of that team. These characters have no existence outside of the dungeon crawl and do nothing but fight. But they also develop excentricities, like refusing to do certain actions, being particularly vulnerable or resistant against specific horror, and so on, which gives them the appearance of individual personality, even though the game has no dialogs.And in the end, they still will get ripped apart by some fiendish abomination and replaced by a new green recruit. You know it, and you learn to live with it.</blockquote>

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