On "Illusionism" (+)

[Celebrim]

This is an interesting point, and part of why I posed the question about player choice. What if the player's want (to keep playing that character) is at odds with what the character wants (some goal that may result in their death)? What will the player choose then? To keep playing their character or to honor what the character has been about?

I've never seen a case where the player decides to martyr their character for a cause or ideology. The players wants generally outweigh what the character wants, and beyond that most of my players will play a character with very simple self-centered wants so that the hypothetical conflict you are describing just doesn't arise. It would be great if I had lots of players over the years that prioritized playing characters with deep and complex ethics and a willingness to die in some cause, but that's not my experience.

I think games lately that have been pulling death and other long term consequences from the fiction may be doing so because they want to free up players to care about ethics without worrying about whether they need to make a sacrifice to advance the story, but first of all that isn't the same thing as choosing to sacrifice for the sake of the story, and secondly I'm not sure that goal logically follows from the rule change.

Not if they care about the fiction in this kind of deep way.

Yeah, but do they? A lot of them play with a combination of Challenge and Fantasy aesthetics where they want to overcome obstacles in preferably ways that make them feel cool and empowered. They want to Discover the hidden secrets and profit and progress, loving when they *ding" and get powerful and capable playing pieces, and being able to laugh when they reminisce about the cool things their PC's have done. They aren't particularly interested in exploring idealism versus utilitarianism, exploring tragedy and loss, or imagining attachments and loyalties to NPCs that then they'd need to protect.

 

[Pedantic]

I find it hard to separate the kind of care you've described that a player may have for a character with care of the events that happen in the fiction, and so I don't see it as so clearly a preference of one over the other... I don't know if "most players" would choose to keep their character alive in these cases. Not if they care about the fiction in this kind of deep way.

It is this kind of point that makes me sincerely wish we could slice the hobby in twain. You are describing a completely different magic circle than the one I'm stepping into, and it contains conceits and agreements that I do not generally make, nor, really, ones that I want to make. I'm not sure I care about characters in the way you're describing here even when I'm purely consuming fiction, or perhaps that even when I do it's subordinate to other things.

I don't have any players that go that far, but I do have a player or two that just love making PC's and have a stack of them ready to go for when or if their PC dies. So yeah, I can imagine that there is some variation in how people relate to the PC's, and that's probably influenced by how disposable the processes of play make a PC (no sense getting attached if your PC is going to die quickly). I'm just expressing what I've seen as the normal from players over the last 40 years.

I don't know that I'd be in a hurry to conflate that with disposability, I'm more just saying that there's other motivations for keeping a character alive. In my current game for example, I know at least two of the PCs fully intend to retire their characters, have new characters planned, are excited to try out their mannerisms, voices and ability sets and all that, but are pointedly trying to keep their current characters alive (both to deal with the current problems, and so they can set up the kind of retirements they have in mind for them). Character death is quite rare in most games I've run or participated in, for all it presents an opportunity that is appealing to some players.

 

[Arilyn]

I admit I don't have a lot of experience with games like that. The closest I have is running my SIPS system for my very young children where I felt large and meaningful and persistent consequences were just inappropriate to the maturity of the players. The very young players felt the consequences of "skinned knees" and "scared" and "crying" perhaps too keenly as we RPed out being children in a fairy tale setting.

I've played a "Jane Austen" style card game a few times where the goal is marrying the most eligible bachelor and death is reaching the marriage stage and finding yourself doomed to an unpleasant and/or lonely life as an old maid, and defeat is seeing your rival live happily ever after. And that's fun and all but I'm not sure how it is relevant to an "Jane Austen" style RPG unless you have some loss of status, reputation, and honor such that you are forced to retire the character in disgrace, hidden away in the attic and no one mentions you anymore. Otherwise, I can't see that such a game really has any failure beyond, the game has gotten boring.

Which isn't to say that it's a bad game, I'm just not sure it tickles the itch on certain aesthetics of play.

"Mr. Warrington, who had behaved in such a gentlemanly manner, when visiting my family, was abominably rude to me, my father and my poor younger sister at the ball. I am deeply humiliated and my dear sister still refuses to leave her room. She is of such a delicate nature, I truly fear for her spirits ever returning to their former cheerful state. I have implored my family and closest acquaintances to never see Mr. Warrington again, no matter how handsome he is and no matter his 10,000 pounds a year!"

See? Great stakes, indeed. Horrors worse than death!

There are many many ways to play rpgs. And many stakes that can feel huge at the table, depending on theme.

 

[Lanefan]

This is an interesting point, and part of why I posed the question about player choice. What if the player's want (to keep playing that character) is at odds with what the character wants (some goal that may result in their death)? What will the player choose then? To keep playing their character or to honor what the character has been about?

This happens all the time, and IMO the priority should be to honour what the character would do. And this isn't just restricted to playing the character into its grave; far more common IME is playing a character out of the party if-when leaving the party is what the character would do.

Or, as in the game I ran which I was thinking of when I asked the question, what if the player had to choose between letting the character die, or having the character changed in a significant way?

If that choice is presented as an integral part of the fiction, then it's up to each player at the time based (ideally) on what the character would do. If it's being presented in the metagame, as in "Bob, tell ya what - if you're willing to accept your character losing its ancestral home, I'll change the narrative such that you survive what's happening here", that's awful: it shouldn't be presented at all.

Not in a way that may as well be character death (which I think describes most of the examples provided by @Lanefan, though some I think were temporary or can be readily fixed) but in a way that matters to the fiction.

I find it hard to separate the kind of care you've described that a player may have for a character with care of the events that happen in the fiction, and so I don't see it as so clearly a preference of one over the other... I don't know if "most players" would choose to keep their character alive in these cases. Not if they care about the fiction in this kind of deep way.

I can't tell if we're in agreement here or not. I think we are as to the player-side outcome, but maybe not as to how the choice arises and-or is presented...?

 

[Umbran]

Well first, what are the consequences of PC death, typically?
...

Those seem to be the big ones, I think. Are there others?

Player disengagement from the material is a potential consequence. Even if they keep playing, they have lost their "hooks", and may not rebuild new ones quickly.

If the new character is not "Joe Fighter #2", the GM may well have to create new narrative elements relating to the new character, which may not be as well integrated into the campaign as a whole. If the new character presents a different mechanical skillset, previously developed elements may need to be discarded, adjusted, or replaced.

In the very short term (like, in the session where the character dies) the player is apt to be distinctly unhappy - that's a consequence that shouldn't be ignored. That player will not be able to engage in play the same way until a new character is made, which isn't likely to be instantaneously. In addition, for the remainder of that session, the group as a whole is operating at reduced capacity.

Basically, killing a character can pretty much kill that session of play as well.

 

[Celebrim]

"Mr. Warrington, who had behaved in such a gentlemanly manner, when visiting my family, was abominably rude to me, my father and my poor younger sister at the ball. I am deeply humiliated and my dear sister still refuses to leave her room. She is of such a delicate nature, I truly fear for her spirits ever returning to their former cheerful state. I have implored my family and closest acquaintances to never see Mr. Warrington again, no matter how handsome he is and no matter his 10,000 pounds a year!"

See? Great stakes, indeed. Horrors worse than death!

I adore "Pride and Prejudice" but I don't get it.

There are many many ways to play rpgs. And many stakes that can feel huge at the table, depending on theme.

Indeed. There are many ways to play RPGs. Indeed, there are many different ways to play the same RPG. And, really, if its the best enjoyment of the game at your table, well you probably aren't doing it wrong. But I'm not even sure a group composed of my wife and her college roommates (which I did teach RPGs to, and one of which has recently begged me to run a Pendragon game) would really get into the aesthetics implied by your diary entry.

 

[tomBitonti]

I don't think that it's appropriate to focus on the idea of "stop playing" as the reason character death (or equivalent loss of a PC) is the reason why it's the only really significant consequence in an RPG, to the extent that if you give players the choice you'll find that the only things "worse than death" are things that also take away the character.

I think the issue is that players have a relationship to their player characters equivalent to a person has to a highly valued material possession of some sort which they value not primarily for its cost, but because of the journey they have taken with it and the sentimental value they attach to it. Think of the value attached to an old car which you've done the work on yourself or to a painting that you yourself painted or a vase you made on a potter's wheel and you kept because it was the first one you really felt proud of or that house that was a fixer upper that you made into a home or your original wedding ring - whatever you can think of that you value above just being a thing.

Not every player does that, but in my experience the vast majority do so such that losing that PC hurts as much as losing something "real". Sure, you can replace it without too much trouble in most campaigns, but you will as you say lose the story the PC is carrying and the history the PC had that you'd built. It won't be the same, at least not at first.

And the reason that no other consequence is significant is because no matter how invested the player is in other elements of the story, they've never invested nearly as much time into those things as they have into the PC. So the vast majority of players in a long running campaign will always prioritize the PC over any other story element - winning, NPCs, fictional positioning, etc. Generally speaking, players will treat any crash they can walk away from as a good landing. They may want vengeance on an NPC afterwards. They may want to restore their PC's name and honor afterwards. They may want to do a lot of things to recover from the consequence, but the point is that that is fun and they get to do it with their PC. None of that is really failure. That's emotionally success with minor consequences that propel the story forward. That's more history to the PC that increases the PCs value.

Things that permanently cripple a PC can be equivalent to death, and indeed can be perceived as worth that death because they attack the mental image of the PC and in some systems are harder to recover from than death - a more permanent loss. But that has I think already been well covered, both by myself and Lanefan's creative list of ways to fail.

I think we are in agreement? In a game with light story investment, death or any of the other catastrophes can still mean an interruption of play. When an encounter can run for hours, an early death means being unengaged for hours. In a game with heavy story investment, the consequence is an interruption, or maybe even a termination, of an ongoing story.

Tying this back to illusionism, I still think this is a system flaw. There should be the possibility of varying degrees of failure that do not cause these problems. When the GM adjusts outcomes to fix this sort of problem, that seems more tolerable. Not that the reduction of stakes and the removal of consequences is entirely problem free.

TomB

 

[Arilyn]

I adore "Pride and Prejudice" but I don't get it.



Indeed. There are many ways to play RPGs. Indeed, there are many different ways to play the same RPG. And, really, if its the best enjoyment of the game at your table, well you probably aren't doing it wrong. But I'm not even sure a group composed of my wife and her college roommates (which I did teach RPGs to, and one of which has recently begged me to run a Pendragon game) would really get into the aesthetics implied by your diary entry.

Good Society is a Regency RPG in the spirit of Austen. It's well received and popular, and certainly not the only rpg in this vein.

My diary entry was just me being a bit silly, but I did want to illustrate that games can have wildly different stakes in an Austen inspired game. The stakes facing the characters would be: Do I marry for security or love? Can I hide my nefarious background from the people in my new home town? Can I escape the bad reputation of my family? How far will I go to gain my heart's desire? Certainly these games are not appealing to everyone, but there is a market.

Dungeon crawls to Austen Regency romance and everything in between. All have stakes and they are all essential within the confines activities of the games.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I've never seen a case where the player decides to martyr their character for a cause or ideology. The players wants generally outweigh what the character wants, and beyond that most of my players will play a character with very simple self-centered wants so that the hypothetical conflict you are describing just doesn't arise. It would be great if I had lots of players over the years that prioritized playing characters with deep and complex ethics and a willingness to die in some cause, but that's not my experience.

I expect that is a common take, but it's not universal. I have played games that work exactly as you've described. I've also played games that were more focused on character, and where the players very much do care about this kind of stuff. Where they are not only concerned about the welfare and power of their characters, but other things as well.

I think games lately that have been pulling death and other long term consequences from the fiction may be doing so because they want to free up players to care about ethics without worrying about whether they need to make a sacrifice to advance the story, but first of all that isn't the same thing as choosing to sacrifice for the sake of the story, and secondly I'm not sure that goal logically follows from the rule change.

I think you're partially right. I think that those games that remove PC death as a possibility do so in order for the focus to be on other stakes. I think that's pretty clear. I don't know if I think it's all about ethics and so on, though it could be. It's that the stories are about other things than mere survival or adventure.

I also think it's interesting that you describe the removal of PC death as a "rule change". Certainly for games that have that rule, it's not a change... its simply a rule.

Yeah, but do they? A lot of them play with a combination of Challenge and Fantasy aesthetics where they want to overcome obstacles in preferably ways that make them feel cool and empowered. They want to Discover the hidden secrets and profit and progress, loving when they *ding" and get powerful and capable playing pieces, and being able to laugh when they reminisce about the cool things their PC's have done. They aren't particularly interested in exploring idealism versus utilitarianism, exploring tragedy and loss, or imagining attachments and loyalties to NPCs that then they'd need to protect.

Some games are better designed to deliver that type of experience. I think the mindset of the players is important, as well, but when a game is designed to deliver an experience, that makes it easier for players.

The example I gave of a player choosing to let his PC die or to be significantly changed came from our game of Spire, as the result of the character taking a severe Blood Fallout. His choice was to die, but take one last action with a bonus because it's the last thing he'll do, or to defy death, but to return changed. He opted to return changed. And that decision affected the campaign more significantly than his dying would have.

It is this kind of point that makes me sincerely wish we could slice the hobby in twain. You are describing a completely different magic circle than the one I'm stepping into, and it contains conceits and agreements that I do not generally make, nor, really, ones that I want to make. I'm not sure I care about characters in the way you're describing here even when I'm purely consuming fiction, or perhaps that even when I do it's subordinate to other things.

Right, this is more about viewing the character as a playing piece, and being attached to it. Which is a perfectly valid way to play, of course, but it's not the only valid way.

 

[Celebrim]

Tying this back to illusionism, I still think this is a system flaw. There should be the possibility of varying degrees of failure that do not cause these problems.

There always are. The possibility of death doesn't preclude other sorts of consequences.

But, again, my stake on this was simply that just because I did not want to kill a PC as a GM, did not mean that I would refuse to kill a PC as the logical consequences of their actions. I agree PC death is terrible for the game. But if you don't allow it to happen and you use Illusionism to remove the possibility of it happening, then I feel those consequences are worse for the game - especially in any game that features violent conflict.