Character Death
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I wasn’t on The Greatest Generation, but my impression of how people have talked about it really points at the expectation aspect to me. People went in knowing their characters were almost surely going to die. That was, from everything I’ve heard, kind of core to the game’s conceit: there were limited-time campaigns, and PCs would die. When players expect to lose their characters, it reframes our entire approach.
This is probably the core of it, yeah. It would be difficult to get the same buy-in on a WoD, fantasy, or modern fantasy/supernatural game, which couples into the point I was making about cgen difficulty, actually. Could you imagine asking someone to make a new Vampire the Masquerade character every 4-6 months for a new chronicle? Even at the most easy going TTRPG tables that would quickly get you kicked off Storyteller duties.
That said, I guess the mindset I tend to have when I make a werewolf or other combat-heavy character is that there’s at least a 75% chance they’ll eat it during a plot.
@MisterBoring said in Factions:
The answer to this (in my opinion) is to somehow get people more emotionally invested in the grander story rather than their own, but I couldn’t begin to fathom how to make that happen. In the LARPs I’ve been involved in where it’s happened, those were prefaced with workshops sometimes months before play began to make sure everyone was on the same page going into the game.
Leading into this, and I really agree with this point here. Likely this is the reason why I tend to be on the pro-character (mine) death, because it creates real stakes to lose characters. If you roll through every story beat without taking any hits on your main group (be it Sept/Protectorate, Freehold, faction, etc.), it gets kind of boring. I’m talking more about staff v. player here, but the same principles can apply to faction v. faction. If no one ever loses a character in a faction conflict, you lose the stakes and it feels like a Spy Vs. Spy pastiche where the same struggle goes on eternally.
I think if people are more invested in the larger story, and view their character as a tool to expand that story, they’ll be more accepting of bad stuff (including death) happening to that character.
This is probably the best argument for a larger narrative-run game over a sandbox style, IMO. It’s very hard to get buy-in for this, but I think it requires a promise that’s hard to deliver: that is, that there is enough consistent story being told in the conflict that it makes the loss of the character cool and worth it. This could be staff-generated or player-generated in the case of player-run factions vs. other player-run factions, but it’s integral to have core people running stories (like in your example with LARPs, you have the GM and assistant GMs) regularly for people to feel like it matters.
"And the Fool says, pointing to the invertebrate fauna feeding in the graves: 'Here a monarchy reigns, mightier than you: His Majesty the Worm.'"
Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destines -
@somasatori said in Factions:
This could be staff-generated or player-generated in the case of player-run factions vs. other player-run factions, but it’s integral to have core people running stories (like in your example with LARPs, you have the GM and assistant GMs) regularly for people to feel like it matters.
What if it was staff generated by finding a few volunteers to play characters who exist solely to add to the story and die to set the example that PC death can be rewarding to the greater story?
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@MisterBoring said in Factions:
What if it was staff generated by finding a few volunteers to play characters who exist solely to add to the story and die to set the example that PC death can be rewarding to the greater story?
I would absolutely volunteer to do this. Actually, now that you mention it, I feel like a game somewhere asked people to make mortals or their equivalent to be part of the death toll of a plot. Metro?
Anyhow, yeah, I think that could work. You still need to have those people play those characters and build their personalities and make ties and so on, but that is a workable idea to get around the loss of stakes due to stagnation.
(edit for grammatical clarity)
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I only played a couple different characters on it during its runtime - and there certainly wasn’t loss without drama - but one of the things I remember from The Greatest Generation’s gameplay was that it was pretty easy to join the game, get enmeshed and equally very easy to die. It was a bit of a bummer if your medic died because the place you were in got (suspiciously specific reference here, hmm), but there were other options you could jump into. I think TGG was less of a true RPG as we know Star Wars, WoD, Pern, Arx/L&L games more in the vein of a combat simulation a la (what I’ve heard about) BattletechMUX, so maybe that’s part of the difference too, as you kind of expected the characters to be short-lived.
I wasn’t on The Greatest Generation, but my impression of how people have talked about it really points at the expectation aspect to me. People went in knowing their characters were almost surely going to die. That was, from everything I’ve heard, kind of core to the game’s conceit: there were limited-time campaigns, and PCs would die. When players expect to lose their characters, it reframes our entire approach.
Oh, hey, TGG has been invoked. This was one of my favorite RP experiences (bolded for emphasis). Some players were mainly there for the combat, but there were also a handful of us who treated it liked Band of Brothers MUSH and that was very rewarding. I’d say the probability you’d lose your PC made certain little character moments more impactful, as did the short-run campaigns, yeah. The headwiz referred to it as a ‘game of two halves’ and I was always more into the RP half than the combat, though the combat was fun or I wouldn’t have played it.
It was also, and I think sometimes people who didn’t play it don’t get this, a purely PVE game. Everybody was a soldier in the same unit. There were no opposed factions in-play at a given time. It’s not really applicable to this conversation.
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@Third-Eye said in Factions:
It was also, and I think sometimes people who didn’t play it don’t get this, a purely PVE game. Everybody was a soldier in the same unit. There were no factions. It’s not really applicable to this conversation.
Yeah, fair, I was mostly bringing it up to emphasize my point about character death, but it was probably a bit of a cheap inclusion.
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@somasatori
Nah, it’s understandable, it just comes up from time to time and sometimes it seems to be an actual misconception about how the game operated. I assume people equate PC death with PVP. The relatively quickie CG did make spinning up a new character less arduous, but you still had people who were so invested in their particular PC they quit after they died. -
Should we maybe break this discussion of PC Death and Player Investment out to a new thread?
Paging admins to the thread. Admins to the thread, cleanup on aisle 5. -
I think it’s forked right. IF anything looks forkfucked, let me know.
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Looks good to me! Thanks @Tez!
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@somasatori said in Character Death:
If no one ever loses a character in a faction conflict, you lose the stakes
I almost agree, here, but there are other stakes possible beyond losing a character. But, at least in my experience, players prone to wanting ‘dramatic’ character conflict are often purely interested in combat of some kind resulting in a character being left unplayable – that’s their version of victory. I hope that in more recent times such people have found other avenues and that we’ve entered a more story-driven era, but my experience is hardly unique. It might explain why so many people are reticent to offer up their characters to the slaughter. They put in all this effort to build a character, create interesting stories, and suddenly that story is cut short to feed an ego instead of completed to feed a narrative.
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@Roz said in Character Death:
I wasn’t on The Greatest Generation, but my impression of how people have talked about it really points at the expectation aspect to me. People went in knowing their characters were almost surely going to die. That was, from everything I’ve heard, kind of core to the game’s conceit: there were limited-time campaigns, and PCs would die. When players expect to lose their characters, it reframes our entire approach.
This exactly. It’s like playing the Paranoia RPG. It’s right there on the tin that you should expect your PC to die. I might still be able to play and have fun with my friends, because at least I know what I’m getting into.
More importantly though, it’s a different kind of fun. In MUs, I’m in it for the soap opera. I want the long-term stories. I couldn’t care less how quick and easy the chargen process is, or whether I get to carry over the XP to my new character, or whatever other “compensation” you try to give me for losing my character. All of that is irrelevant because unwanted/unexpected character death is the equivalent of flipping over the chess board in a middle of a match.
I’m not saying games with PC death shouldn’t exist. To each their own. It’s just not for me because it’s undermining the very reason I’m playing the games in the first place.
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@Faraday said in Character Death:
In MUs, I’m in it for the soap opera
In which case when your PC dies it should come back as your PC’s lost twin brother who immediately falls in love with his dead brother’s widow’s sister, who it turns out is actually adopted former European royalty.
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I’m personally very firmly on the side of pro-character death, but I do see @Faraday’s point in that we all come to games with different perspectives on what’s important.
I suppose, to me anyway, if you are playing in a game that’s attempting to emulate a TTRPG, regardless of which one, there should be some expectation of character death. Playing D&D, it’s expected that you might die (though admittedly there are many ways to offset that through resurrection and raise dead spells) pretty early on considering low HP. There is definitely a different vibe between starting out a D&D campaign and starting out a campaign of Dungeon Crawl Classics, of course, but … I dunno. Maybe this is just my personal experience with gaming coming up.
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@somasatori I think the difference in view comes at least partially from the fact that D&D is born of wargames with RPG elements tacked on at the end. Originally, the ‘story’ was “we go through a dungeon and kill shit.” So mechanically, combat and death and dying are at the absolute forefront.
Whereas other systems have other intentions. If you’re playing Vampire the Masquerade, for instance, and your first instinct in character conflict is to rampage and kill everything… you’re kind of playing it wrong.
Which is just another way of phrasing what’s already been said, really, that different games have different intentions around character death. In D&D I go into it knowing my wizard could die within the first thirty seconds of our first combat, but in a Lords and Ladies game I’d expect my Earl of James-Joneston to die when it is the most dramatically appropriate and narratively satisfying.
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@Pavel said in Character Death:
Which is just another way of phrasing what’s already been said, really, that different games have different intentions around character death. In D&D I go into it knowing my wizard could die within the first thirty seconds of our first combat, but in a Lords and Ladies game I’d expect my Earl of James-Joneston to die when it is the most dramatically appropriate and narratively satisfying.
After which you play his twin brother, the Royal Consort of the Queendom of Latifah.
Yeah, I get what you mean. I do suppose this is where WoD games can kind of add to the confusion of this situation since you would definitely not run most Vampire the Masquerade games this way, but you could, and most likely would, run a Werewolf game this way. Then you have the two different game lines on the same MUSH trying to cooperate with another when the theme and tone are so vastly different.
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Killing off your beloved character and making yourself and all your friends cry is some of the best fun you can have out here.
I’ll die on this hill (which is also good character death)
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@Ashkuri said in Character Death:
I’ll die on this hill (which is also good character death)
Good being the operative term. There are many times when character death has been cheap or not earned, or seems sort of pointless such as in a plotline that doesn’t work or if you feel like you’re being targeted OOCly. This also returns us somewhat to the topic of factional conflict, since that can be such a contentious part of it. But, yeah! If you have a good character death that feels meaningful, it can absolutely propel the story into the stratosphere.
"And the Fool says, pointing to the invertebrate fauna feeding in the graves: 'Here a monarchy reigns, mightier than you: His Majesty the Worm.'"
Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destines -
I sort of want to run a tragic post-apocalypse game where the player characters are vat-grown worker humanoids with incredibly short lifespans who are dedicated to cleaning up and rebuilding the world after a disaster while the actual inhabitants of the world are safely sleeping in a bunker somewhere. The tragic story comes out of these characters trying to make the most of their short lives before they inevitably reach time out and melt into goo, or otherwise die violently dealing with one of the many dangers of the wasteland.
When you enter character creation each time you will receive a notice that the chances of your character’s story coming to an end by violence or tragically by simply running out of time are very high. I think it would also be cool to do this on Ares because I have a feeling I could rig up a system on the characters page where each little character portrait has a timer under it and a green border, and when the time runs out, or the character dies sacrificing themselves to let their short term best friends kill the Gnarlbeast of the Voided Lake, it automatically shifts it to red and puts a red skull and crossbones on their character picture.
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@somasatori said in Character Death:
suppose, to me anyway, if you are playing in a game that’s attempting to emulate a TTRPG, regardless of which one, there should be some expectation of character death. Playing D&D, it’s expected that you might die (though admittedly there are many ways to offset that through resurrection and raise dead spells) pretty early on considering low HP.
I don’t come to MUs to emulate a TTRPG experience, but even if I did, I don’t see the association between TTRPGs and PC death that you do. As @Pavel also pointed out, different games have different expectations. I’ve been in plenty of TTRPG campaigns through the decades, from games with my family, to various clubs, to games amongst strangers at Gencon. In all that time, there were exactly two campaigns where PC death was expected. Naturally some of that is selection bias in terms of what RPGs I play and who I play with, but it wasn’t exactly hard to find like-minded people who just want to chill and tell a story.
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@somasatori said in Character Death:
If you have a good character death that feels meaningful, it can absolutely propel the story into the stratosphere.
As someone who also enjoys a good character death, I find it sad that there are some people who would refuse even the most epic of story ending character deaths. I understand not wanting your PC to die, especially in an arbitrary or uncool fashion, but if your PC sacrifice ties off an 18 month plot and removes one of the biggest antagonists in the game permanently, choosing not to do that and allow the antagonist to continue attacking the PCs effectively spits on everybody else that worked toward an ending to that plot. (Yes, I realize that’s a very very specific example, and yes I still hold it over the person that did that to this day even though they regularly attend my home tabletop game.)
