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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 8477467" data-attributes="member: 16586">In a lot of the games my main group plays we aren't wandering vagabonds or just getting started on our journeys. In Infinity the character I created through the lifepath system was a 36 year old Mercenary who had 2 career phases in special forces and 2 more as a bounty hunter. There was all sorts of life events involved that we then provided additional detail to. By the time we started play we had an experienced person who had already lived a whole life, had all sorts of complicated relationships, and had a real sense of history. We then spent some real time building layered connections between the characters who were equally as complex.Going through that sort of process is deeply rewarding, but involves a lot of effort we don't want to necessarily repeat if we do not have to. That's why we negotiate what happens when characters are defeated. It's also an active negotiation that must make sense in the fiction. If the only reasonable thing is they die then they die, but if there's some other interesting narrative loss that makes sense we usually go with that. It's an actual conversation and negotiation. Not player just decides.We have just gone through a similar process for Exalted over the course of two sessions. We're dealing with characters who are deeply connected to the setting, represent the height of human achievement, and have complex personal lives from the word jump. They have history with the world and with each other.It works for us because we are good at negotiating those moments in fair ways. I feel we're pretty fair brokers of what seems reasonable or at least genre appropriate. I know some people are suspicious about negotiation as a feature of play, but we find for character death in particular it works better than hard and fast rules.</blockquote>

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