Quote from: ArrozConLeche;809965Nothing worse than sitting at the table holding your dick while everyone else gets to play.

In our current game, if a character goes down in battle, we give that person one of the npcs to use in the meantime.

Mortality expectations and system are why I don't play Eve Online; it forced me to either be safe and not frustrated, or to do the stuff I enjoy and be constantly screamingly frustrated by losses.

RPGs are different because player and player characters are people.  In the words of the Immortal Philosopher Clint, when you kill a man you take away everything he has and everything he's ever gonna have. That's the key right there.  Even if your character is nothing but a murder hobo, not only have you put into that hobo probably ten times the playing hours of any card or boardgame at minimum, but you also have goals with that character.  Goals that will never come to fruition if they die.  With any other game, I can try that specific strategy/combination/whatever again, even though it may take a while to manifest.  Unless I do a KoDT style "Knuckles the Eighth" character re-use, I'll never get to play that specific character again.  The finality of game defeat which results in death affecting all future games is unique to RPGs.

Personally though, for me a character death may not be fun, it may suck total ass, but it is necessary to have it possible to happen, and the death of that character gives the setting such authenticity, that it makes Roleplaying the next character that much more rewarding, because then I know my character makes it not because of the PC Glow or not because it makes for a better story if he lives or not because the GM gets to keep running his plot, but because my character gave it his all...and did it.  Also sometimes a character's death is rewarding.  A Norseman falling in battle against a great foe, a Paladin sacrificing themselves, a Wizard finishing off Tiamat with a retributive strike from an overcharged Staff of the Magi...enjoyable and rewarding.

Back when I was a wee GM, before I encountered most of these discussions, my guiding principle for 'adventure gaming' was 'you're not going to die. But I might fuck you up. And don't be an idiot and push it, because then fuck it, you'll die.'

I guess that would be called semirigid plot protection or some such nowadays.

Regarding character death - I am talking about loss which is different than death. To clarify the difference: I've played a number of games that have high mortality (like some Call of Cthulhu runs) - where it was fairly expected that you'd lose characters over the course of an adventure, but it was still assumed that the PCs would complete the adventure and resolve the situation. I haven't played DCC funnel, but I've played a few old-school games which were similar. Even if all of the PCs died, sometimes we would create a new group of PCs who completed that module.

So in my experience, it has been more common for characters or even a whole party to die than for the PCs side to lose the primary mission, like not getting to the final dungeon level, and/or the primary bad guy still being active, and/or the danger coming to pass, and/or not getting the key artifact.

Justin's list of suggestions was interesting, and I thought I'd repost the key points:

• The stakes can't be all-or-nothing.
  
• The stakes still need to be meaningful.
  
• Failures don't have to be absolute.
  
• Have lots of different goals actively in play.
  

I think most of these are important for any game, not just a high-loss game. As a hypothetical example, I wonder about something like a zombie survival RPG, where you're trying to protect your people, and sometimes you save them - but a lot of them die. (The Walking Dead obvious comes to mind.) You can save some people even though some die, and you can be trying for other goals.

Quote from: dbm;809943Ultimately I would still want to overcome the majority of challenges unless they were clearly unattainable (no storming castles or slaying Dragons at 1st level...). But if I was losing more than a third of encounters I would be looking to re-jig my character to make them fit the campaign better. Losing more than half of the encounters would probably result in a down-time conversation with the GM to better understand what their aims for the campaign were.

Ultimately, we are often stymied in real life and since I'm not a masochist I don't want to regularly face this in my fun-time.

I understand and totally sympathize with not wanting to be stymied, but at the same time - I think there could be people who are OK with high loss who aren't simply masochists. It can be fun to play a game and lose - even an RPG.

Good qualifiers, jhkim. It reminds me that most of my 'the PCs don't die' actually segue into 'varying failure modes.'

Like, because of the stuff I want to avoid with characters dying, they might not die... but they have a broken leg, or are on the run, or...


Fate and a few other games help inspire some broader notions of what failure can entail, and how to make it interesting and engaging rather than 'stop having fun now.'

I think it's dependent on system, then on group, then on how the GM handles it.

There are systems that just really want the players to win always/most of the time (Hero System Champions springs to mind), regardless of challenges.  Champions is a four-color pulp comics silver age sort of gaming system; sure the cover of this month's issue might show all the Avengers lying "dead" and Dr. Doom standing triumphant over their bodies but within 2-5 issues everything is back to normal, right?  

Conversely, Call of Cthulhu, and to a somewhat lesser extent Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play (2e moreso) are straight up: drive these people insane/kill them.  The kind of things "supernatural investigators" built into a Champions game (note: not generic Hero System, but actual Champions supers) would do ("I punch the Dark Young, how much knockback does it take?") would leave their CoC counterparts gibbering on an asylum floor, or as a greasy spot on the cubic, basalt wall in a blasphemous forgotten city beneath Mt. Erebus in Antarctica.  Likewise, trying to run a group of WHFRP characters through, say, G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief would have the following results: most of the group dead, a couple of spell-casters insane, and the few who made it out with that much treasure arrested for heresy immediately and all that wealth "appropriated" by the Imperial authorities.

Then you've got the middle path, earlier D&Ds, where yes death can come, but it can be overcome and with a high-enough level party, be overcome on the fly, but there's still consequences (loss of CON, optional loss of Charisma, or a limb leading to other difficulties adjudicated by the DM, and so on), but there's definitely a "Well you have slain most of the stuff in this dungeon but you're out of spells, the Clerics are dead, and you're cut off from escape and have 10 hit points between three fighters and a thief." moment at which you know you're not getting out.  But unless your players are very foolish that moment doesn't come immediately, indeed, it comes after a while of adventuring, and the party may well know that they're overextending prior to that TPK.

As to the group - hey, losing a character or three at a pick-up game for me has never been a problem.  However if you've got another group that's looking for a new DM and they join up with you at the shop/mall/bookstore/whatever ... I think you've gotta play it to the system but before going in let them know what to expect.  "Hey I play full on adversarial DM style" or "I'm a 'let-the-party's-desires-drive-the-game' kind of DM" etc.  A group you've been with for a long, long time...I think you know each other well enough that unless there's some seeeerious animosity then it's "easier" to TPK or TPL them (total party losing).

Finally, I think a DM can handle it over degrees either well or poorly, and this relates back a bit to what kind of group you have.  If you announce at the game store, "Okay, I'm running S1 with pregens, who wants in?" and a bunch of fellow grognards hop up and say "oh we are SO KICKING THIS MODULE'S ASS!" and they die in the most horrible ways...I think you can gloat a bit at them.  Conversely, if it's a group consisting of close family and friends you don't jump up and start telling them to suck it down and that you made them all your bitches.

Oh, and a fourth: depends on circumstances.  A TPK that ends a multi-year campaign and manages to culminate the campaign's apotheosis (heros all die draining their life force into the alien artifact that destroys Galactus and stops him from eating the universe, slay all the demon princes of the abyss but are in turn slain, etc.) can be awesome and one of those games that was talked about for years later.  On the other hand, spending hours helping a group of neophyte players get a character together and then crushing them ten minutes after "Okay you all beam down to the planet's surface" is a dick move.

I think the question is interesting.

I think it is odd how many posts talk about death.

I don't have a good answer as regards how much losing is too much. Like most things it depends, obviously. I guess my analogy would be there should not be so much losing in the game that the players end up feeling as frustrated as they would if they are stuck in traffic for too long a time. How much losing is too much? Well how long is too long?

The key point of the analogy is that the frustrating things about being stuck in traffic is the perception of not making progress. Often, even if the drive takes longer, it is less frustrating to be on a side road where traffic is moving than to be on 3 lanes of interstate highway that is standing still. The feeling of progress feels better. Similarly in an RPG, the players want to feel that they are making enough progress - towards solving the mystery, advancing the plot, powering up their PC, achieving secondary goals, defeating the big bad, defeating some little bads, etc.

Quote from: Bren;810102I I think it is odd how many posts talk about death.

Personally I would put that as a side effect of the DnD "you're fine at 1 HP and dead at 0" phenomena. Games with more graduations of injury mean you could receive a lasting loss without death. I prefer those types of games personally, but my group prefers to play DnD so my mental baseline is, perhaps, skewed.

When you're roleplaying, the journey can be more important then the destination.  A night "accomplishing" zero by staying in a tavern all night can be fun for the players and characters alike.

Quote from: CRKrueger;810110When you're roleplaying, the journey can be more important then the destination.  A night "accomplishing" zero by staying in a tavern all night can be fun for the players and characters alike.

Good point. But normally I wouldn't equate a night in the tavern with losing. Neither would most of my characters.

Most of the gamers who can handle loss have moved on to boardgames and card games. Lots of what's left among RPGers expect auto-win participation trophies if they show up at the table.

I've seen too many tantrums in the past two decades.

I do wonder if these same tantrum-throwers play video games or board games where 75% loss is normal? Heck, any two player game is 50% loss.

As a GM, I encourage PCs to take actions that have meaning, but the fickle gods of fate (dice) may strike them down. For my players, if they "lose" or "die", they are generally happy if they knew they had a real chance of success, or in a campaign, a potential for a second chance.

Quote from: dbm;809891Some people don't get don't get past the temper tantrums stage of development, unfortunately.

And, being more generous, we all have a bad day from time to time when our 'shit buffer' is running on empty!

Or quite simply, being unable to make a new character when you want to is not being able to play the game you want to play. If you were playing Bob the Fighter and now - for whatever reason - want to play Bob the Thief, and aren't allowed to, it's the same as playing D&D today and wanting to play Vampire tomorrow. If you can't, why hang around?

Of course, entire new game systems all the time are a hassle. But it's rather easier for a GM to accommodate a new character than a new game system. It's a reasonable request.

The same people who say it's unfair to make a player play a character randomly-rolled rather than point-buy will turn around and say that same player must play the character however smashed-up and useless they may have become during play. So we should not put up with the character we get during character generation, but must put up with the character we get during play?

Losing is fun provided the person feels that their efforts were not arbitrarily stymied, and that there is some chance of getting it right next time. Losing is fun if victory is possible next time.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;809888I never understand people who do this sort of thing.

Some people just cannot take any sort of loss. They will freak eventually and just need a trigger.

Others though just get really attatched to a character. This can be a sign of a really good GM, or just how a player clicks. Or both.

Quote from: Will;809976Mortality expectations and system are why I don't play Eve Online; it forced me to either be safe and not frustrated, or to do the stuff I enjoy and be constantly screamingly frustrated by losses.

That is how it was with Anarchy Online too. You learned to avoid the PVP zones if you wanted to get anything actually done.