[Das Schwarze Auge] Making the best of a pointless character death

[Frank Tarcikowski]

[Callan S.]

Hi Frank,

I know I'm skipping past alot, but with the ending and what you could get out of it: - if you were writing a game, would you consider the avoidance of that 'aimless campaigns that get played too long and lose all momentum' a good thing and something to include?

Sadly here the ending completely lacked ceremony except with what ceremony you and your group added (which seemed a touching one). But does it seem like it can be a good thing despite that?

[Frank Tarcikowski]

[Callan S.]

With the second paragraph, I mean it was just a sudden death and kind of nasty - I was wondering if your always going to associate endings with that? Or see how you and your group added a ceremony/a celebration of the character, and how that was actually a really strong ending - it's just hard to see how strong because of the system enforced on/the fly in the soup.

[Frank Tarcikowski]

[LandonSuffered]

[Marshall Burns]

Frank,

When you say, "for no good reason I can see, the poison...was deadly, period," my initial thoughts are a bit not-nice, mostly revolving around my opinion that "lose a point every round" poison is stupid (in every game I've made, poison has an "effect" that hits you if you miss the save, and in many cases that effect is DEATH).  But then I calm down and tell myself, "that's just my opinion and it doesn't really have anything to do with the topic," and I see something here that disturbs me a bit:  why the hell didn't they TELL you that the poison was so deadly?  I mean, I've got a game that I played for years where characters died pointless deaths (from stray bullets to simple car accidents) all the time and I loved it that way, but I was careful to make sure everyone knew that sort of thing happened.  I mean, jeez, the GM or someone should've told you before you made that attempt.  I'd immediately be pissed, seriously.  I'm amazed that you weren't.

-Marshall

[Frank Tarcikowski]

Hey guys, was it really that way in OD&D? I'm puzzled, my memory seems to betray me. Perhaps I'm thinking about some other game, or perhaps our DM had a house rule, then. Anyways, let's be clear about what kind of "reason" I'm talking about. The reason can emphatically not have to be some pseudo-realistic argument based on how poison is lethal in the real world. It needs to be about the game being played. Which is why I mentioned that my character, wearing light armor at best, could take several blows by a sword or axe and keep acting normally. That was the kind of lethality of the game world, as transported by system, that I was used to.

And in that same spirit I would never have expected poison to be so deadly. Neither did the GM. He only looked up the poison rules after I got hit, and was shocked, but, as I wrote, he felt he had to follow the rules. It never got mentioned before. There had been no hints whatsoever telling me, as a player, to better be careful about poison. There obviously hadn't been any warnings in the text of the published adventure neither. It just didn't fit, not in that game. Does that make sense to you?

- Frank

[Frank Tarcikowski]

P.S.: Oh, and there was no such thing as ressurection in DSA. And we always thought of ressurection as too "computer-game-y" for "real roleplayers" anyway... Those were the times. ;-)

[Marshall Burns]

And in that same spirit I would never have expected poison to be so deadly. Neither did the GM. He only looked up the poison rules after I got hit, and was shocked, but, as I wrote, he felt he had to follow the rules.

Yeowch.  It would seem that the published adventure was written by a maniac.  On one hand, I can't fathom why a "do-over" couldn't have been acceptable in such a special case (that's just my personal karma talking); on the other hand, the intensity of that death (and what you made out of it) seems like it could be a cathartic experience, in addition to being a nice creative "grace-under-fire" sort of thing.  But I find it strange that it was okay to edit the circumstances of his action ("he died to save [important religious artifact]" and Jostik's testament) but not okay to edit the action itself.  That's not a criticism of your or that group's style; it's just an observation of the fact that I don't "get" said style.

-Marshall

[Frank Tarcikowski]

Yeah, no, I totally agree, it just never occurred to us at the time, I guess.