On the Importance of Mortality

[Jack7]

I should probably mention that my position in this thread reflects my preferences as DM, not as a player.

HOW DARE YOU!! All those electrons I killed and here I find out you weren't even being square with us about your true motives?!


I'm telling one of the moderators.

Well, ... maybe not.
But it's the thought that counts.

So I'm gonna be watching you in the future.

 

[Raven Crowking]

But, to answer your general question (again): there exists in my campaign events which cannot be undone/done over.

Which is really the important issue. Death may be just one in a category of such possibilities....the most obvious and commonly used, but not the only one. As long as the buck stops somewhere, actions can have meaning within the context of the game.

So, from that standpoint, much of the importance attributed to "death" in this discussion really should pertain to any such occurance.

However, I still don't want to imagine villians as Dr. Evil, with Scott in the background saying "You know he's just going to escape; kill him already!" Sometimes keeping the PCs alive is appropriate villian behaviour. Sometimes it is not.

RC

 

[Mallus]

Death may be just one in a category of such possibilities....the most obvious and commonly used, but not the only one. As long as the buck stops somewhere, actions can have meaning within the context of the game.

Yes. We should stop here, because we've actually reached agreement!

However, I still don't want to imagine villians as Dr. Evil, with Scott in the background saying "You know he's just going to escape; kill him already!" Sometimes keeping the PCs alive is appropriate villian behaviour. Sometimes it is not.

Conversely, I prefer imagining the protagonists in my games as Captain Kirk; though the evil computer, pseudo-god, space Nazi, ancient log-shaped planet-killer or Ricardo Montelban may get the better of him temporarily, he'll always come out alright in the end.

 

[Reynard]

Conversely, I prefer imagining the protagonists in my games as Captain Kirk; though the evil computer, pseudo-god, space Nazi, ancient log-shaped planet-killer or Ricardo Montelban may get the better of him temporarily, he'll always come out alright in the end.

Out of curiosioty, if you are running a game and one of your players tells you they want the possibility of death for their character -- i.e. no plot immunity -- what do you do?

 

[Reynard]

(BTW, no one in this thread is discussing players reacting badly or immaturely to PC death. Why start now?)

I didn't mean to suggest that anyone was heading that way or it was even a motivation for not liking death in a game. I was merely saying "Even if I like a character, their death doesn't take away my enjoyment of the game."

 

[Mallus]

Out of curiosioty, if you are running a game and one of your players tells you they want the possibility of death for their character -- i.e. no plot immunity -- what do you do?

I oblige them.

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

If I'm reading accurately (please correct me if I'm wrong, FreeTheSlaves), FreeTheSlaves created his character with full intention and knowledge that the character would be a hero. DestroyYouAlot's post claimed that D&D must have uncertainty about whether the PC concerned will be a hero or not. I see a significant conflict between the two. I do not, however, see anything in DestroyYouAlot's post that implies a high kill ratio. Though admittedly his poster name does

Pretty much spot on.

The high-kill-ratio was a bit of a from-the-hip 'shot gun' comment regarding the necessity of death within my definition of heroism.

I used the term 'ratio' in counter to the argument that character death must have actually occurred for it to be considered a real possibility. Nevermind the lethality status of the campaign before the first character death occurred. Correct me if I am wrong, but i do not believe a ratio can include a 0, and as such I used the term - i.e. 15 monster deaths for 1 character death, i.e. 15:1.

The whole point of the above mess is that imo character death is not a component of my definition of my character's heroism. Overcoming adversity for a good cause is my definition. Deaths are a non-essential byproduct.

 

[Reynard]

I oblige them.

I was just curious if you preferred the "story" to encompass the PCs as well.

 

[Fenes]

I was just curious if you preferred the "story" to encompass the PCs as well.

The main goal is for everyone to ahve fun. If someone wants and needs to risk his character die to have fun, so be it.

 

[shilsen]

RC do you really perceive a no-death camp in this thread?

Don't you?

How can you argue against "The possibility of death is an integral and important part of D&D" otherwise?

Very easily. By arguing that you can have the possibility of death in the game but it isn't an integral and important part of D&D. I would argue that the use of Magic Missile isn't an integral and important part of D&D. That doesn't mean I'm arguing that Magic Missile shouldn't be in the game. I'm just saying that it's not a very important part of the game and the game could work without it.

It's not that subtle a distinction.

My problem occurs specifically when the players know that, regardless of their actions, and regardless of their choices, they're always going to have another chance. No consequence is final. IMHO, that turns the games into Snakes & Ladders....except that you have to start over whenever you might have won until your kids succeed. Winning is hollow (although the degree by which you win might not be) because you can just keep slogging away until you happen to succeed. And after the sixth or seventh time that the BBEG tosses you into an inescapable death trap, or a slave labour camp, or whatever, instead of just killing you, the voice of Scott Evil seems to get overwhelmingly loud.......

Conversely, when you know you can lose -- not just have a setback, but lose -- then you know that you've earned your victory. It may be true that D&D is "always a bunch of people sitting around a table rolling dice and talking about the imaginary things their imaginary friends did" but chess is likewise always two people pushing pieces around a chessboard....that doesn't mean that it's okay to cheat, or that you want your opponent to throw the game to give you a false sense of victory.

That's a pretty simplistic and inaccurate depiction of the position for many of the death-lite (I'm beginning to really like that term) folks. From what I've read of your position thus far, I'd say the above is just as applicable to your position. After all, going by what you've said before, the story is not just about the chosen set of PCs, and if PCs die they can either be raised or replaced by new PCs. Right? If the story continues, that means that any defeat must be strictly temporary, since some PCs will pick up and keep on trucking. If a PC dies and isn't raised, his brother or friend or someone else will just replace him in the group, so the loss is hardly final. And since you refer to players and not characters, it's even more certain that they're going to have another chance. After all, unless you boot a player when his PC dies, he's just going to get another PC to play with. So no consequence is final. In fact, from the sounds of it, even a TPK for the entire group will not be a total defeat, since another group of PCs will magically appear to continue the good fight.

Even though I do run a death-lite game, if we're talking about final consequences, there's a whole lot more on the table than under your system. While death for individual PCs is very rare, there's the possibility of them all going down and a TPK could happen. In the last dozen sessions, they've had at least two near-TPKs. And if a TPK happens, that's it, as far as this campaign is concerned. There are no replacement PCs and there's no cavalry coming over the hill. Because the PCs are truly special in this game and include some of the most powerful people on the planet, and many of the things they are involved with are such that only they can deal with them, it's all up to them. And if they lose, so does the planet. And even outside that big possibility, they've already had significant consequences happen in the game for which there is no redress and which will drastically - and negatively - impact the future of millions of people and the campaign setting as a whole.

For my edification, could you provide an example of situations in your game where players have had a final consequence which cannot be redressed and which PC deaths played an important part in? Naturally, PC death cannot be a final consequence in and of itself if the PC can be raised or the player gets another PC to run, so I'd like to see something more than that, and in view of this thread and your comments, I'd like to see how PC death played into it.