Character Death

somasatori

And to be clear - there’s nothing wrong with liking that. I’m not trying to wrongfun anyone. All I want is a little non-judgemental understanding that there are those of us who get attached to characters - both in TV and in MUs - and who don’t like having to get invested all over again when they get bumped off randomly.

I did also want to note that my being pro-character death (or Game of Thrones model) is also not intended to wrongfun anyone else. I think it’s great to get attached to your character. Passion for your hobby is awesome! It sucks to be invested in something and have it taken away and it’s definitely not wrong. IMO, the only “right way” to MUSH is to be an enthusiastic participant and contributor in however you and your friends want to tell a story and in whichever way works best to achieve that goal, so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else OOC!

Ashkuri

What currently-active MUSHes have a risk of non-consensual character permadeth?

Retromux/Numetal I guess? I don’t know of any other ones, and I don’t play that one so I don’t even know if it’s the case there.

Pavel

@somasatori Agreed. So long as expectations are communicated ahead of time so nobody’s blindsided by being “Suddenly Stark’d”? By all means.

MisterBoring

I think after reading a lot of stuff in this thread, I realize that I don’t necessarily want characters to die, I want characters to have their story end. And I don’t want it to be arbitrary or random. I want staff to be brave enough to say to their players “We want you to tell a complete story.” not “Please write the same character until your fingers rot off.” More games should have a character generation with, “Please include an idea of how you see your character’s story ending in your application.” It doesn’t have to be death, it could be the character realizing they’ve resolved that part of their lives in the region of the world the game takes place in, and getting on a horse and heading to new horizons. I love stories the most when they are complete and then I can move on to creating another new story. When I read, I don’t tend to go for book series that run on and on for 10+ books. I really hate that Brian Herbert is trying to keep Dune going on and on and on. I stopped reading Dresden Files when I realized that Jim Butcher wasn’t planning on ending the series likely anytime ever.

In my history of playing these games, if a game that’s been around for a long time seems to have a giant population of dinosaur characters, I’m very likely to avoid even making a character.

Yam

@Ashkuri I really can’t think of any. Is non-consensual permadeath actually a thing anymore?

Curious if anyone has actually seen a PC death play out where the player certainly didn’t intend to die AND didn’t consent to being in a situation that warned the risk.

Faraday

@MisterBoring said in Character Death:

I think after reading a lot of stuff in this thread, I realize that I don’t necessarily want characters to die, I want characters to have their story end.

Dang, I have the opposite problem in MUs. I have a hard enough time getting my characters’ story arcs to a meaningful conclusion, let alone to bring the entire character to a nice ending.

There are exceptions of course. BSP ended in a way that gave everyone a chance to wrap things up and write epilogues. That was nice. TGG’s campaigns had fixed endings, so we could bring things to a natural conclusion.

somasatori

@MisterBoring said in Character Death:

I think after reading a lot of stuff in this thread, I realize that I don’t necessarily want characters to die, I want characters to have their story end. And I don’t want it to be arbitrary or random. I want staff to be brave enough to say to their players “We want you to tell a complete story.” not “Please write the same character until your fingers rot off.”

Actually, you mentioning this struck me immediately, and I think that’s where I’m going with it too. Every good beginning and middle deserves a good end, which is often not provided to MUSH characters. I do think that the player should be able to decide when that end will be, or that staff might indicate “hey, this plot could include character death/retirement as a possibility as it’s very dangerous” and allow the players to say yea or nay as to whether they participate, but endings are important pieces regardless. This is also super hard to do, as @Faraday illustrated, since it’s hard to know exactly when an ending might be appropriate.

In my history of playing these games, if a game that’s been around for a long time seems to have a giant population of dinosaur characters, I’m very likely to avoid even making a character.

One of the more frustrating things in the hobby for me is when a game just kind of drags on and on. There might be new stories popping up, but if the majority of the population have been playing their characters for 10+ years, or being honest even 5+ years, I’m going to assume that everything my new PC does will be inconsequential by comparison. The games I’ve had a had in creating, I’ve tried to push an absolute time limit of 3 years. Time-limited MUSHes are probably their own thread, tbh.

I’m well aware that this is also due in part to the kinds of games I tend to play. On games that don’t include experience points and stat-based character development, or where stats are not incentivized, the dynamic will be different.

Pavel

@somasatori Agreed. And I’d even wager that if a game is designed to be temporary, with an intention of having an ending, then people will be more inclined to have characters who are temporary. Or at least work towards an arc rather than a straight line.

MisterBoring

@Faraday said in Character Death:

I have a hard enough time getting my characters’ story arcs to a meaningful conclusion, let alone to bring the entire character to a nice ending.

I would not be surprised if the ephemeral life span of most MUs being the major subconscious reason for people being gun shy about working to a fitting story end for their characters.

Evilgrayson

@MisterBoring said in Character Death:

@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?

I’ve done this. There was a group of us who used to advertise that we’d happily play short-term characters and plot devices, although there weren’t many games who took us up on it.

Best death as a bit part? A police detective in 1920s Chicago whose partner made some dumb calls and got them both killed. The hitman felt so sorry.

MisterBoring

I wonder if incentivizing character story endings would lead to more characters finding a story ending in games. Staff could offer extra starting XP, or special perks that represent rare story elements for new characters after working out a full story for their current character.

Roz

@Yam said in Character Death:

@Ashkuri I really can’t think of any. Is non-consensual permadeath actually a thing anymore?

Curious if anyone has actually seen a PC death play out where the player certainly didn’t intend to die AND didn’t consent to being in a situation that warned the risk.

I think it depends on how we’re defining things. Because I’d say that non-consensual permadeath would include situations where the players consented to the risk, but still took it, and the dice went how they went. That’s definitely something that still happens on games. Because, to my mind, they still weren’t choosing the PC death.

MisterBoring

@Roz said in Character Death:

Because, to my mind, they still weren’t choosing the PC death.

That’s almost it’s own question in this topic:

Is agreeing to a certain level of risk for a character and then dying in the scene a form of non-consensual permadeath?

catzilla

@Yam said in Character Death:

@Ashkuri I really can’t think of any. Is non-consensual permadeath actually a thing anymore?

Curious if anyone has actually seen a PC death play out where the player certainly didn’t intend to die AND didn’t consent to being in a situation that warned the risk.

I had a Freehold pledged mortal randomly get sniped by another PC because the player didn’t like mortals in a Changeling game.

sao

Yes, it is very different to choose a death versus being prepared to accept death as a consequence of dice rolls. Risk of death can make a triumph feel way more powerful. Stakes are super important for story reasons. A character who you know you are killing versus a character who might die if their attempt fails? Wildly different experience.

Yam

@catzilla WHAT

somasatori

@Yam said in Character Death:

Curious if anyone has actually seen a PC death play out where the player certainly didn’t intend to die AND didn’t consent to being in a situation that warned the risk.

On Liberation this guy who I think was a mortal or maybe a psychic did a homophobic hate crime against a Verbena (Mage) and her partner which ended up getting him smote. While this was happening he kept saying in OOC “I DON’T CONSENT TO THIS” and tried to run away from the room and Sundance kept +summoning him back. I feel this kind of illustrates a bit of a misunderstanding about what “consensual” means, since it probably should not mean you can be aggressive and shitty toward someone else without facing consequences for those actions. Maybe he shouldn’t have been straight up obliterated, and we might argue about whether the punishment fits the crime, but … y’know.

Pavel

@Yam said in Character Death:

Curious if anyone has actually seen a PC death play out where the player certainly didn’t intend to die AND didn’t consent to being in a situation that warned the risk.

Honestly, there were a few games in The Before Times where consent was… dubiously understood. So I’ve definitely seen people not understand that they were playing a game wherein they were at risk and subsequently got telenuked for looking at a mage’s girlfriend wrong. But I certainly wouldn’t count them as expected or desired standards of behaviour, even back then.

Yam

@somasatori At that point it should’ve been pulled out the IC realm and dealt with it like it was player problem. I think the… GTA RP server people call it failRP? << Sometimes people do such wacky shit that it cannot be resolved ICly. There’s a threshold of “oh, I see, this is not RP related at all”. You wouldn’t punish a player like this by killing their character. You’d punish a player like this by banning them.

somasatori

@Yam said in Character Death:

There’s a threshold of “oh, I see, this is not RP related at all”. You wouldn’t punish a player like this by killing their character. You’d punish a player like this by banning them.

Yeah, I can see this. I think he also got banned, but I might be misremembering as it was about a year and a half ago. I could see it being a retcon + ban situation, though, since there were probably OOC motivations at play from the dude.

There are also some (mutter) mechanical elements here because if he took the ‘Bigot’ flaw or the ‘Intolerant’ flaw towards LGBTQ+ folks, he could have justified being a homophobe in his RP. But, man, no one wants to play that out, and if they did, it would certainly not be with some rando you run into in a public room.

edit: this is just a personal tangent, and I absolutely do like “dark RP” but I feel like there can be this push to misery-porn WoD games because of those annoying dudes (guaranteeing they’re dudes) who pop up now and and again saying “IT’S NOT THE WORLD OF DISNEY!!” Like it’s okay to sometimes celebrate a win or have some levity. It can’t rain all the time