Fate and Death

[J B Bell]

Can we call this "snapshot goal" system "RPG slalom"?  :)

--JB

[contracycle]

I have a long standing interest in post mortem mechanics, ever since reading a review of Bushido whic mentioned this feature many years ago.  Some random thoughts:

I have tried asking players how they would like their characters to die; most were not able to answer that question (at character creation anyway).  Heavy bias toward sim in these players styles.

Next I tried asking them to speculate on how they thought their character might die, and this was more successful.  At least it helped me comprehend the players vision of the character, which was useful.  The answers would often be rather vague, though.

The vision/life stages idea I like, its somewhat similar to some of the discussion around the mesopotamia game - explicitly laying out future events in a characters life.

One of my ocncerns with post mortem play is integrating living and dead characters, which I fear at best presents much the same problem as cyberspace deckers in Cyberpunk - you end up running two seperate games in seperate spaces.  Further more, most religious afterlifes are quite static - atfer ascending to a glorious heaven, not much happens.  The alternative are the postponed resolution afterlifes, in which judgement or purgatory or just plain suspension occurs until judgement day arrives to tidy everything up and just deserts are distributed from on high.  Most traditions would understand the interaction of the living world and the human dead as a perversion of or exception to the divine order.
However, peoples expectation of an afterlife informs many decisions, and so to an extent I think sims suffer without having an element of this expectation, of how people interact with it.  

Another concern about inheritance systems is that it might lock players into an in-game line of descent, or might not be invoked becuase players switch lines of descent.  I found in pendragon that the inheritance mechanics were sometimes effectively useless because players wanted to try a different type of character, or character with a dramatically different background.

How about an implementation of changing the world?  After all our buildings and stuff long outlive us - maybe something could be structured around giving "tribute scenes" based on characters achievement to be "redeemed" by the GM in later games.  This scene brought to you by the dearly departed XX.  Or perhaps events referring back to a character - like discovering a possession - could be used in some manner.  Characters in a position to raise monuments or buildings could be guaranteed that these will be shown off by the GM in later games.

I have found characer death to be an important experience for the surviving characters too.  I have seen players carry out funerals and the like in which much very good RP was done IMO, and characters acquiring memento mori, or visiting graves and the like.  This is something else which makes me a bit concerned about an active dead characters; I fear the impact of such events might be minimised.

[Walt Freitag]

One of my favorite tropes for old-school sim games is the band of rebels against the evil empire. Academy and Empire, for example, cast the Romans as the evil empire -- gee, that's a real stretch, eh? -- and the player-characters as former students of the now disbanded Hellenisitc Academy system. The system was modified Hero System and I didn't want to apply all of my usual illusionistic protagonizing practices, so character deaths and also long-term disability/recovery situations were expected.

A solution I've found effective in such scenarios is adding additional emphasis on a larger pool of player-characters. Each player plays one character per session, but has long-term control of two or three or more, most of whom are inactive for any given episode. Experience points (remember, we're talking old-school here) were given separately for the character in play, and for improving or developing other characters in the player's pool. These were not allowed to be traded off, to avoid the temptation to over-invest in any one character (thus avoiding a potential gamist-simulationist incongruency). It was an entirely metagame rule, which gave some of the benefits of inheritance systems and avoided some of their problems. For example, it didn't force players to remain with the same type of character, and it encouraged them to think about other characters they wished to create and play ahead of time. (The emphasis was primarily exploration of setting and situation, so the lack of dramatic focus on any individual character in the long term was not a major drawback.)

Plus, "the group" has its own identity much like a character, that changes over time and is shaped by all the players. Several important premises, including the primary one, "how can we fight effectively without becoming as bad as those we're fighting?" developed more at the group-identity level than within any specific character. And the group, of course, can be more or less guaranteed "immortality" without pushing too hard on sim constraints even in a violent chancy milieu.

Steve Dustin's Tribes/Lost Pangaea concepts seem to me a much more refined and elegant approach to accomplishing similar ends. For instance, it never occurred to me to have players participate in creating characters that would be selected and played by other players, or to codify the group's culture relative to other groups by giving the group its own collective stats.

- Walt