nuric:
I get into playing my characters, perhaps too much so, so I get nervous about losing them very easily, I'll admit.
That's understandable. How much (if at all) are you also concerned about sitting out of the game, either with a character "in the hospital" or while a new character is being created?
For a long time I tended to be more of the opinion that I wanted to stick with a single character. D&D, my gateway game, presented the concept of the character reaching all of these amazing levels, which I assumed were amazing mainly because of the journey it would take to reach them. And my game group seemed to take that line of thought too, with the GM wanting to see us grow more powerful.
But I've since learned that I came to the game (in the late 80s) at a time during a bit of a shift from the idea of disposable characters in a somewhat generic world, to long-lasting characters intended to be part of an unfolding plot. There's probably always been a bit of both in the hobby, and probably still is, but I know now that there are players who, though they try to keep their characters alive, will just shrug at character death and make a new one, or start playing one of the henchmen. I was once boggled by the idea of Traveller, in which characters could die
during character generation. I get it now, sort of.
Nowadays, while I try to make characters I enjoy and could see developing, I try not to get too attached to them. I only partially succeed at this, but it weakens the hold that failure or potential failure has on me. In theory. I find that most GMs don't really seem to want to kill characters anyway, even when I tell them that I don't mind. Actually, I think some GMs and fellow players get a bit put off at my admission that I wouldn't mind losing my character, like I'm not really playing along with the concept.
nuric:
To me, moderate risk feels like edge of your seat excitement, because I lose myself in it. I just get very attached to my characters, I suppose.
What if, as alluded to above, the risk was not to your character at all? What if the game was going to involve monstrous termites who would defend themselves, and knock the PCs aside, but really only wanted to devour the town? There would be a risk of the termites succeeding at this, but never a risk of your character dying. Could that be enjoyable to you?
More generally, could you see enjoying a game in which your characters could fail, but wouldn't die unless you took extreme steps to make that likely?
nuric:
That being said, I don't mind a challenge, but situations that are too hopeless can feel less like playing a game and more like trying not to lose one. The latter being no fun at all.
That's an interesting phrasing. I think I see what you're saying, but with most games, one is "trying not to lose," at least from a certain standpoint. RPGs differ in that part of the point of the game is not to "win" but to see how they unfold. Is that what you're getting at? That if it's hopeless then you know where the game is going to go, unless you somehow stop it, as opposed to it being about just what happens next?
In any case, the issue of hopelessness is why I am very much a fan of alternative failure modes, devised around how the players "want" to lose. I can crunch the numbers to make a situation as fair or as biased toward the players as possible, but unless I am prepared to fudge things, a long enough string of bad rolls could result in the situation becoming essentially hopeless. I think we've all been in games in which the GM misjudged things, or the luck was just superbly bad, and then suddenly the enemies start missing, or go from being murderous to merely wanting to capture the PCs. I'd rather not fudge, so I'd rather
start out with the enemies having a goal that brings them into physical contact, but doesn't require PC deaths or even captures, so that if I misjudged the enemy strength, they can just slap the PCs out of the way and then turn to their real task.
I'd also rather that the enemy's task be something the players, as "audience members," would be interested in seeing happen. Like when you are sort of rooting for the antagonist to succeed in a movie or show: man, bummer for the characters, but that was
awesome.
nuric:
Sure, it might have gotten us closer to his bigger plot (which, sadly, we never got to because the next Real Life distraction caused him to end the game), but I felt like there was nothing I could do to change things, and it took all the fun out of the game for me.
It's telling, I think, that this was a Dragonlance game, because I'm told that Dragonlance was a definite milestone in the shift toward plots and long-lasting characters and away from quick and easy death: people really wanted games that developed like books, with their character as a long-lasting main character.
At the risk of saying stuff people already know: At some level, there's always going to be GM fiat. Something has to exist or happen that presents a problem for the players to solve or overcome. The classic is the captured princess, right? Something happened, mistakes were made, and then the PCs are asked to help make things right. They can fix the situation, but they couldn't have prevented it - and even if they could have it would have meant a completely different plot, or no plot at all. That's really all that is happening in the scenarios you described, except the people the PCs are saving are themselves.
But the really crucial difference I see is that the mistakes that resulted in that situation were, ultimately, made by the characters, even if it was "offscreen." They weren't brought in to correct someone else's failure, but are forced to deal with one that's their own "fault." Do you think this has any bearing on how you felt about those scenarios?
Thanks for responding to my initial questions, nuric. I hope you'll consider my latest questions.
Novocrane:
Character death, on the other hand, is relatively quick. Doubly so if each player character is part of a larger squad, and a new PC can be brought into play as soon as you write it up. This is something I've tried to find a GM for here, and I was surprised at how poorly the request fared; both in terms of GMs willing to produce that level of brutality, and players not undermining the stated goals.
That's interesting. I'm a big fan of 4th Edition D&D but one of the more frequent complaints I heard about it (true or not) was that it was now impossible for the characters to be killed. The people complaining felt like there was no risk. This was part of what made me realize that there were and are gamers who really enjoy the game when their characters can and do die.
At least in theory. I've had trouble pinning down people on how often they think character death should occur, and how often it has occurred for them, and what exactly they enjoy about their character actually dying. In a lot of cases I get the impression that the person wants death to be possible, but primarily only if a player is "foolish," which can mean always charging into combat, or taking on excessively powerful foes, or not taking basic precautions. They themselves would never do those things, but if they did their character would die and they would all but rejoice in that, because things would be as they should. Death is for other people.
I feel like I regularly see offers for games in which the GM talks about how death is a definite possibility for PCs. When I ask those GMs what the procedure will be in the event of a character death (will the player take up an NPC, or should they make a backup, or what?) a lot of GMs seem taken aback, as though they hadn't thought that far ahead, or they tell me not to worry about it at the moment. I'm left with the sense that these GMs only want to induce feelings of tension and impending doom and have no real intention of killing characters, other than to snap to attention a player they feel isn't engaging properly with the game.
So, it's an open question as to what degree players and GMs "really" want lethal failure in their games.
badpenny:
RPGs and fiction are different critters. I like to RP the fiction, so a game like Fate is right for me. I also like to RP in the superhero genre, where death isn't a thing. (It might be a major plot point that you see in fiction to shake up the book, but it's hardly "final".)
I think the superhero genre and serialized shows like, say, Star Trek, are instructive when it comes to interesting failure. We know, at some level, that the main characters are not going to die, because that would massively disrupt things. DC isn't going to cashier Superman, just because "death is a definitely possibility" and actors sign contracts for a whole season. (Yes, many shows try to subvert things by killing off people we assumed were going to be regulars, or by taking advantage of real-life changes in jobs or health. Still.)
But Superman and Captain Picard have to be able to fail somehow, or there's no story. They probably have to fail a few times before the end of the story or episode, just so that they have somewhere to go, narratively. Picard might lose some security guards or an ensign, or might fail to save another Federation ship from the fate that will soon threaten his. There have been occasions, I believe, in which he has failed entirely and irrevocably, but in a way that didn't involve the death of any main character. Can we adapt that kind of thing in a fun way for our games?
badpenny:
Say a spy breaks into an embassy. Stealth has to be used to sneak past a guard. You could roll and "fail." What does that mean? You're spotted and the alarms go off? That might blow the entire caper from the get go. That wouldn't happen in the fiction. Secondly, that would make your spy look like a chump.
Great example. Heists are, I find, a perennial problem with games. A single failure, or just a few failures, out of the many chances to fail, can bring the whole thing crashing down in a frustrating way - or, if they fail to, make the whole scenario improbable. If it fails, you don't get to the cool scenes with the vault, and the chase, etc., and the players don't get to feel like their characters are very capaple.
So, when I wanted to have a heist situation, I skipped most of the way to middle of it. Failure before that point wasn't going to be interesting, so it wasn't something we went into detail on. We narrated a bit about what their plan was, and then I decided that it was going to succeed and started them off in the vault with the item. Now, arguably, the players don't get to see their characters
actually being cool, because they don't have the validation from the mechanics that their characters definitely can do the things we described them doing. But we get to the part of the caper that
makes it a caper and get to have a fun and interesting time with that.
Now, some people
do find flubbing a caper to be interesting, and it's an outcome they want to explore. More power to them, and I wouldn't have skipped what I did in my game if my players really wanted to play out the infiltration. Heck, we probably could have come up with ways for them to fail interestingly that didn't blow the whole plan or may the security seem improbably lame. So, I'm not saying that one should always skip certain failures, or take them off the table. I'm just reiterating that not every failure is always interesting or interesting to everyone.
badpenny:
When it comes to combat, I like to think in terms of setbacks. Since Arrow/Flash aren't going to die week to week on their respective shows, their plans to defeat the villain are simply set back and they get another shot at it next week.
Yep. I dig those shows, but they often strain what little credulity they have in how they allow the main character to survive. If it were a game, I'd say the GM and players weren't on the same page about what to place at stake.