Ironically, video games like Darkest Dungeon are closest to the original PnP experience.

Point of order!

DMs DO NOT kill PCs (at least not the good ones), the players kill their own PCs with stupid decisions most of the time. Suicide by DM if you will.

IF the DM did kill your PC chances are one of you is a total douche.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on March 28, 2023, 02:51:29 PM
Point of order!

DMs DO NOT kill PCs (at least not the good ones), the players kill their own PCs with stupid decisions most of the time. Suicide by DM if you will.

IF the DM did kill your PC chances are one of you is a total douche.

You are correct. But by the logic of these people, as a GM you put a challenge there and didn't make it easy enough to beat. Therefore Matt Mercer says that's bad game design because killing players is bad design. Therefore it's your fault as GM for putting challenges there in the first place you sweaty try hard grognard.  No matter what you say it will always come around to them not having fun because you are a bad gm because you didn't do the specific story they wanted in their heads.

Fucking narcissistic shit. I hate it.

Quote from: King Tyranno on March 28, 2023, 02:57:30 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on March 28, 2023, 02:51:29 PM
Point of order!

DMs DO NOT kill PCs (at least not the good ones), the players kill their own PCs with stupid decisions most of the time. Suicide by DM if you will.

IF the DM did kill your PC chances are one of you is a total douche.

You are correct. But by the logic of these people, as a GM you put a challenge there and didn't make it easy enough to beat. Therefore Matt Mercer says that's bad game design because killing players is bad design. Therefore it's your fault as GM for putting challenges there in the first place you sweaty try hard grognard.  No matter what you say it will always come around to them not having fun because you are a bad gm because you didn't do the specific story they wanted in their heads.

Fucking narcissistic shit. I hate it.

You are correct, but missed my point:

By saying the DM kills PCs we cede the grammatical ground by calling it what THEY call it. From that you have already lost the debate.

DM's DO NOT kill PCs, period.

If a DM kills a PC then either the DM or the player are a douche.

I've played 5E a few times and I tried dying but couldn't pull it off.
It's way too forgiving than 1E.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on March 28, 2023, 04:02:06 PM

You are correct, but missed my point:

By saying the DM kills PCs we cede the grammatical ground by calling it what THEY call it. From that you have already lost the debate.

DM's DO NOT kill PCs, period.

If a DM kills a PC then either the DM or the player are a douche.

I agree with you.  I think the exception is illuminating, though.  I never kill PCs now. (Nor do I save them when they manage to kill themselves.)  I did outright kill a few when I started, because:  1. I was young, not very wise, and riddled with teen-age emotions.  2. My players were the same way, and some of them had it coming.

The kind of people that think killing a PC is a hate crime are functionally adolescent, foolish, and self-wallowing in teen-age emotions.  So I have no doubt that when a group of them gets together and one of them GMs, it goes down exactly in the way they complain about.  The GM probably did kill the character, and the character probably deserved it.

A better fix for the problem would be for the participants to grow up, but that is hard.

Quote from: King Tyranno on March 28, 2023, 06:21:58 AM
I've always absolutely hated how a lot of RPG players just hate dying. I can name many times I've had a situation where a PC rolls were bad and they got killed by a kobald or a goblin or something like that. And they start blaming me as the GM. I'm not an adversarial GM. I'm not actively trying to kill the players but I am trying to stress challenge and that death can happen. But so many people watch Critical Role and just see RPGs as "a collaborative storytelling exercise" where they are the stars and constantly need "super awesome" moments where they do "super awesome" things.

Hating PC death goes back long long long before Critical Role, though -- especially random death like being killed by kobold #27. I got into Call of Cthulhu at some point and learned to love PC death, but I also knew lots of people in the 1980s who hated PC death and preferred games like Champions or Star Wars D6 where death is extremely rare.

I think the most important thing is to get player buy-in at the start. That's one thing I like about Call of Cthulhu -- the players who sign on are enthusiastic about PC death. With D&D-ish games, players joining may not be clear on what sort of game it is, so I try to communicate more clearly about expectations.

Quote from: King Tyranno on March 28, 2023, 06:21:58 AM

Quote from: Rhymer88 on March 28, 2023, 04:11:22 AM
One thing you touch upon is the absurd tendency nowadays to write huge backstories for first-level characters. It's very funny when such characters get killed off soon thereafter.

I had a player in a recent game who did that. They got annoyed I didn't remember their backstory. I have to deal with 7 other kids. I'm not memorizing their badly made fantasy novel. They can participate like everyone else. And let the story evolve from player actions like everyone else.

Again, this depends on expectations. While I've played a few old-school D&Dish games where PCs start out like "generic fighter", most of my games have more detailed setting, and I'll ask players about their character background. Typically, I try to have starting characters that feel like actual people.

I do this even in Call of Cthulhu with its high mortality rate. The horror is less interesting if the PC is just a token, and the player yawns and just pulls out a new character sheet after the last one dies.

I think there's a strong "kids these days" factor at play here. I remember people in the 80s losing their minds when their characters died. But we were all kids, and everything seemed like a bigger deal than it looks now in retrospect. 5e brought a ton of new people to the hobby, specifically *young* people. And the game itself is published by a *toy* company keen to attract younger players.

Any parent knows kids are a lot more narcissistic than folks in their 40s, 50s, 60s. And get upset more easily. 5e players are young. OSR players less so, and there's a selection bias as a lot of folks come to the OSR seeking a grittier more deadly style of play.

Sure the older versions of D&D are deadlier than the later ones and the style of play has changed. But it's also at least partly a generational thing. Give these young 5e players a few years. Eventually a good number will get bored and crave a different gaming experience. And 30 years from now they can complain about "kids these days."

Finally listened and...

If your character cannot die, whatever you do in the game is irrelevant and means nothing. There are various degrees of the likelihood of dying depending on genre, but death must exist or you are wasting your time.

OK, so I finally listened to the OP. Besides the point over death, Pundit suggests the reason is PCs being a fantasy version of oneself rather than a different persona to immerse in -- and that this is something new since 2015 or so with snowflake SJWs.

As an old-timey RPGer, that sounds ridiculous. Immersing yourself in a persona unrelated to your real self is artsy-fartsy extremism that doesn't match what most players are trying for. They want to drink beer, eat pretzels, and kill some monsters - with some jokes and funny voices thrown in. Knights of the Dinner Table started in 1990, and it was already old stereotypes that the players would play fantasy versions of themselves. The whole schtick of KoDT was how the players will act in-game exactly how they want to as themselves. And that's what lots of players have always done.

That said, the KoDT crowd also are fine to play a fantasy version of themselves and have that character killed. It's no big deal. They just roll up a new fantasy version of themselves. So basically, I don't think playing a fantasy version of yourself is the root cause of opposing PC death.

---

I think the biggest issue is the genre that the group is going for. I've played in a bunch of RPGs which had basically no chance of death - like Champions or the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG. I've also played RPGs with a high chance of death like Call of Cthulhu. The Forge / Story Games crowd was often into their dramatic tragedies - like Fiasco - which often involved character death.

So I'm opposed to the idea that killing characters is a war crime. But I also think it's fine to play a game with no (or almost no) chance of death like Champions or Buffy or Toon. To me, it's a game. There doesn't have to be some great purpose - you just sit with your friends, play, and have fun.


EDITED TO ADD: Here's a link to the discussion that I think Pundit was referring to.

https://twitter.com/jsgaribay/status/1637808367505666048

I agree with jhkim. IME the traditional typical D&D player does not really distinguish their personality from that of the PC. As Fighting Fantasy put it, "YOU are the Hero!". But that's very different from rejecting the possibility of PC death. Players are 'stepping on up' and playing to win, which needs the possibility of loss.

Since there are plenty of RPGs where PCs almost never die, I think the problem is with a mismatch between 'snowflake' D&D expectations and D&D game rules. 5e D&D can still be pretty brutal, just like every D&D edition. Lost Mine of Phandelver can easily TPK a 4 PC party of novice players at several points - I saw this in play.

Theres still a good share of players ok with a PC death.
But these fringe nuts have been at it a while now.
Theres also been a resurgance of the old complaint of "Theres more combat rules than talking rules! I  can NEVER talk to an NPC everrrrrrr! waaaah!"

Is there a link to a source of J. Scott G or someone else actually saying that PC death without player consent is a hate crime? Because if not, then this video is just ranting against a straw man.

They do remember that D&D has spells to revive dead PCs, right?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on March 29, 2023, 09:42:21 AM
They do remember that D&D has spells to revive dead PCs, right?

the sheer INCONVIENCE of the downtime between shifts at the barrista is unpossible for New Wave/Critical Role players to tolerate.