Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Monster" data-source="post: 5517146" data-attributes="member: 69516">I'm a pretty soft GM, as my whole home group - it's been ages since we had a PC death (other than one-shot horror games). I find that killing PCs in a long campaign is hardly fun for anyone. I haven't played in a campaign where permanent/semi-permanent disabilities (amputations, level drains, etc.) figured in a very long time.  I can easily see the frame of mind where losing a level or some such can be very discouraging; it's effectively wiping out a fair amount of game and real time, as if it had never happened. In some campaigns,that's an understood risk, and if it happens regularly (i.e., I'm not the only one down a level), then maybe. But I doubt most players really like this sort of thing at all.  Severedhead's comments indicate an area where I think some kinds of GMs distort the situation - they use whatever means they see fit to threaten and harm the PC - so magic items get stolen/destroyed, background details lovingly created are turned into hostages, and so on. On one hand, yes, an evil plotter would do exactly these things; furthermore, these kinds of things are stock tropes in heroic fiction, to motivate and challenge the heroes. So they should be fair game, right?  Not so much. The problem is that players respond exactly as described in this thread: orphaned loners with no connection to the local adventure setting, taking extreme measures to protect property, and double-tapping all the villains to make sure they don't come back in the sequel. So instead of brave heroes, we get paranoid sociopathic bloodthirsty killers who really are in it only to kill critters and take stuff. Not good - not fun to play (for msot people most of the time, I'm pretty sure), and not fun for me (at least) to GM. It spoils the whole genre of heroic fantasy when the hero has no motivation but greed and power.  Items and background are and should be plot hooks, and GMs can and should use them. The problem is to use them just for that: to hook players into the plot, not to punish them. In the classic adventures stories, bad guys are always taking the prince/ss hostage and threatening to kill them; but they pretty much never do, no matter how smart or 'appropriate to evil' it would be to stab the victim as soon as the hero shows up at the Gates of Darkness. Heroes are always getting thrown in prison or slavery - but among the first things that happen are that they get or make an opportunity to escape, or make an effective appeal to justice - if it takes long, the time of imprisonment is handwaved in narrative. Of course, if there's a prison/arena subplot, that gets rolling and the hero does not *need* his special sword to succeed, and in addition, the escape attempt doesn't rely on the hero coming up with an elaborate escape plan (unless the story is abou a "smart hero!"), but taking advantage of things around him.  The point is, all these hooks and challenges and such are tools to move the story along, not to simply gimp the heros - and they should work that way in games as well. Contra to 'my character wouldn't know' that the magic items are coming back, or the disease will be cured, or the like, the player should be able to trust the GM enough to keep going (like heroes of all kinds always do) and that the situations to be faced will be suitable to the PC's new status (and, furthermore, that the underlying assumption all around is that things will turn out all right, barring truly unusual events). Of course, this requires that the GM be sensitive to the player's design, so that background hooks are not grossly violated nor simply used as excuses to punish. Well-developed background should be used to *reward* players, with both mechanical and fluff benefits, at least as often as they are used to provide hostages. After all, character background info is entirely at the grace of the player, who is bringing something to the game besides a buch of stats - that kind of offer to enhance the game ought to be regarded positively.  There's a lingering mindset, a sad legacy of earlier times, of player-versus-GM sentiment. One of the aspects of this mindset is precisely this sense that anything the GM can use should be used, to make the player's life harder; and the player must respond by carefully denying the GM any chance to pull a 'gotcha.' Frankly, it's one reason I quit D&D decades ago (I only came back a couple years ago) and played other stuff, where that 'gotcha' was much less prevalent. Both players and GMs need to work to overcome this attitude, in my opinion: the goal is to provide a fun time for everyone, and the toolbox for doing that is better if it includes background info and lingering effects.</blockquote>

Verification