I've always considered lethality a crucial part of D&D. I consider it so important that I find games that don't risk character death nearly unplayable. What good is "winning" a game if there is no way that I can "lose"? I would think it's very safe to assume that this sort of thought process is shared in this community and in much of the OSR, which makes this contradiction I've come across all that more confusing.

Many OSR/ OSR-adjacent games feature a "background" feature, either Lion and Dragon's Background Events Tables or Deathbringer's Random Misery Table. I actually really like this idea, as I like the characters to be more than just "hero man" and "magic girl," yet, it seems incompatible with the notion of having a deadlier game. If you have a deadlier game, but the characters have backgrounds that the players get attached to, then it can really cause a schism when that character dies and can result in apathy and resentment, something that I very much would want to avoid.

For example, if Joe the Fighter dies from a random stray arrow from a failed search for traps roll, no big deal; Tim the Fighter can replace him. But if Joe, the champion blacksmith of Nottingdale, older brother to Celia, the party Cleric, Son of Peter, and Qwen, Brother of 6, and father of young Andrew (who he is adventuring to gain money to help raise), dies because the thief fucked up a roll, that can cause Joe's player to have a bitter taste in his mouth, and likely not care nearly as much when Tim the brother of Joe shows up. I was being a bit hyperbolic with the background of Joe, but the idea is still there. By having more to them, the character and player become more attached, and death becomes much more bitter between the DM and players and can lead to players just not caring anymore.

Am I missing a key ingredient in how this needs to be balanced? Am I just stupid and worrying too much? How do y'all go about this? Any advice would be appreciated.

I want the fear of death to be present and the understanding that it can come for you at any time, but I also don't want it just to become a board game of rotating characters. I've thought of having a negative HP system, where you have an amount equal to your Con, and every round after the first, you lose 1d4 HP, but I don't know how well that would work.

Not really sure why this topic shouldn't be on the main forum, so I'm moving it there. If the OP has a problem with that they can give me their reasons why they think it should go back to the Pundit's forum.

That's why I prefer games with some kind of 'get out of shit' mechanic, be it Fate Points or whatnot. The kind of thing that doesn't make the game trivially easy, but avoids the 'you take every precaution, but one bad roll killed you' BS.

I know this isn't popular with a sub-group of hardcore Grogs, that consider anything short of random death at anytime to be like sex with 6 rubbers on. But I consider any game with Joe The Warrior to be boring drivel, so right back atcha

IMO something like Fate Points keep the smart players around just long enough for their deaths to be a little more meaningful, while not overly protecting the terminally stupid.

Quote from: Shaldlay on August 02, 2023, 05:03:08 PM
I've always considered lethality a crucial part of D&D. I consider it so important that I find games that don't risk character death nearly unplayable. What good is "winning" a game if there is no way that I can "lose"? I would think it's very safe to assume that this sort of thought process is shared in this community and in much of the OSR, which makes this contradiction I've come across all that more confusing.

Many OSR/ OSR-adjacent games feature a "background" feature, either Lion and Dragon's Background Events Tables or Deathbringer's Random Misery Table. I actually really like this idea, as I like the characters to be more than just "hero man" and "magic girl," yet, it seems incompatible with the notion of having a deadlier game. If you have a deadlier game, but the characters have backgrounds that the players get attached to, then it can really cause a schism when that character dies and can result in apathy and resentment, something that I very much would want to avoid.

For example, if Joe the Fighter dies from a random stray arrow from a failed search for traps roll, no big deal; Tim the Fighter can replace him. But if Joe, the champion blacksmith of Nottingdale, older brother to Celia, the party Cleric, Son of Peter, and Qwen, Brother of 6, and father of young Andrew (who he is adventuring to gain money to help raise), dies because the thief fucked up a roll, that can cause Joe's player to have a bitter taste in his mouth, and likely not care nearly as much when Tim the brother of Joe shows up. I was being a bit hyperbolic with the background of Joe, but the idea is still there. By having more to them, the character and player become more attached, and death becomes much more bitter between the DM and players and can lead to players just not caring anymore.

Am I missing a key ingredient in how this needs to be balanced? Am I just stupid and worrying too much? How do y'all go about this? Any advice would be appreciated.

I want the fear of death to be present and the understanding that it can come for you at any time, but I also don't want it just to become a board game of rotating characters. I've thought of having a negative HP system, where you have an amount equal to your Con, and every round after the first, you lose 1d4 HP, but I don't know how well that would work.

Well, I can only speak to my experience, but in my groups it's always been a matter of timing.  Too many character details before the campaign begins makes it feel to us that adventuring is almost an afterthought for the character.  We usually create just enough backstory to give a motivation for adventuring, but that's about all.  The stories that define the character mostly happen during play.  What this means is that low level characters are pretty nondescript.  They haven't adventured long enough to have much of a story.  So when they die, no big deal.  By 5th or 7th level, the characters have usually done enough that they start feeling fleshed out, but there are a lot more ways to recover from death, though most are a major inconvenience and  might be a whole adventure in itself.  By 13th+ level, the party probably has a number of ways to cheat death by itself, so the danger of losing characters who are beloved is very small.

So, in my experience, lethality is somewhat inversely proportional to level, and therefore character "story".  The difference is that we don't really create elaborate backstories...

I can see where spending a lot of time on backstory and then getting killed for something minor and out of player control could become an issue.  I look at it from the other end: not having any backstory leads to reckless players who could care less because they just can roll up another.  Even higher level PCs I've seen have that same attitude when they waltz in on something and get smoked.  I agree that some kind of luck/fate system takes out the really bad blunders but if PCs have some investment in the character they cool it on the "kick in that door and kill it all!" gameplay and at least take a second to think about what they can do to mitigate risks.  A lot will depend on the player's desires for gameplay but so far I'm seeing more cautious activity.  It could just have been the group I was a player with but they didn't bother with listening at doors, checking for traps, rudimentary recon, etc; and they died many times just to whip up a new character.

Quote from: Striker on August 03, 2023, 03:06:12 AM
I can see where spending a lot of time on backstory and then getting killed for something minor and out of player control could become an issue.  I look at it from the other end: not having any backstory leads to reckless players who could care less because they just can roll up another.  Even higher level PCs I've seen have that same attitude when they waltz in on something and get smoked.  I agree that some kind of luck/fate system takes out the really bad blunders but if PCs have some investment in the character they cool it on the "kick in that door and kill it all!" gameplay and at least take a second to think about what they can do to mitigate risks.  A lot will depend on the player's desires for gameplay but so far I'm seeing more cautious activity.  It could just have been the group I was a player with but they didn't bother with listening at doors, checking for traps, rudimentary recon, etc; and they died many times just to whip up a new character.

I'm playing in an OSE game where the characters practically have no backstory at all, but still proceed cautiously and always listen at doors and check for traps. Each player also has a stable of characters he can choose from, so if one gets killed he can be immediately replaced. Characters can also be swapped between adventures if, for example, a player wants to play a thief for a change instead of a fighter.

Quote from: Shaldlay on August 02, 2023, 05:03:08 PM
Am I missing a key ingredient in how this needs to be balanced? Am I just stupid and worrying too much? How do y'all go about this? Any advice would be appreciated.

Perhaps you are missing a key ingredient:

If you do a fairly involved background, then lose your character, you are affected.  If you start with relatively little background, but develop one during play, then lose your character, the party is affected.  That is, the other players had a chance to get attached to your character too, in ways that matter in the campaign.  It sounds like the latter would be even worse, but in fact it is not, usually.  In the first case, it really does come across to the rest of the party that Tim replaces Joe, carbon copy--even if in your own mind Joe had all of those background details.  Whereas in the second case, not only had background emerged about Joe organically, it was background that the rest of the party is more likely to care about.  Which means whether you bring in Tim or someone else, it is to a party that cared about Joe.  It doesn't really matter in either scenario how much of Joe's background you had mapped out for yourself (or even with the GM), because you can't make other people care about your character's background.  It's like trying to make other people as interested in your dreams as you are--even literally in some cases.

Though I think most of this dynamic is the chemistry of the group and the mixture of several different elements.  Some story arcs just don't work well with death (and vice versa).  You can make death more or less likely through any number of system bits, as well as the way the players act.  The GM can run a game with likely story arcs that are more or less likely to be compatible with some amount of death.  But no one gets to just, for example, arbitrarily decide that they are going to run a campaign where Joe the Fighter is the Chose One to kill the Dark Lord, with death on the line at all times for anyone.  It doesn't work.  With some thought you might be able to run a campaign where Joe the Fighter is part of a prophecy concerning the death of the Dark Lord--with the usual ambiguity of such forecasts, such that if Joe paves the way for Tim, it still works out.  Or maybe the Dark Lord wins, and all Tim does is escape with Joe's kid, leaving the resolution for later. 

I think generally it is better to be clear about what everyone wants, then determine what mixture of those wants is likely or even logically possible.  You want a certain amount of death, then that's a constraint to everything else.  You want a certain amount of background, then that's a constraint to everything else.  If may not be much of a constraint, but it is always there.

You need to also be clear in your own mind on each element:  Do you want it for real, or do you want the appearance of it?  The appearance of "death on the line" and the reality of "death on the line" overlap a lot, but they are not the same thing.

This is something I've brought up before as well, and I love to mock the 'hurr durr super lethal' mentality over it.

If you want to run a game with a lethality rate akin to X-Com or Darkest Dungeon, that's fine, but I'm not going to do more than the bare minimum to flesh out a character.

Don't like it? Eat a bag of dicks. I'm not saying RPGs should be risk free but holy shit, asking me to pour time and creative energy into a PC who dies two sessions in is just insulting.

Minimal background (a table for example) takes seconds to establish, makes the PC ex-sailor stand out from the PC ex-farmer just a little and may allow some knowledge (yeah, he's a sailor, he knows knots, you untie the rope instead of cutting it).

Quote from: Ghostmaker on August 03, 2023, 07:57:03 AM
This is something I've brought up before as well, and I love to mock the 'hurr durr super lethal' mentality over it.

If you want to run a game with a lethality rate akin to X-Com or Darkest Dungeon, that's fine, but I'm not going to do more than the bare minimum to flesh out a character.

Don't like it? Eat a bag of dicks. I'm not saying RPGs should be risk free but holy shit, asking me to pour time and creative energy into a PC who dies two sessions in is just insulting.

Pretty much the biggest problem with all the Battletech RPGs prior to Mechwarrior: Destiny was that they always defaulted to the wargame for Mech combat where there's pretty much a 1-in-36 of instant death due to headshot.

Which doesn't sound like a lot, but with most Mechs lobbing 3-5 shots per turn you're running even odds on surviving 10 turns of combat.

This isn't a problem for the wargame where a pilot is three stats (piloting, gunnery, and health track) and maybe a name if you're running a published scenario.

But the "A Time of War" rpg edition had a chargen system that had you build your character with XP gained via a lifepath system that, by hand anyway, takes probably 30-50 minutes.*

That's not good when you measure combat survival in turns.

Basically, chargen time needs to be proportional to expected survival times. Too thin with a long expected lifespan and players can lose interest because they don't have enough interesting bits to work with. Too many with too short a lifespan and they'll start wondering what the point of all the detail is if none of it matters in play.

* conversely, MW:Destiny both ramped down PC creation time and Mech combat lethality using a modified theatre of the mind combat system where mechanics make hitting it much more difficult (basically trying to emulate a feel closer to being a Battletech novel protagonist than a random pilot).

You can still die fairly easily, but chargen is closer to 10 minutes instead of 30-40 and you'll generally live long enough for that level of investment to feel worth it.

Yes, lethality should have some inverse proportion to the time you spend creating a PC.

This is the reason why HP was invented, IIRC; people get attached to their PC. Which is why high-level Pcs are harder to kill.

You can still have an OSR game with backgrounds if these are generated with a couple of rolls.

It's always worked for Rolemaster.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 03, 2023, 09:23:28 AM
Yes, lethality should have some inverse proportion to the time you spend creating a PC.

That's the answer right there.

I don't do long backgrounds. Usually just a former profession and homeland, and maybe a few family members. Background is created during play by the adventures themselves and by inventing background facts when needed.

Quote from: David Johansen on August 03, 2023, 10:14:23 AM
It's always worked for Rolemaster.

No, it never worked for Rolemaster.  My group loved the crits system, loved the charts, even liked the skills.  We never had a character live beyond 7th level.  We quit playing because it took so long to make a character that the investment wasn't worth it.  If it took 5 minutes to make a character, we'd still be playing Rolemaster today...

Quote from: Eirikrautha on August 03, 2023, 11:06:37 AM

Quote from: David Johansen on August 03, 2023, 10:14:23 AM
It's always worked for Rolemaster.

No, it never worked for Rolemaster.  My group loved the crits system, loved the charts, even liked the skills.  We never had a character live beyond 7th level.  We quit playing because it took so long to make a character that the investment wasn't worth it.  If it took 5 minutes to make a character, we'd still be playing Rolemaster today...

One of the oddest things I've noted is that the mechanics for WEG's Paranoia and Ghostbusters games would work a lot better if they were swapped. Ghostbusters is intensely rules light, but Paranoia has a ridiculous number of skills and traits to manage.

Considering that GB is not super lethal while Paranoia has to issue you five extra lives (clones) in the hope you'll survive the briefing? Very strange.