Quote from: John Morrow;581017If you are dealing with people who are used to achieving success without doing anything to earn it and have been largely insulated from failure, that way of looking at things may be entirely alien to them.

i try not to read to much into peoples' behavior at the table. I have noticed that gracious losers and sore losers react in different ways to character death. It is also my experience that the guy who whines over character death tends to be disruptive generally at the table.  Whether it goes back to their parents letting them win at board games or not participating in competitive activities when they were young isn't something I would speculate on.

All I know is when someone starts getting huffy over stuff like this, i tend to lose interest in appeasing them in any way. I just find that kind of behavior very offputting.

Quote from: John Morrow;581029I think people are creating a false excluded middle argument between one extreme, where losing a character is unacceptable and shouldn't happen and another extreme, where the players are essentially indifferent to the loss of their character and just roll up a new one without missing a beat.  I think most people fall between those extremes.

I am certainly not routing for the extreme you describe, since my point clearly states that dying in that combat silva was describing was making the next combats with your next characters more meaningful and engaging because risks were real etc. Which means you HAD an investment in your character and that the character dying WAS a meaningful resolution of the game for you, which THEN prompts more meaningful interactions in the game BECAUSE of the investment you felt with the prior character and now feel for the new one.

Without investment in the character, my point simply doesn't make any sense. So I'm certainly not implying you shouldn't care for your character. Quite the contrary, actually. I'm routing for one of the excluded middles where character death is a possibility at every turn AND you care for your character.

QuoteIn my experience, most players will accept their character dying because of a choice they've made at a critical moment or if the death has some meaning or purpose. On the other hand, I think most players also don't like the idea of their character dying a meaningless death doing something trivial because of an unlucky string of die rolls.

This is the point I wanted to reach. It seems to me that there is this "unspoken contract" between participants that define exactly this John Morrow put - characters can only die in certain specific situations that have some weight/meaning for the adventure at hand. So dying for the big badass demon boss at the end of the dungeon/climax of the adventure is dramatic and acceptable, but dying for the skinny kobold at the first encounter is not. Some games I know activelly give advice on this direction in the very text.

Can we agree more or less on this "unspoken agreement" ?

Because, if we can, I think games should make this rule boldly, explicitly, unashamed, declared upfront. Thats where I think certain games hit the mark by implementing rules or concepts to this end (Paranoia, Freemarket, Eclipse Phase, Shadowrun, Mountain Witch, etc) while others miss the mark for trying to keep too much with the roots of the hobby (wargames and chainmail-like games) where death was acceptable and perfectly coherent since you didnt spent hours creating whole personal backgrounds and developing the life of that piece/army miniature in your hand and the game assumed interaction was only restricted to the martial field.

Quote from: silva;581125This is the point I wanted to reach. It seems to me that there is this "unspoken contract" between participants that define exactly this John Morrow put - characters can only die in certain specific situations that have some weight/meaning for the adventure at hand. So dying for the big badass demon boss at the end of the dungeon/climax of the adventure is dramatic and acceptable, but dying for the skinny kobold at the first encounter is not. Some games I know activelly give advice on this direction in the very text.

Can we agree more or less on this "unspoken agreement" ?

Because, if we can, I think games should make this rule boldly, explicitly, unashamed, declared upfront. Thats where I think certain games hit the mark by implementing rules or concepts to this end (Paranoia, Freemarket, Eclipse Phase, Shadowrun, Mountain Witch, etc) while others miss the mark for trying to keep too much with the roots of the hobby (wargames and chainmail-like games) where death was acceptable and perfectly coherent since you didnt spent hours creating whole personal backgrounds and developing the life of that piece/army miniature in your hand and the game assumed interaction was only restricted to the martial field.

I dont think it is an unspoken agreement for all (or even most) groups.every group inhave been in deals with this differently and has different assumptions. Assuming your preference is shared by most is probably not a good idea. What game books should do is cover the different approaches and suggest ways for achieving each one.

Quote from: Novastar;580939I'm hoping by quoting this post, it will have babies, and they shall go forth and multiply across teh Interwebz, and people will know the good things in life, come within inches of the worst.

tl;dr The quoted post is fucking METAL!

:hatsoff:

Quote from: silva;580963But how about the opposite ? Instead of winning in the end, you lose, and then you cant keep playing with a character that (lets assume) you invested a good time and effort creating/developing or simply wanted to keep playing with ? While I see certain players taking it nicely, I see others getting frustrated.

You know me, I'm neo-old-school. I was kind of like this in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but rediscovering TSR-era D&D in the last few years brought me a new appreciation of the lethality of old school gaming, and how the dice often display a better sense of drama than any player or GM.

Quote from: silva;580963Yeah, specially if the game in question have a character creation that takes 2 hours long. I would be REALLY scared to die in such a game, Butch.

Me too, which is why I don't run GURPS or RM. I'd feel tempted to avoid killing PCs because creating a character is such a drag, and that's a no-no in my book.

Quote from: silva;580963But serious now. Doesnt it feel incoherent/illogical a game where you take 1 or 2 hours creating a alter-ego both conceptually and mechanically, to have it die at some random point because of a bad die roll or a bad decision from your part (or on the GM) ?I would like to see this kind of thing more present and assumed/clearly stated in the hobby, because I think its make much more sense game design-wise.

No, it doesn't "make more sense game design-wise" to exclude the possibility of death in a game of high stakes action. If the game is about risking life and limb in trapped, monster-infested ruins in search of gold and eldricht secrets, death should definitely be on the list of perils. If it's an epic game of Good Versus Evil, laying down your life for a greater cause is an absolutely appropriate outcome. Taking away the possibility of death (or even the finality of death, as it happens in certain magic-rich D&D games where you can buy raise dead at any old village temple) dulls the dangers inherent to hunting treasure or fighting evil, at least in part, and voids risk-taking behavior of much of its meaning.

Like Tommy Brownell said above, it makes less sense for games such as four-color supers, or a game of immortal godlike wizards who manipulate whole worlds plotting against each other (like Amber, or a Rhialto-level Dying Earth campaign).

If you can't handle PC death for whatever reason, I won't judge, and encourage you to play games which make PC death unusual or do away with it altogether. But I assure you you're missing out on some of the most tense and immersive moments I've had at the game table. In my experience, no other undesirable outcome gets players' attentions like "OMFG my ass is on the line".

You know, there's something I always want to say at these forum discussions, and in your case, I finally can: stop being such a fucking pussy and show up at mine and Bland Joe Dwarf's game table. I'd rather show than tell.

Quote from: John Morrow;581029I think people are creating a false excluded middle argument between one extreme, where losing a character is unacceptable and shouldn't happen and another extreme, where the players are essentially indifferent to the loss of their character and just roll up a new one without missing a beat.  I think most people fall between those extremes.

Excellent points, John. I'm very much advocating the mid-term here. A degree of player-character attachment is essential, or death loses its sting -- or worse still, becomes a sit-out tax, a bureaycratic punishment for lack of player skill. Without some attachment, character death loses its gravitas.

I think Iron Simulacrum said it first and best:

Quote from: Iron Simulacrum;580967I'm utterly mystified as to why the risk of death would be removed from an adventure game - it's an adventure. Jeopardy is the point. Your character isn't real, get attached enough so you feel the drama, experience the jeopardy, but if he dies, just get a new one. It too can be awesome.

(emphasis mine)

Quote from: John Morrow;581029As for character creation time, if all the things that make losing a character undesirable, the time spent creating the character in the rules and spent creating a new character to replace them rates pretty low for me.  The problems I have with losing a character are related to the investment of time playing playing the character, emotional attachment to the character, the disruption in the role that character played in the party and adventure, and the verisimilitude issues related to the party quickly accepting a new character into a trusted role in the group.

No reason to play down mistrust and slow acceptance of a new character. I for one welcome a modicum of intra-party tension.

As for time spent playing, it should make character death ecen more memorable. All great stories and sagas come to an end; the fact that it's not always a happy one doesn't make these tales any less compelling.

Quote from: John Morrow;580579Aren't all of those forms of chess simply variants of that same original game of chess?  So Xianqi doesn't get to be called a proper "chess" variant but this does?

You could say that both Chess and Xiangqi are variants of Chatauranga. But I think it would be dismissive of xiangqi to suggest it is a "chess variant", anymoreso than chess is a "xiangqi variant".

RPGPundit

Quote from: John Morrow;581015As with role-playing, isn't the solution to having no local players to make some?   I was pretty happy with Ishi Press' Chinese Chess for Beginners.

I have in fact made a couple; just not all that common for me to get together to play with them (more often, other games come up to be played instead).

RPGPundit