Should I retell the tale on how my small group suffered tpk by loose dirt?

Quote from: Bren;1112070Not dying is fun. Dying, not so much. But for not dying to be fun, there has to be some appreciable chance that your character will die.

Exactly. It comes down to whether you want your campaign to feel like e.g. an actual safari to Africa, or a vacation to Disney's Animal Kingdom. Some people just want an imaginary amusement park where the rides look scary but they're perfectly safe. Other people want there to be a chance you'll get eaten by the lion.

I've found that most people come to enjoy actual "safari" style play more, but only once they've learned not to go to sleep among a pride of lions.

Quote from: Trinculoisdead;1112001So yeah, in these high-lethality games, how do you as players or GMs deal with characters dying off so much? Does it disrupt the continuity of your game?

I don't run campaigns where the storyline depends on one PC. Also, D&D has Raise Dead so death isn't always permanent versus other RPGs. The only continuity disruption is weaving the new PC into the game, but I don't make it a big deal and create reasons to swiftly introduce them.

Let's say a bunch of 1st level noobs are wandering a dungeon and half the party gets slain. The other players tootle off for 10-15 minutes to make new PCs and they can be easily found wandering the dungeon themselves, half their own friends also slain so now the new and old PCs need to band together. Or they are found as captives. Or they are were trapped and starving. Or they were sent by the patron with hirelings because the local shaman had a dream the mission was in danger. Or whatever it takes to get the new PCs into the game so we can keep the momentum going.  

Quote from: Trinculoisdead;1112001Is it something that takes getting used to?

Probably for new players.

But players who throw fits and end game sessions for any reason need to fuck off.

Gaming is leisure time for the whole table. If one person ruins the time for the rest, that clown gets replaced.

Quote from: Trinculoisdead;1112001Is there anything you can do as a GM to make it more fun or acceptable to the players?

Be upfront with the players about the game and the expectations of lethality.

Do your best to smartly bring their new PCs into the game swiftly in a believable manner.

Be liberal with rewards so survival and victory means something.

Quote from: Trinculoisdead;1112001Or is total-buy-in the only way for these games to work? Is this even fun?

I believe total-buy-in is necessary for many RPGs.

Definitely for lethal games. Definitely for horror games. Definitely for any setting requiring setting knowledge. Definitely for any setting that's non-standard.

I'm very upfront about my campaigns so everyone knows what's up and they can decide whether or not to join.

Quote from: Omega;1112055Right, some want to really just play a board game.

How? If they shit themselves when their PC dies, how do they handle being beaten by an opponent and losing the game?

Even cooperative boardgames can be lost. Competitive boardgames have [Total Players -1] losers at the table.

Quote from: Azraele;1112067I'm not coy with like "Are you SUUUUURE?"

I do this at convention games with players who don't know me.

However, for the "Are you SUUUURE?" to work as a thinking/teaching tool, it's important to ask that when their plan is totally safe and there's no actual danger. Otherwise, its just you telling them NO and redirecting them like toddlers.

Them: "We open the door."
Me: "The one with the burnt runes and bloody handprint?"
Them: "Uh...we look at it more. Can we read the runes?"
Me: "The runes aren't carved, they're freshly scratched deep into the door and the bloody print looks fresh too. [Clatter dice] None of you are familiar with these runes, the cleric thinks its a part of a demonic ritual."
Them: "Uh...we open the door."
Me: "It opens."
Them: "Really???"
Me: "Yeah, it opens and there's another dark hallway beyond."
Them: "Anything happens with the runes or the blood?"
Me: [Clatter dice] "Nothing obvious, but who knows?"
Them: "Okay, we head into the hallway."
 
[FYI, the evil wizard who did the blood ritual knows that door has been opened, and begins to prepare his defenses...]

Quote from: Bren;1112070Not dying is fun. Dying, not so much. But for not dying to be fun, there has to be some appreciable chance that your character will die.

Exactly!

Quote from: Snowman0147;1112083Should I retell the tale on how my small group suffered tpk by loose dirt?

Post the link! That's a great story!

Coming from someone who ran a sandbox west-marches campaign that saw the death of over 60 player characters, including 3 TPKs, I can agree that buy in is important, but more important is how the campaign is set up in the first place.

A few anecdotes from that campaign to help demonstrate an ideal and less than ideal approach.

One player played smart, though took risks from time to time. He embraced the lethality of the campaign, losing 2 or 3 characters along the way. He was the most active player in group. His characters were simple concepts, veteran fighter, esoteric elf, roguish vagabond. What he lacked in character concept he instead invested in planning and working out solutions to problems that were happening in the present.

Another player put a lot of thought into his character, about his history and past. This player created an antagonist for his character and wanted to have a confrontation with said antagonist one day. Unfortunately this would never happen, because after about 8 sessions his character was buried in sand and suffocated to death. He made another character but it was obvious his heart wasn't in it. He made a mistake and lost his second character early. He stopped playing.

You can set expectations all you want, and follow through with those expectations by having characters die. I even told new players that they should not write character backgrounds, because everyone was an adventurer and their goal was finding treasure and discovering the world... Players should be dealing with the problems as they come upon them, not turning up to a campaign with a laundry list already. Regardless, some players are just going to take death badly, in fact most players do. You can try and coach players into seeing the game past a character's death, but ultimately it's up to them how they decide they want to play.

Issues in the campaign became more prevalent when story became more of the focus instead of the treasure finding aspect we started with. When the endgame scenario was taking place characters were becoming more integral to the plot, and losing them would certainly be more detrimental than before. It was only at this stage that I, the referee, felt apprehension in having a character die.

I can only recommend that when the dm\referee sets up an OSR style game and they want it to be deadly (and i believe it should), they need to find a way to disassociate the story from the players in a way that the players can still alter and interact with the story, but they do not become the story. I'd recommend a more episodic approach to adventure design, or a vast mega-dungeon environment. The goal isn't clear to begin with, and may just be to get rich. Later, the players can create their own goals based on what they discover, but even then, these personal goals should not be the primary focus, rather the world that exists around the players should be, and the player's goals stem from the world. With this approach, it's much easier to slot in different characters week to week.

If you set up a campaign where players have to write a long backstory, and goals from the start, then you're setting them up for disappointment and later when you need to insert a new player character into such a group, it is harder to do so. Players are limited to the types of characters they can bring to the already existing story.

I'm going to address your post backwards because I think it'll make my point make more sense, I hope that's not too annoying.

Quote from: Trinculoisdead;1112001Is this even fun?

Different people have different kinds of fun. Lots of people have already said lethality is fun for them, so I won't belabor that. From a theory of fun perspective, part of enjoying lethality is (I think) derived from the impact of decisions. Balancing the impact is the tricky part. Too lethal and players conclude there's no point in trying and give up. Not lethal enough and it's boring because there's no risk. Feeling like there is a challenge to overcome and then overcoming it is fun too, particularly for certain personalities. Roguelike video games hit that idea of punishing, challenging fun pretty squarely. "Nintendo hard" from back in the NES days as well. It's good for something to be hard enough to feel like a real accomplishment.

Not everyone has this kind of fun, and not all of the time. Sometimes even people who like lethal games want something less risky and more escapist.

Quote from: Trinculoisdead;1112001Is there anything you can do as a GM to make it more fun or acceptable to the players? Or is total-buy-in the only way for these games to work?

I'm not an expert, wise GM or anything, so take this with a grain of salt as academic theorycrafting, because it is: this seems like a good discussion for session 0. My hunch is that if players have some expectation set of what the game is like, especially if they are newish to the system, that'll help the badfeels. As Antiquation!'s amazing "worst session" thread ( https://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?41311-What-s-the-worst-session-you-ve-ever-run ) shows, sometimes even when you've done all you can, people just straight up tilt without it having anything to do with anything you did wrong. Humans are occasionally irrational and unreasonable.

I started to write up something about an analogous clash over a particular Magic format, but I realized this problem actually generalizes all the way out at least to the psychographics, if not farther. You might find this article about Magic psychographics to be interesting ( https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-2013-12-03 ). Disagreements happened all the time, particularly between Timmy (make big dudes smash things!) and Johnny (do the weirdest shit with the rules that I can) versus Spike (win at all costs). Timmy and Johnny often feel like Spike ruins their fun and isn't great to play against. Spike thinks Timmy and occasionally Johnny's rickety, unreliable, unchallenging decks are snoozefests. Timmy and sometimes Johnny also tend to be the ones who introduce lots of personal, individual rules about what "real" or "fair" Magic is. Spike doesn't care -- he's out to make the best use of the rules that he can. This can get ugly, and I think it's a similar origin of disagreement.

Quote from: Trinculoisdead;1112001So yeah, in these high-lethality games, how do you as players or GMs deal with characters dying off so much? Does it disrupt the continuity of your game? Is it something that takes getting used to?

I think setting expectations helps, and there is probably a period of adjustment for people who haven't played that style before. As for continuity, I haven't really thought about it before, just kind of rolled with it when it happened, but I see two general mechanisms: 1) the same sort of "how did the party meet" storycrafting as was at the start of the campaign; 2) drawing on books/films/real life responses to when people die. If the healer bit it and now the party's mission is at stake, someone in the setup will have an interest in filling that void, right? If the party leader kicks the bucket, that's a power vacuum to fill...

Quote from: Trinculoisdead;1112001I've played a lot of Dungeon Crawl Classics, a little bit of Maze Rats, and ran my first session of the Whitehack tonight. In all of them, character death happens pretty often and unpredictably. In the game tonight one of my players got pretty upset after their 1st level warrior-type character was one-shot by the first monster they fought in the dungeon. He was down to 4 HP out of 6, and the monsters were rolling d6s. Of course I rolled a 6 on my first attack. One failed save later and whoop he was dead. We had to end the game there. He threw a bit of a fit. Clearly these games are not a good match for him, or I'm doing something completely wrong.

It also could've been a bad day?

But at the end of the day, it's just a sheet of paper. Throwing a fit and ruining the game for the party isn't cool. Poor RPG sportsmanship I guess?

Responding to the OP:

Many players come in with death-averse expectations.

If you set up their expectations that these are games where characters can easily die, and it's expected that may likely happen even if they do nothing wrong, and that what happens then is they take over one of the surviving NPCs in the group, and/or start with several characters, and/or the whole party dies and a new party is started out, THEN it may not be so shocking and upsetting to them.

If they can't get over it, maybe the game type is not for them.

I've never played any of the modern OSR games, but I did play basic D&D and AD&D (now referred to as 1e) with high PC death counts. Some of them were fun, but many others were not. I tend to find highly lethal games more interesting in contemporary/near-future gaming or in certain fantasy and sci-fi settings (like Warhammer and WH40K) and less satisfying with typical D&D fantasy where I'm OK with more forgiving combat rules. That may be one of the reasons I don't play (or buy) OSR products.

Quote from: Razor 007;1112066This thread comes close to a thread I had considered starting myself, so I'll try to contribute.

There seem to be two large segments of RPG players; those who understand that character death is always a possibility, and those who want their characters to live forever.

I'd make it even more general than that: there are those who play for a challenge that's very flavorful while it challenges unforgivably, and there are those who want an escape from an everyday life that usually has more strikeouts than home runs.  What these two groups want out of a D&D game (or whatever RGP) is entirely different and contradictory.  

The first group isn't a fan of fudging in any direction - for them or against them.  They want objective neutral risk which is possible to identify, avoid, and possibly turn to their favor if playing with creativity and skill.  They're willing to risk the time they've spent with a character to this point for that experience, and the out-of-game feeling that comes with surfing it.

The second group is a fan of fudging, although that may not be owned up to - part of what appeals to the 2nd group is the pretense of risk.  But only the pretense (although they may be willing to trade a character for big damn hero bragging rights).  While there is a third group who enjoys both styles while recognizing they're not-the-same, group 2 will never get around to enjoying games truly purpose-built for group 1.  Group 2 people usually aren't comfortable saying this overtly, because they do like the idea of playing a game allowing lethality while their DM sits behind the screen madly making fudge like a keebler elf on speed.  Succeeding in a game environment that (in theory) allows fatalities absolutely enhances the illusion they're looking for; any DM-talk to the contrary is also hopefully, merely, the pretense that sets the stage.

Both groups support RPG companies, and will share the hobby.  So if you as DM have group 2 people and you want to play games with those people instead of finding a different tribe - make fudge.  Don't try to run a fudge-free campaign and think it will go over.  I can't run group 2 games, but tastefully discrete fudge is the only solution for group 2 people using an old school rule set for more than a one-shot.

Quote from: EOTB;1112122I'd make it even more general than that: there are those who play for a challenge that's very flavorful while it challenges unforgivably, and there are those who want an escape from an everyday life that usually has more strikeouts than home runs.  What these two groups want out of a D&D game (or whatever RGP) is entirely different and contradictory.  

The first group isn't a fan of fudging in any direction - for them or against them.  They want objective neutral risk which is possible to identify, avoid, and possibly turn to their favor if playing with creativity and skill.  They're willing to risk the time they've spent with a character to this point for that experience, and the out-of-game feeling that comes with surfing it.

The second group is a fan of fudging, although that may not be owned up to - part of what appeals to the 2nd group is the pretense of risk.  But only the pretense (although they may be willing to trade a character for big damn hero bragging rights).  While there is a third group who enjoys both styles while recognizing they're not-the-same, group 2 will never get around to enjoying games truly purpose-built for group 1.  Group 2 people usually aren't comfortable saying this overtly, because they do like the idea of playing a game allowing lethality while their DM sits behind the screen madly making fudge like a keebler elf on speed.  Succeeding in a game environment that (in theory) allows fatalities absolutely enhances the illusion they're looking for; any DM-talk to the contrary is also hopefully, merely, the pretense that sets the stage.

Both groups support RPG companies, and will share the hobby.  So if you as DM have group 2 people and you want to play games with those people instead of finding a different tribe - make fudge.  Don't try to run a fudge-free campaign and think it will go over.  I can't run group 2 games, but tastefully discrete fudge is the only solution for group 2 people using an old school rule set for more than a one-shot.

I wonder if this is part of the larger problem in my game group right now. Because even in non-lethal systems, or in board-games, there's a friction that arises when certain players are losing in the case of a board-game, or their characters are failing rolls in the case of RPGs. Any significant set-back or antagonism on my part borders on the edge of players getting upset. It's uncomfortable, and bothers me greatly as the GM and therefore the player with the most responsibility for how the game goes.

Perhaps some of my players are simply group 2 people: they want to play heroic characters who, like in a movie, go up against tough odds, but who ultimately succeed no matter what.

Perhaps that's disingenuous in my particular case, but I think that sort of player certainly exists.

Quote from: Trinculoisdead;1112123I wonder if this is part of the larger problem in my game group right now. Because even in non-lethal systems, or in board-games, there's a friction that arises when certain players are losing in the case of a board-game, or their characters are failing rolls in the case of RPGs. Any significant set-back or antagonism on my part borders on the edge of players getting upset. It's uncomfortable, and bothers me greatly as the GM and therefore the player with the most responsibility for how the game goes.

If they're getting upset I think that goes beyond the basic style preferences, though they do sound like group 2 to me overall.  I won't play with people invested in an outcome to that degree, regardless of which style they prefer.  Getting upset over lets pretend is a sign of life out of balance, and I'm not going to let someone like that drag down my fun time.

Assertive, well-adjusted gamers of either stripe say "no thanks, but good luck" when a campaign isn't to their taste.  Passive but adjusted gamers have schedule conflicts or ghost until you get the hint.  People with misplaced priorities get upset frequently when their unspoken need isn't met, and yet keep coming back hoping it will be.  (We all have had a bad day or two that bled out into a social setting, but most for whom it is a rare exception will admit something from outside the game was the seed, and own their faux pas.)

Quote from: EOTB;1112122So if you as DM have group 2 people and you want to play games with those people instead of finding a different tribe - make fudge.  Don't try to run a fudge-free campaign and think it will go over.

Rather than secret Illusionism/Fudging to keep them happy, I prefer to introduce open mechanics like Fate Points that make PC death much less likely. The 5e Death Saves system works a bit like that - preserves the apparent possibility of PC death, no hiding fudging from the players, but in practice the GM can make PC death pretty unlikely in most circumstances.

Quote from: Trinculoisdead;1112001We had to end the game there. He threw a bit of a fit.

The problem here is the player, not the game. You could give him plot immunity, but then his character would miss a foe or fail to pick a lock or fail a persuasion check or something, and he'd throw a fit over that, instead.

In the past running an open game table, generally the reaction to character death from younger players is, "wow, you can actually die in this... cool!"

You just had a player who was a poor sport. If something like this happens again, dismiss the player from your game table, and play on with the rest of the people at the table. A soccer match doesn't end because one player deliberately draws a red card on himself, the team just plays on with 10 players instead of 11 - and chooses another 11th player for the next match.

The game must go on!

Quote from: bryce0lynch;1112032Celebrate.

I keep a Roles of the Dead

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I haven't seen a Magnum 40 around here in a long time, I thought they stopped making them!

There's no real point in echoing what others have said regarding setting expectations. I will say there are plenty of lethal modern games out there that are very enjoyable as well. The OSR stuff is often much more random than the modern games, and that does change the dynamic quite a bit. In Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green, if someone has a gun on you, you're in big trouble and can die very easily. In an OSR game, if an Orc comes at your fighter, you are probably ok, but the Orc still has a slight possibility of killing you outright. Its a lot more random, for better or for worse, at least at lower levels.

Quote from: S'mon;1112134Rather than secret Illusionism/Fudging to keep them happy, I prefer to introduce open mechanics like Fate Points that make PC death much less likely. The 5e Death Saves system works a bit like that - preserves the apparent possibility of PC death, no hiding fudging from the players, but in practice the GM can make PC death pretty unlikely in most circumstances.

Yeah there are good ways to adjust that lethal slider up or down. Boosting PC hitpoints, nerfing monster damage, Fate Points, wounds-instead-of-death at negative HP, extra saving throws like 5e D&D.

I'm going to play different games for a bit though. The player in question keeps claiming that its not the death of the character that upsets him but the feeling that what he chooses doesn't matter, because it all comes down to a random die roll in the end.  I told him that, ideally, the choices you make determine whether that die roll happens, and the likelihood of it coming down in your favour, but he disagrees. He was upset and said a bunch of dumb shit about how he might as well be reading a book and how the game is badly designed, etc. etc. So it's all kind of clouded and mucky now. I don't think patching these games will fully solve the issue. If there's the possibility of character death due to bad rolls, then the same scenario will play out again, and I'm not going to let that happen of course.

Fuck, I guess it's time for another one-on-one conversation about expectations. I have not been looking forward to this, but I guess that's my job. So much for a stress-free pastime.

The plan is to play Mouse Guard instead. At least in that game the only way to lose a character is by agreeing to it as a possible outcome from a Conflict. I think that knowledge, that his character is safe unless he's okay with risking their life, plus the game's meta-currency for affecting dice rolls, will work out. If not, I'll find a new player!

Quote from: S'mon;1112134Rather than secret Illusionism/Fudging to keep them happy, I prefer to introduce open mechanics like Fate Points that make PC death much less likely. The 5e Death Saves system works a bit like that - preserves the apparent possibility of PC death, no hiding fudging from the players, but in practice the GM can make PC death pretty unlikely in most circumstances.

That can work too, so long as the fate points don't run out.