More on SOAP!

[Ferry Bazelmans]

 The other question I had, though, which I might not have expressed clearly in the post, was that we had trouble deciding what to do with guesses that were only partially correct. Give partial credit?  Say close enough and give it to them?  Make them guess it to the letter?

Again, this is up to the player whose secret is being guessed. Ruleslawyers would not grant points to a half-correct guess, since it would technically be incorrect, but casual players might, on the grounds that it is close enough. Everyone has to decide for themselves. Remember, in the end, everyone will know what your secret was anyway and people will probably call you on it if they think you cheated or stuck too rigidly to perfect guesses.

The motto here is: work it out together...

Crayne

[Ferry Bazelmans]

As for the character death issue, SOAP really does raise an interesting point.  If your participation in the game is divorced from your character (to an extent, because in SOAP it's not totally divorced), what does PC death or removal matter?

It doesn't. Even without a PC you should still be able to influence people's scenes. And even if you have no plotpoints left (which, assuming your character doesn't die within 2 minutes, will not happen so fast) it is fun to see where the plot goes.

Crayne

[Ian Freeman]

 Which raises my objection to the idea that you can just keep on playing without a character.  Without a PC you quickly run out of plot points (you can't accomplish your goal, give hints, use traits) and are left powerless.  Though I suppose you could still rack a few up by guessing other's secrets...

I disagree. The way I invision it even the dead players are capable of completing goals, giving hints and using traits through the manipulation of other characters and NPCs.

Take a character I just played. An important trait was that he used designer drugs. His goal was to kill his nurse and his secret was that he had buried his dead wife's brain in the backyard in a little shrine.

He could show his trait by having NPCs in the household comment on the unique drugs in the nurses collection, or he could have a dealer show up trying to sell (not knowing that he was dead), or a number of other things.

He could try to complete a goal by saying something like "The hitman papa Joe Louis that I hired shows up and waxes Nurse Honey". Perfectly doable from beyond the grave. Or he could have booby traps that he set up go off, or whatever.

For giving hints, this is fairly easy. THings like having characters notice a used shovel lying in the garden, or getting a phone call from a panicked priest saying that the brain has been removed or having characters find a supply of formaldehyde under the kitchen sink, etc...

You can drop a lot of hints about your secrets get your traits across even when you are dead (though maybe you aren't so supposed to do this, don't see why though).

While being dead can often be a little less interesting, it's definetly not a huge loss.