Character Death
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@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
"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 -
@Yam said in Character Death:
You wouldn’t punish a player like this by killing their character. You’d punish a player like this by banning them.
Some places do both.
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One must remember, of course, that Liberation set out to do things entirely differently and new, and therefore we cannot judge their decision-making based on accepted practices we might employ. Since they’re special, unique little creatures over there.
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@somasatori said in Character Death:
I feel like there can be this push to misery-porn WoD games
I want a push to a different kind of WoD game. I want a WoD game that focuses very deeply on the struggle to maintain basic utilities when you’re a walking reality bending monster.
Bob the Brujah struggles with his cable company’s inability to send an installer to his house when he’s actually available to have the installer on site.
Jane the Virtual Adept struggles with the fact that her apartments toilet clog is currently sitting in a pocket realm she accidentally created during a Correspondence experiment.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@somasatori I would leave out the bigot or intolerant flaws entirely, they seem poised for bad faith nonsense on a MU* environment. It’s one thing if it’s your own table, but then you can play FATAL for all I care if it’s in your personal space.
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@Yam The game was new at the time and I made the first mortal. Dude would make snide remarks OOCly about mortals being useless and no point in having them on a game.
My character got pledged to the Freehold not too long after approval. His character was a Winter assassin that was aloof around my character (totally fine ICly). One day my PC had lunch with another member of the Freehold and as soon as they stepped out of the diner the ST pops up and tells me that I’ve been hit with like, 6L damage? out of nowhere. Friendly PC manages to stabilize my PC and get her to the hospital. Should have been fine there right?
No. Somehow the sniper PC sneaks into the hospital, gets past police, etc., finds my character in the hospital and point blank shoots her dead. Then somehow also manages to get out the hospital unscatched, go on the run and in hiding, then quit the character when he wasn’t applauded and then quit the game.
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@catzilla That’s utterly pathetic on their part. As is that game for allowing this to go off at all.
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On the opposite end of the arbitrary death spectrum, I want to say that I’ve witnessed people arbitrarily kill off their own characters for various reasons. Sometimes they wanted to leave a game and make sure that nobody tried to use them as an NPC, and in other cases I recall people needing to free up an alt slot for some new concept they wanted to try and just having their character get run over by a wagon or something out of nowhere. I’ve done it myself at least once. Years ago on a WoD game with a three alt limit, I decided to swap out one of my characters for a new idea, and because I wasn’t attached to resuming that character in the future, I ended a random social scene with the character stepping out of the bar and immediately getting struck down by a semi truck at speed. (I did apologize in advance for throwing a huge crowbar into what was otherwise a fun bit of barRP.)
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@MisterBoring In the right circumstances, that would be a moment of high comedy
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@labsunlimited said in Character Death:
@catzilla That’s utterly pathetic on their part. As is that game for allowing this to go off at all.
The player of sniper PC was buddies with the ST (who was also the owner of the game/site). I had asked if there was a way that my character could have been nabbed by a privateer/loyalist/etc and replaced with a Fetch or something but ST said no.
The worst part was that this game had a public diceroller and there were no rolls made for sniper PC to escape the hospital/police.
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@somasatori said in Character Death:
@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.
Truly wild, I still have people on my +watch on Lib who got banned for calling Polk out for a transphobia. This was, of course, pre-Polk ban. Weird it wasn’t lifted. shrug
@labsunlimited said in Character Death:
@somasatori I would leave out the bigot or intolerant flaws entirely, they seem poised for bad faith nonsense on a MU* environment. It’s one thing if it’s your own table, but then you can play FATAL for all I care if it’s in your personal space.
But how else do I get bonus points for playing a raging Man-hating Femme-Nazi?!?
… I haven’t, but it’s nice to know the option is there.
@catzilla said in Character Death:
@Yam The game was new at the time and I made the first mortal. Dude would make snide remarks OOCly about mortals being useless and no point in having them on a game.
My character got pledged to the Freehold not too long after approval. His character was a Winter assassin that was aloof around my character (totally fine ICly). One day my PC had lunch with another member of the Freehold and as soon as they stepped out of the diner the ST pops up and tells me that I’ve been hit with like, 6L damage? out of nowhere. Friendly PC manages to stabilize my PC and get her to the hospital. Should have been fine there right?
No. Somehow the sniper PC sneaks into the hospital, gets past police, etc., finds my character in the hospital and point blank shoots her dead. Then somehow also manages to get out the hospital unscatched, go on the run and in hiding, then quit the character when he wasn’t applauded and then quit the game.
I have a similar dumb-death story, just not about me specifically. I forget if this was The Reach or if this was Fallcoast, but I was part of an Invictus Vampire group who the other Invictus didn’t like, so they decided to keep me distracted by the Prince while the hit squad went after everyone else.
Now, we had a Mage ally, and a mage staffer at the time had a Vampire on the hit squad, so they had to call in a different staffer to adjudicate. This is fine. The problem is that some how some way, the mage cast a successful spell but then posed chanting too loudly so ‘wow, the mortals saw the spell and now it doesn’t go off because disbelief’. Cool and fun.
Fastforward, every Vampire has been killed, the Mage jumped into the spirit world and ran to the Police Station where his Mentor was a Death Mage/cop. The Mage staffer no longer has a PC involved, so he is in charge of the plot of the Ally running away. Oh look, a super-powerful Ghost of the Police Station attacks and kills him! Never mind that the Cop was a master of Death and was never told about this spooky ghost being a problem.
Fair and Balanced actions by all.
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@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.
It depends on what you mean by “consent to”.
The first PC I lost was on a (very old) Star Wars game where they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and rolled poorly on an Athletics check. On another SW game, my character was sniped in the town square by a bounty hunter acting on a dubiously-initiated bounty. My PC didn’t die, but easily could have. On TGG, I generally played non-combatants, but one time my nurse char was killed because I forgot to +takecover before going AFK and the (usually safe) base got shelled by artillery.
One can argue that just by playing on a game with the possibility of PC death I was implicitly consenting to whatever came my way. That’s fair. But I certainly didn’t enter into any of those scenes thinking it at all likely my character was at risk.
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I agree it does depend on what exactly is being consented to. I’ve had one PK that I sort of consented to back in the day? A player I had known IC tension with pinged me wanting to RP, I said sure, we met up, there was an OOC warning that ‘this might turn violent if they dont’ like what they hear’.
And AFTER I said ‘sure, that’s fine, I’m good with whatever’, their werewolf buddy suddenly joined the scene and itg quickly became apparent that this was an assassination, not a ‘might turn violent’ thing. Dunno if that counts as me consenting to PC death. I guess it kinda does.
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I feel like “consenting to death” for me is, like — fully giving a player the choice. Or the player chooses to have their PC die in a scene. I think any death where a character’s death comes down to dice rolls in some way isn’t a fully consensual death.
That said, I do think it’s a sliding scale. A lot of games nowadays fall somewhere in the middle, rather than on the extremes; I feel like a general attitude of “keep players informed when they’re getting into situations where death is a possibility” has become a lot more common, and “you can be PKed on a whim for dumb, petty reasons” has become a lot less common.
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I am happy to risk death on a character that I love and want to keep playing if the death is part of an epic plot where I had a fair chance of survival if things went differently or maybe an unfair chance of survival, but a fair warning that this was very risky.
I would also need to feel like that the staffer was being fair. I have seen staffer make things harder on players they like less and it was probably never intentional, but bias working its way into things.
Clearly the only death by another player that I would find acceptable would be one that is well earned or one that I fully consented too as an intentional way to end a story.
I also don’t like character death or even heavily damage to a character (perm wounds, expensive hard to get equip loss and etc) for plot that is really small and not that important. I had a character suffer a big loss on a poorly ran plot that was a had zero impact on the overall storyline of the game, with the odds heavily stacked against us while the real heroes were in other scenes and that was sucky. I was like I would happily take this damage if my character helped to save the day or didn’t help to save the day, but just did something stupid to earn it.
But my character was not acting foolish. The storyteller just had different characters in different scenes in mind to be the real hero of the storyline. Our scene was largely a distraction minor scene for people who were not the heroes to be given a little something to do that ultimately impacted nothing. I felt like with the high risk, the chance of death and the damage we were taking to our characters some of which was perm damage they should have had our scene at least help the heroes save the day in some way. If that wasn’t doable, it should have been a low-risk scene so long as we weren’t being idiots.
In other words, a high-risk scene should come with high rewards unless the scene only became high risk because of characters foolish choices. And if staff is unwilling to give rewards (they helped save the day or whatever) to a particular group, they should keep the risk low.
However, if my character took this damage or even died, in the actual save the world scene, I would have been so happy with it.
And when I had characters, I loved and was not ready to depart with die in epic plot, I was quite happy with the outcome.
I do think that people who die by dice (if they were mature oocly about the death), should be given support in making a new character who while may not be as powerful as the character they lost, can start with some decent stuff
I actually quit a game over being n very high risk and near zero rewards scenes while the staffer’s buddies were in very low risk and very high rewards scenes.
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I also had a scene once where a staffer who disliked me ooc, gave me a dice roll diff that I probably had less than 5 percent chance of making and if I failed, my character would have been on shot killed by their powerful npc.
I made the roll, surprising myself and the staffer who wasn’t super amused.
That also turned my character into the big hero of the scene, which the staffer downplayed, and another character claimed it was them instead of me both ooc and ic who had that wild hero moment.
When I went into a second scene with said staffer, I had still extremely difficult rolls and almost died again and this scene came with almost no reward. My character dodged death a second time.
Same game as above, but I did quit. I realized that I had three choices, quit, play in the plot scenes until I finally fail the near impossible dice rolls and have a likely pointless death or play and avoid doing plot or staff run scenes. I decided just to quietly walk and vote with my feet and move on.
While I like a good death, I don’t like an unfair death and I decided not to stay around for it.
Or TLDR: I love a good death, but I think storytellers should be careful to make sure that high risk scenes come with high rewards.
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I haven’t seen a non-consent permadeath in more than a decade. Again, back on KotOR, there was a crewman of the Sith Empire who mouthed off to both superior officers and Sith, and when threatened with the brig, attacked a superior officer and Sith. They were OOCly told by a Staffer that it would likely result in character death, and that led to OOC yelling about how it wasn’t fair and they weren’t going to the brig and they would leave the game. The character chose to attack the other PCs, was killed, and left the game. Everyone was happier (save perhaps the player of the dead character).
On another note, one thing that I really appreciated from The Network was that the short seasons (4-6 months usually) meant that character death was less painful. You could have a complete arc for your character within a season, and end it with riding off into the sunset, death, a cliffhanger, or whatever else you liked, without worrying about being “behind” people who kept their character in the midst of their story. The only downside was that if there was a second season in the same world, you might have problems bringing your character back for another go-around (except during the Soap Opera season, that one would have been easy).
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I wonder if others have had players attempt things that would guarantee their death, explain this to them OOC, and they still push for it, and then when they failed and had to suffer the consequences, thrown a total fit.
In one case, the player of a Mage was chasing a bad guy across the rooftops of the city’s downtown area, and the bad guy used his hyper-science rocket boots to jump from the roof of one building to the roof of the building across the 4 lane street below. PC witnesses this, their character has the right skills and knowledge to understand what’s happened, but still chooses to attempt the jump themselves. Their character does not have hyper-science rocket boots, or even the Mage spheres that could feasibly allow them to get across the gap. I explain to them that they’re 14 stories up, the gap is easily 70 feet (four lanes of street + two sidewalks) and they have nothing to help them make that. Their response is “My character is a highly trained freerunner, and will be able to handle that.” I tell them if they attempt they’ll be subject to the falling rules, and likely also get hit by a car depending on how they roll. The roll goes poorly, they fall roughly 100+ feet, basically splatter on the ground. They didn’t die, but they hit that point in the OWoD health track where any single point of damage will kill them. It’s basically the “Aim for the Bushes” scene from The Other Guys but not funny.
They then threw a fit, and told me that I was concealing information from them, and quit the game without even giving the other PCs at the scene a chance to get down to them and help them. I asked the other players if they felt I was concealing things from the nearly dead player and they all agreed I had explained it well enough for them. The player in question didn’t come back.
Has anyone else been witness too or heard about this phenomenon?
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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It sounds like you were generous for not killing them and like they were being stupid.
That being said I feel for staffers who probably sometimes find themselves going…
That was really dumb and should probably kill them.
But I don’t want to kill their pc.
And omg the fit they are going to throw.
It sounds like you were more than fair by having them almost die, but not die.
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@MisterBoring said in Character Death:
Has anyone else been witness too or heard about this phenomenon?
Long ago I was the co-head (though this was referred to as god because good lord we were full of ourselves) of Metro 2 and also the Changeling wiz. I was running a Changeling scene and I forget a lot of the actual details on how this came about, but there was this Sidhe who was fighting a handful of Thallain during a plot I had been running for a bit. The sidhe had prided himself on being this impressive duelist and was OOCly a bit of an upstart by comparison to some of the more established characters. I warned him that the Thallain he was fighting, which were Shadow Courtiers (I wish I could remember what their kiths were, it was 2nd edition since this was back in the late 00s) were very accomplished and he could quickly find himself outmatched. I even gave him narrative reason to back down and flee, and he wasn’t part of a noble house that was particularly martial or had reasons to stand and fight. I think he might have even been an Eiluned. Anyway, he absolutely did not take me up on this. I explained that even if it’s not lethal, he may be captured. No change to his actions. I don’t remember the exact conversation, but I feel confident saying he told me he would go down fighting. There had recently been a lot of heroic battle on the game since we had just had this big Halloween weekend event thing.
Cut to getting, as I suspected, trashed by the NPCs. Man, he was pissed. He didn’t die. The goal of the Shadow Court was to acquire assets in the Freehold, not to kill them. I told him that he would end up being a prisoner and he threw a fit and quit the game. This actually left me in a lurch because we had some difficulties with our previous characters who had been in control of the Freehold (a Liam and a Dougal Sidhe pair who were transitioning out of the game) and I had hoped that this other Sidhe would step up to take the county.
I feel like there have been a handful of these kinds of cases at everywhere I’ve staffed except maybe Darkwater. I actually haven’t killed a lot of PCs, despite having staffed on places that had a fairly high death count. There were only a few times where it felt like it would be a fitting end to the character’s story and that the other player agreed. I think with this sort of thing where they get angry about it, people think they want to play through big consequences and that their luck will hold and they’re going to be a big damn hero that people will tell stories about, but come to realize that they have the same luck as anyone else. Then they realize that the heroics they attempted to perform weren’t worth it by comparison to what they stood to lose.
To quote Cormac Mccarthy, “Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased.” He was probably talking about pretending to be a werewolf on the internet here.
