Quote from: Black Vulmea;699440No - they're whiny little cunts.

I love when people get stupidly macho about pretending to be fantasy characters. You are playing a game of make believe. Feeling the need to emasculate people who play make believe in a different way than you is almost embarrassing to even watch.

And this is coming from a person who doesn't mind a character death or two.

Quote from: Emperor Norton;699448I love when people get stupidly macho about pretending to be fantasy characters. You are playing a game of make believe. Feeling the need to emasculate people who play make believe in a different way than you is almost embarrassing to even watch.

Did you read the rest of my post, or did you just stop with me saying something to get a rise out of the first self-righteous idiot to happen along?


That would be you, by the way.

The part where you say "RPGs are like this" not "My campaigns are like this"?

Or the part where you misinterpret what someone said to mock them? They meant you don't get to play MARIO the character, not the game.

Nothing in the entire post amended anything you said in the first sentence, you just explained how you would approach a "whiny little cunt" being in your game. Just because you are polite to them in person doesn't mean you don't think they are a whiny little cunt.

And even if what you said afterwords did amend it, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and let it stand that you intended for it to, baiting people intentionally is juvenile.

Lately I feel like the odd man out, complaining that no one in our games EVER dies. Our Deadlands GM responded with 'It's bad for the story'.
Luckily our Pathfinder group had a TPK last week and that warmed my heart.

When I run a game I state my aesthetics up front. Death is a real consequence and there is pretty much no way to come back from it. If a player balks at losing a PC then he can find some other group to play with. It's not a 'tough guy' stance... it's just a matter of taste.
I'm thinking these days it's far easier to find a low-mortality group than it is one where you go through a couple characters before you hit 5th level.

Really, I think it has a lot to do with the aforementioned lack of wargaming crossbreeding with the soft-touch most modern computer games put on character death. At most it's a minor inconvenience as you have to run back through the current level/area and collect the mcguffin again.

Most settings are rather explicitly hostile environments. Some moreso that others. Death should be a threat, even when it is potentially circumventable.

But eh. Some players and groups are really into the death factor. Others are the exact opposite. And the rest of us plod the sane middle.

From a game design and gameplay viewpoint you really dont want the players characters dropping like flies at the start. That can give a negative first impression to new players. You want them to be attracted to the game and not turned off because they just died six times before even hitting level 2.

There isnt any good workaround short of beefing up the starter characters in HP or level, which can be unsatisfying. Or the DM tweaking a few rolls to make sure the character doesnt get offed right off the bat. Which is also unsatisfying.

I still lean to the "give recovery options" stance. That way those who want to recover can, and those who are fine with re-rolling can get on with it. Talk it over with the group before starting and see where everyone stands on the issue.

I change HPs

Everyone starts with Wounds (you can actually modify this number if you want to be precise with a fully grown man having 6hp and a child 1).

Then the PCs who are trained get HPs. these are the ability to turn a slash into a nick or a crushing blow into a bruise. You know liek HPs are described in D&D.

At first level they either get to roll a dice or they get maximum for first level.

Wounds heal 1 per week + a Con check for an extra one if you have full rest.

HPs cure quickly in hours.

Now you have a wizard with 4 HP and 6 wounds. Or a fighter with 10/6
They are unlikely to die for a single mistep. Yes they might, but outside someone snipping them and getting a double damage hit its unlikely and unless that is another PC you the DM chose for that to occur so you need to own the consequence.
However when they get hit they will loose most of their hit points. They will realise that life is short. When they first get wounded chances are they will fuck off somewhere safe and return wiser and cannier.

In my current strontium Dog game no one has died yet but they have all come really close to dying and either hid or run away. A while back the party hard man who has 16 HP took on a bloke with a Big Hammer the hammer was doing 2d6 +5 (from Strength) damage. The hammer hit him one and took away all his hit points so he ran .....

If you use this mechanism not only do HPs make a bit more sense but your first level parties only die when they fuck up not when they forget to duck whilst walking through a door.

As an aside I think D&D should have a much more formal mechanism for making up PCs of different levels. Some sort of psuedo lifepath model with a year of adventuring giving you stuff, backstory and XP as well as risk.

I don't play MongTrav or MongRQ, but are the mortality rates significantly less than original Traveller and original RuneQuest?

Also, I fully agree with Omega that there are legitimate options to PC death that sometimes works great.

I run lots of one-shots at conventions and I've had dungeon itself resurrect the dead PC...but at the end, the PC found that he could not leave the dungeon, or at the end with the Big Boss, I take the player aside and reveal that his "rebirth" was actually just a possession by the Big Boss's minion and now its time to reveal and slay.

Even though old D&D is designed for a kind of game with (by current RPG standards) a high rate of character mortality, much of the system can be adapted to another kind. For that matter, I know old hands who have no patience for playing low levels any more, while people completely new to RPGs often have no problem with the need to replace casualties. It's in my experience mainly longtime gamers, accustomed to different games, who balk even at death with resurrection.

Mechanically, a big chunk of the problem is easily solved by giving PCs more HP, especially if monsters are left as is. The Runes of Doom (Arduin Grimoire III) presented a system that greatly reduced the HP significance of class levels. Hackmaster, IIRC, gave a "kicker" to characters and monsters alike.

"Save or die" (or "go straight to dying") effects require a bit more work to temper mechanically, but GMs can be mindful of what players consider fair warning.

Investment in laborious builds rather than quick roll-ups is certainly a factor in making sudden death undesirable, but it is itself often firstly a response to a desire for more extensive commitment to a given character than quick generation satisfies.

I've seen a sudden burst of high, frequent turnover hurt a group's overall investment in one campaign recently.  As it is now, only one character still has a realistic investment in the hook that kicked the campaign off.

It's been feeling a bit like going through the motions lately in that game.

Quote from: Old Geezer;699327Funny, I see it just the opposite way; in a computer game I'm limited to what's been programmed in, but in a RPG I can do everything I can think of to alter the odds in my favor.

However, I've found in recent years a lot of players just don't think of things like giving the second rank polearms so they can fight with the front ranks, using spears in the front rank so you can set vs charge or else throw them, if you know the enemy are coming putting a small detachment hidden to your own left to hit the enemy in the unshielded flank, and all the other stuff that we did.

AD&D even gives explicit advantages for an advance guard of Elves and Halflings -- surprise those monsters for a change! -- but it's amazing how people neglect that.

Quote from: Omega;699476There isnt any good workaround short of beefing up the starter characters in HP or level, which can be unsatisfying. Or the DM tweaking a few rolls to make sure the character doesnt get offed right off the bat. Which is also unsatisfying.

My 'workaround' is that I usually provide plenty of 'safe' stuff for the PCs to do, adventures hooks that don't necessitate violence.
In my BRP homebrew the newly-minted PCs went off to recover some missing library books. Except for one wandering monster (that THEY chose to track down and fight) there was no violence thrust upon them.
It was all on them that they chose to go after the local bandit tribe, pick a fight with the town's religious leaders and pretty much started a war. If they'd just gone straight after the books they would have had plenty to do, locks to pick, mysteries to solve, but nothing that could have outright killed them.
Still, only one of them ended up dead (kinda) and he was really really pushing his luck.

Quote from: Rincewind1;699340This is probably the single most important issue with "Old School Mortality" - the lack of personality/backstory until the character reaches "x" level, because what's the point to bother, if he might be Mario 5.0 in a moment?

Agree 100%, though this is a symptom of something more fundamental. If some players expect to be able to invest in a character and have them survive no matter what, you haven't managed their expectations.

Any game where you roll up a character fit for X and it turns out to be Y can be off-putting -- happened to me in my first ever CoC game where I took my character (and their death) way more seriously than the other (experienced) players did. Once that was over and I realised the disposable nature of PCs in that game I had a better time.

The worst thing that comes of PC death in OSR (or any) game is when death means the player can no longer participate for a chunk of the session (because the party is down a dungeon, and the GM lacks a creative way to bring another PC in). That more than anything will put a player off. I have seen some games where the GM has said it's a high mortality game and if you die, you won't get another character. That hurt sign ups.

Quote from: smiorgan;699497Any game where you roll up a character fit for X and it turns out to be Y can be off-putting -- happened to me in my first ever CoC game where I took my character (and their death) way more seriously than the other (experienced) players did. Once that was over I had a better time.

That's why it's important to have a chat beforehand so everyone is at least kindasorta on the same page.
As a player I asked rude questions just prior to starting our Shadowrun campaign last Saturday... 'OK, I've never played this. What's the assumption here, it's not going to be just D&D with guns and cyberwear, right? Not random wandering with interludes of violence and then a quick trip to town to sell the loot?' (that's how they claim D&D ALWAYS plays and despite their assurances otherwise it looks like that's how Shadowrun is going to go too)

QuoteThe worst thing that comes of PC death in OSR (or any) game is when death means the player can no longer participate for a chunk of the session (because the party is down a dungeon, and the GM lacks a creative way to bring another PC in). That more than anything will put a player off.

Yeah, I've been on the receiving and giving (gm) end of that one... but I've learned my lesson. Monsters take hostages and PCs have hirelings and if nothing else 'Hey, this dog can talk!'

In the game I'm currently running, a knight with a longspear decided to go in front of the shield wall.  He gotheld and murdered.  The show is going on.

However, if half the party got ganked, things would be a bit weird.  I listened to a podcast of people playing the Kingmaker adventure series.  Things got crazy lethal in the mid to high levels, and the party went from "guys who founded a kingdom together" to "random dudes in charge of a kingdom for no discernible reason."  When the last few founders died off, you could really feel everyone lose interest.

Quote from: Simlasa;699494My 'workaround' is that I usually provide plenty of 'safe' stuff for the PCs to do, adventures hooks that don't necessitate violence.
In my BRP homebrew the newly-minted PCs went off to recover some missing library books. Except for one wandering monster (that THEY chose to track down and fight) there was no violence thrust upon them.
It was all on them that they chose to go after the local bandit tribe, pick a fight with the town's religious leaders and pretty much started a war. If they'd just gone straight after the books they would have had plenty to do, locks to pick, mysteries to solve, but nothing that could have outright killed them.
Still, only one of them ended up dead (kinda) and he was really really pushing his luck.

True. Safe areas are a option too as long as they have non-com things to garner EXP off of.

And yeah, if they charge off headlong into trouble despite efforts to eas them into it. Well. Let the bodies fall where they may.