It's a hard job

[angelfromanotherpin]

There's a particular sort of story I'd like to RPG.  It shows up in Warhammer fiction, in the Myth and X-com computer games, in WWII movies, on Legend of the Five Rings' Kaiu Wall, and so on and so forth.  The story goes: 'It's a hard job and even if you succeed most of you will probably die; but it's got to be done and you're the only ones who can do it.'

Now, the problem is that in traditional RPGs, the death thing is problematic.  So here I am, looking to make an indie solution for that problem.

Stuff I know I want:
• Low-investment character generation: Making a character should be a matter of a few minutes at most.  Either characters are really simple, or the complicated stuff is turned into templates with only some customization.
• No player elimination: When a character bites it, his player stays in the game, as an abstraction giving bonuses to the remaining characters.  This role should have enough depth that the player stays engaged, but less power than while alive, so that death still has some bite.  Yes, the last character standing is hard to take down.  Also, maybe the manner of your death flavors the kind of help you can give from beyond?
• Some method of moving from 'dead' to 'alive': Not by characters coming back to life (which would undermine the premise), but nobody wants to play Obi-wan's disembodied voice for very long.  So there should be some mechanic for players whose characters have died to introduce new characters to portray, as the original group releases prisoners, is sent late reinforcements, or indoctrinates captives.
• I like the idea of a list of 'honored dead.'  Maybe not even mechanical, maybe just a rule that the players write down the name of any PC who died particularly well, or even at all well, at the end of the mission.  Posthumous medals?  Maybe if no-one makes it out alive to tell the tale, no names can be added?  I can totally see a sheet at the back of a rulebook for that.

Stuff I'm not sure about:
• How much abstraction?  I like the idea of getting into traditional tactical puzzles with characters filling particular roles.
• Scaling issues.  You can play with one poor sap per player, but sometimes there's an actual hardass in these stories.  Maybe you can choose to have a number of guys apiece, and you can trade in an appropriate number of them for one tougher guy.  I like that idea, if only because someone who survived a previous mission can be 'veteran.'  Opposition will scale accordingly, of course.  The job is never easy.
• Between mission stuff: Is there a continuing campaign?  Specifically, are there mechanics which track progress based on missions that succeed and fail?  Or do the players never see the big picture, only their slice of it?

Thoughts, please?

[Mikael]

Don't know why this thread has not been getting more love; personally I think that the basic idea is inspired, if not necessarily easy to implement well.

Mostly the questions you have seem a matter of taste, and as such are yours to decide and design around. In my opinion, the mechanics should facilitate hard and furious action interlaced with some interludes where the characters are forced to think about the battle ahead, forced to acknowledge the high probability of no-one getting out alive ("I have a bad feeling about this"), and required to describe how the particular character reacts to this imminent doom. This "day before the great battle" is an often-used device in fiction, and essential, I think, to bringing out the characters' personalities and to make their fate matter. Especially if you plan on having a really fast character generation.

[contracycle]

As a thought, maybe this can be approached by differentiating between central and dependent characters, using the hardass idea.

You could build a group as a sort of sheriff plus posse, or lord plus retainers, whatever.  This major, hardass character is significantly more powerful than the others, but consequently would be called upon to lead from the front take more risks.  If/when they die, the hardass role can then pass to another player, so everyone gets a turn to be the empowered character.  This also allows losses among the lesser characters to be replaced immediately from a cadre of followers.

That might be useful in that it would shift the emphasis from 'making my guy survive', to going out in a glorious and useful fashion, and earning the rights to play the hardass next time.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm thinking about two roles: Grunt and Specialist.  I think characters take levels in these, and missions are rated by how many levels you get to try them.  So a 5-level mission with 4 players has 3 players each take a character with 1 level, and 1 player takes either one character with 2 levels or two characters with 1 level. 

Grunts do the basic fighty-stuff.  They take hits better than Specialists and can have grunt-specialties like 'takes hits,' 'hits hard,' and 'runs fast.'

Specialists do mission-specific stuff, and have specific combat roles.  So an Engineer can blow a bridge and set booby traps, a Sniper can put down a dignitary in the middle of his elite guard and take out heavily armored enemies, and a Hacker can bypass security and shut down robots. 

For each level a character has, they get a secondary Skill, like Charm or First Aid, or what have you.

Actually, I think that's character creation: Each character has x levels in y roles.  Each level gives them a role skill, and a secondary skill.

Cinematically speaking, people tend to have 4 levels of injury: uninjured, injured, crippled, and dead.  Uninjured and dead are self-explanatory.  Injured people are impaired but still basically functional.  Crippled people groan a lot and have to be dragged around by their friends.  For simplicity's sake, I'm thinking of eliminating injured as a mechanical thing, so characters are bloodied or limping, but not actually penalized, but that's probably a playtest thing.

Hm, might be starting to move out of First Thoughts territory.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Okay, on the injury front:
• When a character takes a hit and their defense fails, they lose a Level.  If that was their last Level, they choose to become either Crippled or Dead.  So characters with more than 1 level can be injured mechanically, but characters with only 1 level are either up or down.
• The choice to become Crippled or Dead is an important one.  A Crippled character becomes a liability, who must be tended, moved, and protected by other team members.  A Dead character becomes a floating benefit of some sort.  I suspect Grunts will choose to die more often, because Specialists will be required to complete the mission.

Problem: Having a Crippled character may be a not fun situation, since they are severely limited, and don't offer the play options of a Dead character.  Crippled characters can be fun while feebly crawling around desperately trying to stay alive, but if not under immediate threat become dull again.  Suggestions?

Problem: Characters with multiple levels are difficult.  A character can be both a Grunt and an Engineer, but only one at a time, and so is less valuable than one of each.  Even if such a character has multiple actions, they're at a disadvantage since they lose deployment flexibility when compared to multiple characters.  Suggestions?

[J. Scott Timmerman]

Stuff I know I want:
• No player elimination: When a character bites it, his player stays in the game, as an abstraction giving bonuses to the remaining characters.  This role should have enough depth that the player stays engaged, but less power than while alive, so that death still has some bite.  Yes, the last character standing is hard to take down.  Also, maybe the manner of your death flavors the kind of help you can give from beyond?

I did something similar in my project, which I brought up in a thread entitled Conflict of Interest in Element Introduction?  In it, I talk about all the little things that go on in a situation that are usually handled by system or the GM - such as paying attention to side consequences of actions or the off chance of something random happening.  These things I put under control of players who don't have characters involved in the current scene (even if the characters are physically there).  Something like that may give your players the ability to influence goings-on outside of a limiting character (like a dead character).

-JT

[Istvan]

What if you made the after death aspect a separate game line. The events in this game would have impact on the main game. I willtry to explain via some cheesy examples.

For example in the Quest to Destroy the Evil Artifact story the characters will have to go through several phases.

1) Find the artifact and take it
2) Find the way to destroy the artifact
3) Meet the requirements of 2 however many there are
4) Destroy artifact.

All the while they have to protect the artifact from the forces of evil who are trying to reclaim it.

What if at the same time, on another plain there was a linked storyline. Starting at some point in the previous line. The Evil Force exists in both planes, but the challenges and outcomes are different. The only way to defeat the evil force is in the orginal plane, but the EF perhaps can be weakened, and influenced in the second plane.

Let say at point 2, the Evil Force (EF) wants to reclaim the artifiact. To do so the EF unleashes dragons. Perhaps the number and strength of dragons released for the party to fight can be influenced by actions the already dead members have made in the Second plane.

Or should the characters be successful at a certain aspect of the second plane game they can particiapte in some of the material plane game as ghosts.

For example should the already dead character(s) sucessfully convince,trick,bribe,blackmail,perform a task for the lords of the underworld they can gain the ability to materialize once/twice/whatever times per day in a ghostly form. This can increase in power. perhasp they can at first just gesture, but as they gain experience they can speak, fight use magic etc..This would allow limited interaction and participation at the final climactic finish. For multiple story campaigns perhaps there could be a small chance for the dead to come back as undead with various restrictions, bonus and detriments.

This would require two DM's and great story writing to make effective, but perhaps it is feasible.

[Creatures of Destiny]

I'm really curious about this project, also because my own project, Creatures of Destiny, is based around multiple characters and a bit of player distance from the characters.

This could be part of an ongoing campaign in which case I think you should definately have some measure of player success/reward that is seperate from character success/reward - since characters will be dying often. In this way players who are daring, dramatic, show pathos and generally play their characters well will "earn" stuff that they can pump into the next missions characters - so upping the ante. Sure they could come back as ghosts, but players could also bring in an originial character's brother/buddy/girlfirend or whatever who steps in to take their place. Basically a buddy system so that all a player's characters where connected in some way to each other.

[jamsthehobbit]

I've actually been toying around with a similar idea myself (though I was going for a more Apocolyptic bent rather than just a "hard job").

One thing that immediately comes to my mind is maybe some neat goal mechanics. For example, you could give a character points or bonuses by progressing toward the "end goal." You could even throw in some interesting conflict by giving the characters side goals which provide an even bigger immediate bonus, but work against him/her in the long run. Maybe you could even work that in with the crippled/injury problem you were talking about.

For example, a character that progresses more toward the end goal could go out in a "big bang" if they end up on the chopping block. They could actually make their character die in a dramatic fashion with some big in-game bonuses toward their last actions. A character that chooses side goals, however, wouldn't be able to bump up his/her injury in such a way.

Just some thoughts. I love the concept. Really interested to see how it turns out.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Thanks everyone for your thoughts, most of which are good ones even if they don't gel with my vision.

Istvan, I'm not a fan of 'now you fight on from the afterlife,' because it's not really in-genre.  I really am set on dead characters being replaced with an entirely abstract narrative force and keeping all the action in the realm of the physical.  When a player wants a new character, he pays for it somehow, and a replacement is narrated in as a prisoner or a traitor or a survivor, or whatever.  I'm thinking that currency is a Complication, so the GM gets a monkey wrench to throw into the plan later. 

Creatures of Destiny, I'm not interested in a codified advancement system.  Player reward is character names on the Roll of Heroes and either the satisfaction of a hard job well done or the pathos of grim failure.  The scale of the stakes and the difficulty of the job are not really tied in any way; and if players want to keep particular ties between their characters, that's fine but it shouldn't be mandatory, because a squad full of dynasties strains my credulity. 

jamsthehobbit, I am kind of interested in a betrayal mechanic, because sometimes a person is a spy, or goes mad, or endangers everyone else to steal Nazi gold or something.  I'm not sure I want players playing the individual against the team, though, since that kind of paranoia isn't really in-genre.  Possibly players can co-opt a Complication by having a character betray the team, even if it's in an innocent way, like Pippin's dropping things down a well.  Choosing your own poison, so to speak.  Going out like a punk vs going out like a hero is going to be all about tactical savvy and luck, though, not narrative reward for being on-mission.

I'm now thinking about Job structure.  Some missions are simple and have the plan laid out in advance (e.g. Go to the ford, fight your way across, dodge patrols to the target, destroy the target, dodge patrols to the extraction point).  Some missions are complex and open-ended (e.g. survey these islands for risk, information, and treasure; find out which ones have the best ratio; and get as much information and treasure while losing as few people as possible).  Some are proactive and some are reactive (e.g. take the wall vs hold the wall). 

Some Important Questions:
• How flexible should a plan be?  Is there only one solution to an obstacle, or many?
• How much should the players participate in the planning of a mission?  Predetermined plans (flexible or not) feel like 'orders from above' and let you get right to the action; player generated plans (flexible or not) increase player engagement.
• How much failure is acceptable?  Is one bad fight the end, or is a retreat and regroup able to salvage things?  This ties back to flexibility, where an inflexible plan means it's back into the meat-grinder, while a flexible one allows for an alternate method.

I'm also still looking for input on the two problems noted in my injury-related post above.