Quote from: dragoner;699696At which point the opfor changes as well, if you don't learn to use the lethality of planning and intelligence, you are screwed.

My point being, increased capability isn't measured solely in levels and hit points.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;699710My point being, increased capability isn't measured solely in levels and hit points.

That is true enough.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;699676And if, instead, you sit down at the outset and explain that there are no 'safe areas?' That they need to play smart and skew the odds in their favor as much as they can?

I try to give players non-violent options, though they might be trading difficulty for danger. That doesn't mean there are 'safe' areas. Just because they're not being confronted and attacked doesn't make the area 'safe'. Like the thing with the wandering monster that might not go straight in to attack mode, there are loads of dangerous folks around them that won't attack until they fuck with them somehow.
I can walk down the street where I live with fair certainty I won't be attacked, but if I start kicking in doors demanding pie there's gonna be trouble.
There are parts of town where I can walk without worry as long as I don't look at anyone wrong and avoid flashing cash and cameras.
There are places I can go where I WILL be physically challenged... IF I choose to go there (and the particular place I'm thinking of actually has big flashing lights in front of it and bouncers who will try to discourage you if you're the wrong ethnicity... so you really have to want be looking for that trouble).

The mortality thing is a reality for the NPCs as well and they have other modes of operation in addition to 'FIGHT!'
If the only way to ever interact with the bad guys is to stab them in the face that just ends up feeling like a wargame/video game.
I don't think 'Old School' necessitates playing like a sociopath... I don't think it negates the value of non-violent solutions.

Still, there are only so many ways to steal treasure from a dragon.

Quote from: dragoner;699696...and as with the real military - if you are in a fair fight, you are doing something wrong.

Though that's only encouraged if the game/GM is willing to punish you for just barging in blindly with guns drawn.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;699710My point being, increased capability isn't measured solely in levels and hit points.

That's always been one of my favorite takeaways from Traveller. Not that players always appreciate that... there's no 'DING!' for going up a level but, hey! Now you know some guys who can get you that PGMP you'd been wanting.

Quote from: Simlasa;699724Though that only happens if the game/GM is willing to punish you for just barging in blindly with guns drawn.

Then I am that willing GM ... abandon ye all hope; I like a sense of realism to the whole deal. Though I also understand the difference with Heroic Fantasy, eg Conan doesn't get killed by a mook. Different games are different though, with Traveller, it is often "Thieves Like Us" as the general unspoken trope; D&D you get more of the "Heroic Adventurer" type trope.

Quote from: Simlasa;699724I try to give players non-violent options, though they might be trading difficulty for danger. That doesn't mean there are 'safe' areas. Just because they're not being confronted and attacked doesn't make the area 'safe'. Like the thing with the wandering monster that might not go straight in to attack mode, there are loads of dangerous folks around them that won't attack until they fuck with them somehow.

Which is true of how I run my campaign as well, but it's also missing the point.

Omega, like a number of others, wants to make his campaign 'newbie friendly,' whatever the fuck that is; at first that meant fudging the dice when something too bad - in Omega's judgement - happened in the game, but now that also means creating 'safe areas' outside of which Omega claims that the hammer may drop if they ignore his neon-sign warnings of 'you're not tall enough to ride this ride.'

My question is, why go to so much fucking manipulation when you can look the players in the eye before the game begins and say, 'We play the dice where they lay, which means your character may take a foot of rapier blade in the eye, and the world is full of dangerous people with rapiers in hand. Play smart and remember that if your character dies, the game's not over; you can make a new character and keep playing.'

Is it really that fucking hard to talk with adults as adults and not expect them to respond like children?

Let me add one thing: the players I've seen most upset about character death and an impersonal game-world are not newbies, but experienced players with mismatched expectations about how the campaign is going to be run. If you come into my campaign expecting to be d'Artagnan from The Musketeer, you may be unhappy to discover that you're d'Artagnan from Richard Lester's The Three Muskteers, who gets beaten up and his sword broken by lackeys then ends up face down in the mud after a failed rope swing, or that you're not d'Artagnan at all, but one of the Musketeers who ends up with two handspans of rapier in his gut after an ambush by the Cardinal's Guards.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;699739Let me add one thing: the players I've seen most upset about character death and an impersonal game-world are not newbies, but experienced players with mismatched expectations about how the campaign is going to be run.

I have observed this as well. The whining and wailing about character death comes almost exclusively from "experienced" role players IME. I have not seen a newbie whine after his or her character got killed for decades. I still introduce newbies to RPGs regularly.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;699590If the players don't all understand and accept that old school play is a contact sport and characters can die, fairly easily, then we can play something else.

That's the thing to me - understanding and agreeing on appropriate expectations in the game.

And if you don't want to play that type of game, play a different one.  And that's not dismissive, either - if I don't like ice skating, I'm not going to play ice hockey.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;699739Which is true of how I run my campaign as well, but it's also missing the point.

Really, I should have quoted Omega rather than you... because his mention of 'Safe Areas' came up in response to something I'd written and that really wasn't what I meant.
I certainly didn't think I was telling you anything new...

QuoteIs it really that fucking hard to talk with adults as adults and not expect them to respond like children?

You'd think... but sometimes... some people... plus, the players I've been running games for lately actually are children and yet they're nowhere near the complainers/arguers the adults I play with are (they argue with each other but hardly at all with my rulings).

QuoteLet me add one thing: the players I've seen most upset about character death and an impersonal game-world are not newbies, but experienced players with mismatched expectations about how the campaign is going to be run.

Yes, it seems to be the guys who settled into a certain style of D&D and insist that's the only way it should ever be played. Meanwhile one of the newbie kids had his PC die in our Sunday game and he actually seemed excited about it... he told his brother that it proved he was really playing the game... vs. standing back and watching (his brother is MUCH more cautious).

Hrm.  The OP doesn't particularly apply to me: I've always had a low-mortality rate in my campaign, from the mid-70s on forward, because:

(a) I've always prized the ability of players to develop and grow their characters, and to wrap themselves around their creations;  

(b) I strongly believe in the Tasha Yar Rule -- people ought to die only doing something heroic, not because some mook orc had awesome dice luck; and

(c) I GM GURPS, which is a system in which it's relatively easy in low-tech to incapacitate a PC, but pretty hard to kill one short of falling into a lava pit, jumping off of a 500' cliff, or a NPC slitting the throats of the unconscious.  Very few weapons do enough damage to mortally wound an otherwise moderately-armored, active PC in one shot.

But without going through a hundred posts of what (from the last page) looks like screaming at one another, this seems a basic situation of expectations.  There's nothing wrong with a high-mortality campaign.  There's nothing wrong with a player wanting a low-mortality campaign.  That player should find a different campaign, one more in line with his own preferences, is all.  And that's the constructive answer.

Quote from: Evansheer;699485I'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.

Old school gaming isn't designed for "a hook that kicked the campaign off."  OD&D is explicitly designed for "twenty players who may be doing twenty utterly different things on different nights of the week."

Quote from: JonWake;699581So I've run a game of Riddle of Steel-- don't do it, the game's shit, but the combat system has a lock on being lethal without being arbitrary. It works like this: you get a pool of dice dependent on your skill level, decide if you're attacking or defending, and roll a chosen amount of dice.  I've had fights end with single shot insta-kills, and I've had two trained fighters grapple on the ground over a single dagger for thirty minutes of real time.  The players accepted the death because they knew there were alternative courses of action available to them.

For lethality to matter, the player's moment to moment choices must matter. When the character dies, the player has to be able to look back and say 'if I'd only stayed on the defensive, I could have made it', or 'if I'd only kept my spear handy instead of throwing it, I might still be alive.'

The problem I've run into in D&D is just how incredibly random combat encounters are at a lower level. Even at higher levels, the wrong roll on the wandering monster chart and it's boom, squish, dead.  Just last week, I got a TPK on my whole party of 8th level characters with a single Beholder. A couple failed saves and they were locked down. It was a great story, and the player's were fine with the results, but largely because they were sort of done with the characters and knew they'd scraped by a few too many death traps purely by luck.  

It's fun, but only for certain groups. I've lost two of the best role players I've ever played with in that campaign because they didn't want to die from a single random bad roll, which nearly happened. They'd accept death if they'd, say, used up some resource they had conscious control over and chose to push on, or if they'd ignored warning signs, but they just weren't interested in being random Gnoll-kebob.

I tell people, "Go read 'The Seven Geases' by Clark Ashton Smith.  If  you're not OK with the ending to that story, you won't have fun in my game."

Quote from: Phillip;699639If mortality is repeatedly final, it slows or potentially halts exploration of higher-level goodies unless people start characters at higher level. That's a matter of interest from a purely "gamer" standpoint.

Horseshit.  "Learn 2 play n00b" as the kids say.

Rob Kuntz played in fucking Greyhawk castle and made it to 14th level without Robilar every dying A SINGLE FUCKING TIME.  He made it through Tomb of Horrors and looted the shit out of the place.  For that matter Ernie Gygax made it through ToH also and killed the lich as well.

If a sixteen year old kid can do that, I have NO sympathy.

Quote from: Phillip;699648Some people have the patience for that, and some don't. In the field of competitive boardgames, it's not generally regarded as a moral failure on the part of players if they lose interest in a horribly unbalanced design. Either they hack it into more acceptable shape, or they let it gather dust on a shelf.

In the case of an RPG, the GM is not at all an opponent on a level playing field. The role is more like that of the designer of a computer game, seeking to provide an entertaining challenge for players -- but with more direct feedback from them. What's fun to the players in question is a really sensible standard, not some ivory tower ideology.

First, "high lethality" is not "horribly unbalanced design," it's "different assumptions."

Second, it's not "ivory tower ideology," it's "This is the game I'm running, do you want to play?"

Third, show us on the doll where referee touched your character in a bad way.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;699693More than that, careful and clever are virtually required. Doing the simplest of math, a character has a d6 hp on average and nearly all attacks do a d6 of damage. Each attack has about a 50% chance to drop a character in one hit.

Using that as an eyeball estimate and assuming a monster will hit nearly as often as it gets hit, how many straight encounters using only this simple interaction of numbers can a character survive?  Not many.

The game clearly intended the intangible contributions of the players to be the focus of play. Playing purely by the numbers results in wham bam re-roll a character man, 95% or more of the time.

That level of autopilot death rate strangely enough was designed (unless I am interpreting this all wrong) to increase and maintain interest in the game instead of the opposite. The more "forgiving" a game is in terms of just running the numbers, the less significant the player contribution is to victory.

Just like any wargame.  You can play CHAINMAIL by lining up all your troops and rolling them straight ahead, but if your opponent is smart enough to shit unassisted she will hand you your ass in a bucket.

OD&D was written under the same assumption.  You can play with your head up your ass, but your character will die.  Then, some of the people who played that way got put in charge of later editions.

Quote from: Old Geezer;699795You can play with your head up your ass, but your character will die.  Then, some of the people who played that way got put in charge of later editions.

:rotfl: