Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[Micah Sweet]

You feel the way you feel, but this would seem to write off superhero combats in most games that use them being interesting to any meaningful degree. That's certainly not been my experience.

Superhero games are a different beast, and as far as they are concerned I agree with you. But that's not what I want out of D&D.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is an area where probability matters. You can have a chance of death in a system, but where (for any number of mechanical reasons) its not a likely result, but not so off the table that you can ignore it.

The issue for some people as referenced up thread is that random death, even low incidence random death, is also the opposite of interesting. If they're going to lose a character they want to do so in a meaningful context. So you're not going to make both sets of players happy.

I have no issue with random death either, for my part. Plenty of character ideas in the old steel trap.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Superhero games are a different beast, and as far as they are concerned I agree with you. But that's not what I want out of D&D.

I'll note this thread is not just about D&D.

 

[cranberry]

I think we can blame this need for story/character development and plot armor on Matt Mercer, and call it a day.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'll note this thread is not just about D&D.

Fair enough. Life and death are by no means required for games or any other media in the superhero genre.

 

[Lord Shark]

I hate how most fiction goes the way of silly, goofy PG-13, at best. The idea that you have action adventure, with just silly slapstick, does not make for an interesting story.

In the early 20th century there were not many Forever Heroes. The typical format for radio shows, novels and most of all pulp printed magazines was more the Anthology. "Weird Amazing Stories" would have an adventure with a randomly made character like "Rex Strong" . And roughly half of the stories would have the heroes die. A lot of stories had what most modern people only see in The Twilight Zone...or Black Mirror. Like Rex Strong would save Elle from the evil kidnappers, but shed get bitten by a snake. So Rex would suck out the poison and save her life.....but then die of the poison himself.

I guess I must have hallucinated Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Spider, Operator #5, Raffles, Sherlock Holmes, Allan Quatermain, Tom Swift, Sir Denis Nayland Smith, Flash Gordon, Scarlet O'Neil, Buck Rogers, Tarzan, Zorro, Captain Future, Sir Percy Blakeney, John Carter, G-8, and all the other ongoing characters in pulp and adventure fiction from the late 19th/early 20th century.

 

[pemerton]

Without the possibility of character death, combat is uninteresting IMO. Other stakes definitely help, but the possibility of each "life and death" fight to actually be life and death has to be there.

The simple fact is that heroes on fiction usually only die when it’s dramatically appropriate.

<snip>

But nobody goes out randomly. Boromir is killed defending Merry and Pippin, and goes down to overwhelming odds. It’s epic, heroic, and exactly what we want to emulate.

The solution here - as far as RPG design is concerned - is fairly well known. Scenes are only framed, and/or dice are only rolled, when something significant is at stake.

The issue for some people as referenced up thread is that random death, even low incidence random death, is also the opposite of interesting. If they're going to lose a character they want to do so in a meaningful context. So you're not going to make both sets of players happy.

An alternative approach can be this: the probability of death is low, perhaps for practical purposes nil, provided that sufficiently clever decisions are made about how to use player-side resources. 4e D&D combat can approximate this. The interest, then, is not in finding out whether or not we die but making those decisions, as a group, that will keep us alive.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

We had a situation tonight in our Traveller game that fit this topic. I'm a big fan of something designer John Wick said: players want the Die Hard/John McClain experience. There's a thrill that comes from being absolutely run through the wringer and walking away with minimal health knowing a die roll made all the difference. Those are the stories gamers love to tell.

Tonight's Traveller involved us dropping into a system while scouting an escape path for our Federation fleet. Three planetary ships attacked us and brutalized us - in fact, later the GM realized as we were being boarded, we had managed to survive with 1 hull point left on our scout/courier. The enemy wanted to capture it because they had no jump-capable ship. We'd taken massive crits - two to our empty fuel tanks, one to the power plant.

The boarding where it was five NPCs breeching from different points against four PCs was brutal, and got worse. At one point, a PC got melee'd by the not-a-pirate and yeeted out into space above a gas giant. Same time, a PC was taking insane melee damage against the Vice Admiral who boarded us. Through sheer luck and the damaged gravity, I was able to secure the cargo hold and then 'fly' back to finish the Admiral and save the day.

This session, much like many of these sessions of Traveller, ended bad and we will definitely talk about the mechanics making it so severe, but for me, being there, the journey even in that span of going from having things well under control to being one round away from death and not looking at my sheet but choosing to go back into the fray... We didn't need plot armor. But we wanted the actual knowledge of how close we came to being pancakes. Thankfully we could see all the die rolls... and thankfully we all laughed that, with Traveller, character and party creation is its own fun mini-game if it went poorly. YMMV

 

[Micah Sweet]

The solution here - as far as RPG design is concerned - is fairly well known. Scenes are only framed, and/or dice are only rolled, when something significant is at stake.

An alternative approach can be this: the probability of death is low, perhaps for practical purposes nil, provided that sufficiently clever decisions are made about how to use player-side resources. 4e D&D combat can approximate this. The interest, then, is not in finding out whether or not we die but making those decisions, as a group, that will keep us alive.

Seems less exciting to me if the decisions about life or death happen before the actual life or death decision occurs. Maybe that's just me.

 

[bloodtide]

A lot of other pulp heroes survive too. Even in HPL's stories, the narrator is typically alive though perturbed and feeling threatened.

Some did die was my point.

One of the most epic films ever made is Lawrence of Arabia. We, the audience, know he will survive the war because the framing device is his death in a motorcycle accident after the war. This doesn't make the rest of the film pointless.

Obviously innumerable other examples could be given.

The idea that RPGing, even FRPGing, is "pointless" if the PCs can't die is just wrong. Fiction in other media doesn't depend upon the prospect of death to generate drama and tension. RPGing doesn't need to either.

I guess it works for a "great film" : the mian character does not die. It does not work so well for a massive spam of films, books or whatever...and RPGs. When the character goes on their 100th quest....wow, wonder if they will survive? Oh...right, yuk yuk. And it is pointless, the character does not have to even try and beat the dragon: they have already won and saved the day and everyone knows it.

A foe does 20 damage to a character, the character has 10 hit points....what happens? Nothing. The rules don't matter when the character has plot armor. Why even bother with the rules if your playing this sort of game style?

Take two groups and run them through an adventure. The first is a group that agrees on no character death ever and the heroes always succeed. The second in my game: hard core hard fun unfair unbalanced anyone can die at the drop of a die anytime. When the first group successfully completes the adventure did they really accomplish anything? they just sort of automatically succeeded as that is the game they played. My players had the hardest time possible and really had to make a huge effort to succeed. It makes for a very different game.