Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[bloodtide]

What RPG are you talking about?

All of them. When the DM and players all agree to change, bend or ignore the game rules it does not matter what game you are playing.

In D&D, depending on edition there are many different things that might happen when a PC with 10 hp suffers 20 hp of damage. My favourite version of D&D is 4e, and in that version the PC in question is knocked unconscious and has to make death saves.

True. But no edition I know of has a rule like "just ignore the damage as no player character can ever die".

What do you mean by "running a group through an adventure", in this context? Are we assuming railroading by the GM? That all the scenes to be framed are known in advance?

Well, just playing through the adventure with the basic idea: the players succeed, lets just see how they do it. The most obvious is the "no character death rule", so they basically just ignore hit points. But also anything the characters "do" will be the right and correct thing to succeed at the adventure. The Dm and Players all agree the player characters can't fail....so they don't.

As @Irlo posted, I don't know how these two things are related. I've never heard of a RPG in which the PCs always succeed, and I don't really know what you have in mind by that.

It's not a game as in rules set down on page 11. It's a game play style.

What RPG system are you talking about? I assume some version of D&D, played in a broadly 1980s-but-not-DL style.

Again, it's a play style.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Does being banished from their hometown count? Or having their beloved killed? Or losing all their wealth and fame? These are all long-lasting personal detrimental effects that are part and parcel of the sorts of stories (fantasy and others) that inspire RPGs. D&D, as typically played, rarely puts these at stake. But many other RPGs do.

If they do that while taking death off the table (except by PC consent), I don't consider it enough for D&D. Other games, sure.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Some did die was my point.

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.

This all just tells us how little you have grasped, or at least as narrow as your vision of RPGs is. Nor is your 'comparison' meaningful, because it utterly misses the entire point! Are you really suggesting that all adventure-type literature is worthless because the major characters won't die? All the stories of super heroes and mythological characters is all just boring nonsense because the death of the main character isn't part of the agenda?

But, I actually agree with you, for a certain narrow niche set out of all possible RPGs it is part of the equation. I think its a hell of a boring equation, overall, but its not always bad. I mean, we did play this way for the first several years, until we started noticing, maybe around 1979 or 1980 or so, that the 'death' of a sheet of paper doesn't actually mean anything much. Yeah, it can be a perfectly interesting challenge, to survive, but it can also be a perfectly interesting challenge to, say figure out how to swindle everyone's money. Or it can be an interesting experience to find out if your character REALLY WILL do anything to save his friend. Those are interesting too, and they require different tools.

You may, one day, also arrive at this conclusion, most people who play RPGs long enough eventually do. At that point, come talk to us, we'll be around.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, there are a number of games that, effectively, have that baked into the mechanics, particularly games with semi-realistic potential combat results, but strong enough metacurrancy to put your thumb on the scale. In practice, that's usually the case with Savage Worlds; the open ended damage rolls can kill almost anybody, but if a moderate amount of Bennies are in play, you can throw a wall between those open ended rolls and death with Soak in the vast majority of cases. In some its even more strong; for all its grittiness, Mythras Luck can be used to outright make a Mortal Wound just a Serious Wound.

I don't think @pemerton is talking about anything 'meta' at all. Its more like, "did you make a plan that works?" If so, then you almost surely win, if not then there's some negative consequences, which might include PC death, or other lesser consequences. 4e doesn't really have meta-currency, at least I would say its 'currencies' are pretty concrete and first-order, being directly visible in-game when deployed (IE Action Points). I guess you could call 'skilled use of an AP' a rather slightly 'meta' play, perhaps. Anyway, did I equip myself with the right weapon? Do I have a potion that will protect me from X? Did I bring some equipment which gets me past terrain Y? These are all things that might spell the difference between success and failure. Actually the most obvious of these would be something like B/X D&D, which is pretty darn trad. But 4e is a good example because outright death is probably not the negative consequence, yet a game of skill is QUITE apparent.

 

[The Shadow]

Well, just playing through the adventure with the basic idea: the players succeed, lets just see how they do it. The most obvious is the "no character death rule", so they basically just ignore hit points. But also anything the characters "do" will be the right and correct thing to succeed at the adventure. The Dm and Players all agree the player characters can't fail....so they don't.

There has got to be some disconnect here, because for the life of me I don't see how these sentences, and even clauses, lead to each other.

How does "the PCs won't die" equate to "the players succeed"? Surely it's possible for the party to live, yet utterly fail in their objectives?

How does "no character death" equate to "ignore hit points"? Surely one can track hit points, leading to one or more characters unconscious on the ground, and not have their contribution to the fight, without in any way requiring them to die? Which might mean the entire party gets defeated and captured!

Where did this agreement allegedly happen, in which it was determined that everything the PCs did would be right and they can't fail? Because that seems to me to be entirely orthogonal to whether the PCs can die or not.

I'm not seeing how or why you're equating these things.

 

[pemerton]

@bloodtide

My response to your most recent post is similar to @The Shadow's - I can't really work out what you have in mind.

In particular, I can't work out what it is that you are contrasting with a fairly traditional approach to Tomb of Horrors or White Plume Mountain or whatever you are thinking of as "the adventure" that gets played through. You refer to a "play style" but it's not one I'm familiar with - you clearly don't adopt it, I don't know of anyone else who adopts it, so where is it found other than in your imagination?

I think I'm one of the few posters in this thread to have actually referenced a particular RPG which has as a concrete principle that PC death is not normally an important part of play, namely, Prince Valiant. (The Shadow referenced Fate.) But in Prince Valiant adverse consequences in conflicts - which are mechanically expressed as depletions of one's dice pool - are carefully tracked, and there is no such thing as "agreeing that the PCs can't fail". Upthread I posted this link to a session in which the PCs failed - those who were pursuing a kidnapper failed to catch him; the one who was leading the defence of a castle against a siege failed in his leadership, and the castle fell to its besiegers; and then when all the PCs were trying to withdraw to their friendly castle, their enemies caught up to them just outside its walls.

Whether or not PC death is a typical possibility in play simply has on bearing on what was at stake in these various conflicts, whether or not they were exciting (I can report that to me they seemed to be), and whether or not the PCs succeeded at them (as I've already posted and reiterated, they didn't).

 

[hawkeyefan]

All of them. When the DM and players all agree to change, bend or ignore the game rules it does not matter what game you are playing.

True. But no edition I know of has a rule like "just ignore the damage as no player character can ever die".

Tales From the Loop is an RPG about kids in a strange 1980s that never was. The rules of the game are that the player-characters cannot die. It would be bending the rules to say that they can.

Now you know of a game where the PCs cannot die. This is also not the only one, just an example where it is explicitly a rule. So stop saying it's true of all RPGs.

Feel free to say "It's true of the one RPG I play" but stop assuming that's the only game, or that other people are incapable of coming up with meaningful stakes beyond character death.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

"It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That is not a failure; that is life".

And Role Playing Games are NOT LIFE!!!! There is barely the faintest connection between the two in most cases. I'm not playing Pencils and Paperclips.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To me, the question is, "can the PCs suffer permanent/long-lasring, personal, detrimental effects (such as death) without their consent?". If they can't, quite frankly I'm not interested.

How about "I had to decide between betraying my country or killing an innocent, and either way I will lose the respect of people whom I care about?" Or "I learned that I'm actually NOT willing to lay down my life for you." Or "I like money and power more than my own family?" All these are questions we could ask in an RPG, but you don't seem to be able to imagine anything but death or maybe losing a limb or something as being legitimate stakes. Its like you read one comic book and declared you understand everything about the genre or something.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And Role Playing Games are NOT LIFE!!!! There is barely the faintest connection between the two in most cases. I'm not playing Pencils and Paperclips.

Where possible, I want my RPGs to emulate reality as much as they can. Abstractions are a necessary evil.