Hello Forum,
I am looking for some feeback on a large mechanic in a game I am working on that I feel might come off as offputting for older pen and paper rpg'ers that grow attatched to their characters. In my game, death is common and fairly frequent(death is a factor in roughly 5% of your encounters) but plays a large factor in the creation of your next character. WIthout spilling too many beans, I will say that there is a system akin to a father passing on skills(in the form of wisdom) and inheritance(weapons, money, junk) to his son. So the question is, would you feel betrayed if the game mechanics killed the character you spent time building up if it would allow you to pass a small part of him to the next character you made? In essence, you play a family, or dynasty of characters and further their legacy rather than just an individual.

This style of play implies that each character has a child who, at some point, he's taught all he knows and managed to hand his equipment to. This either feels like it would become an abstract concept, the practical considerations largely ignored, or would force the players into making certain types of character or perhaps promote a certain type ofrestrictive gaming.

For example:
"My character is Thrug the Barbarian!"
"OK," says the GM, "Thrug has a child and must visit him regularly to impart information and drop off items."
"Well, that wasn't really the idea for a lonely savage I wanted..." Says the player, a little disgruntled.

It strikes me that most players would prefer a character to die and a new one be introduced at a comparitable 'level' to the previous one so they may continue the gaming experience.

RPGs treat death (or permanent incapacitation) very differently.  In Call of Cthulhu it's considered a given that you'll have multiple player fatalities (or characters going permanently insane) throughout the course of any lengthy adventure.  Other games take the opposite approach and make death either nigh impossible or provide multiple ways to recover from it (resurrection).

In my experience, if death occurs as little more than a random chance, the game doesn't make for a long-term campaign.  Let's face it, if your character has a flat 10% of going belly up each session, with little you can do about it, you're not going to invest yourself in the game personally.

That said, it doesn't sound like you are talking about really playing characters at all.

In Ars Magica, the driving force behind the game are the mages.  But the players rarely play those characters on adventures.  Instead, the players manage a "troupe" that consists of a mage, servants, guards and henchmen.  Anywhere from three to five characters that all work together.  A player only runs one of these characters per session (generally), but if one of the characters dies it's not the end of the game for that troupe.  A lot of people praise the magic system in Ars Magica, but the idea that each player plays a small group of characters has always been my favorite part of the game.

FYI - Ars Magica is now free to download here:  http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=AG0204

In a nutshell, if you manage it right, I think such an approach could be very, very cool.

Perhaps I should clarify a bit more. I did present a fairly restricted approach with the intro. When I say you pass something on when your character dies, I didn't mean it had to be to a bloodline or actual family member. I admit I did say dynasty or family, but that can be expanded to fit what the player likes. For example, you may be a rich merchant who spent too much time counting money and never had a family, but in theory, you could have a benefactor, or in your travels you may come across a really cool race that obvisouly you wouldnt be able to 'mate' with, however, it would be perfectly acceptable to adopt an orphan of that race... prefereably not one who's parents you killed... but you get the idea. All in all the idea is similar to that 'troupe' mechanic (I should look into that btw) only you are one single character who will eventually die and pass on your knowledge and heirlooms to an heir. As one above poster stated you wouldn't be playing "characters" and they were correct in that observation.

The idea is to play a "family tree" and to have it be full of variety. And things do translate well, I've done some work to see to that. Say the merchant has an heir that happens to have a lust for blood and want to be a gladiator, well the skills are set up so that a "fighting" skill can translate into a "trade" skill. Ie: the merchant's "keen eye" skill which let him discern valuable items and tell a genuine painting from a fraud would translate to the gladiators "keen eye" which allows him to quickly identify weak points on an enemy and increases his chance for a critical strike.

Thank you for the feed back, I'm new to this forum and I was expecting to get thrashed and berated. Granted I've only received two replies, but the disagreements have been civil, which is a very nice change from most forums I've visited in the past.

bobert wrote: The idea is to play a "family tree" and to have it be full of variety. And things do translate well, I've done some work to see to that. Say the merchant has an heir that happens to have a lust for blood and want to be a gladiator, well the skills are set up so that a "fighting" skill can translate into a "trade" skill. Ie: the merchant's "keen eye" skill which let him discern valuable items and tell a genuine painting from a fraud would translate to the gladiators "keen eye" which allows him to quickly identify weak points on an enemy and increases his chance for a critical strike.

wrote:
Thank you for the feed back, I'm new to this forum and I was expecting to get thrashed and berated. Granted I've only received two replies, but the disagreements have been civil, which is a very nice change from most forums I've visited in the past.

How much establishment of the connection between them would there be. If it's just saying "Oh yeah, that stable boy I talked to once. Him." there really isn't any legacy or tradition being carried on there? Well, most likely isn't and on the slim odds it is, it's pretty damn hard to see.

Does the 'next gen' adventure with the character for some time and some sort of rapour is mechanically made to be on display.

I think the idea has alot of merit, but that connection really needs to be shown prior to character death for it to be passing anything on. Or so I'd say.

The way a character might meet his heir is very circumstancial. By default, it would be someone within your family. This could be a brother, a sister, son, daughter, etc.The main characters are human, so this would be done via the old fasioned method, but it wouldn't really come up within the game. It would be a cultural "given" hopefully displayed through the "mini-stories" written to give the game flavor and history. However, should you decide you later want to play a lizardman or some such, your 'heir' would simply be an egg from a hatchery,(started as a new family completely, like you were taking up a completely seperate second character, or it could be tied to your human family) and this could have certain advantages as well, such as chosing a 'warrior brood' or an 'intellectual brood' etc... but I dont want to get too complicated until it's structured and outlined. For now, I'm focussing on the reception of the general idea of running a "family" one generation at a time. Speaking of time, I see the issue hiding between the lines about how 'time' would be managed as you would be playing several generations over the course of a family tree so I'll try to explain how that is handled.

As far as the course of time is concerned... it's not really relevant in the universe my game takes place in. The planet rotates, and there is day and night, but long periods of time are not really a 'concern' of the citizens and haven't been for ages... even though I suppose they wouldn't say that, as the idea of "ages" would be foreign to them. A large factor in my game's story centers around a fledgling group of colonists leaving their homeworld in search of new places to settle. I should mention that their method of travel involves ripping the universe several new space-holes which has left the flow of 'time' in and around their planet in a mess. As a happy side effect some scientists were able to harness this and use it to establish specific 'growth colonies' enabling children to be raised to adulthood in what would pass as a few days to us. I know it sounds like a bit of a cop out, but with the whole story in context and their fiddling with geometry and energy I promise it makes sense. I'd just prefer not to divulge too much in public forum before getting a proper copyright, whether my game be for personal use or market(should the idea grow wings). The presentation of this concept along with their technological evolution and how it drastically differs from our own would be a couple of my game's other biggest challenges. I am working on the assumption, however, that once read the pitch for this game, the player that picks it up would be interested in learning about those differences, rather than confused by them.

Does the 'next gen' adventure with the character for some time and some sort of rapour is mechanically made to be on display.

....On another note....I feel bad about posting three times in a row....but here we go

The lack of a rapour can open up just as many options. You may have a decorated war hero who's a third generation military man (btw Vordark mentioned earlier the idea of having bonuses over multiple charcters in the tree contributing to it, that was something I'd had worked out in the idea of "traditions" :) )but then decide  you want your next character to be a merchant, or scholar. You may say the government retrieval teams brought back the heir's inheritance and he wanted nothing to do with the war hero father who he never knew that was never home so he decides to sell the weapons and start a trading business or buy a series of books in the study of ancient geometry and linguistics. This will break your military tradition bonus, but I feel it allows the player to branch into whatever they like rather than be thethered to their current character, but really it's all a question of flavor. More issues with the storytelling than game mechanics I think.

I'm sorry, I think a legacy means to pass on ideas and principles and codes of living onto somone else, and that person keeps practicing them (to various degrees) and passing them on even when the original person who germinated them, is dead. I thought in particular you were getting at this given you said it wasn't just a family, it could pass on to anyone - as ideas can.

As is, I'm not seeing much more than, upon death, making a new character, with a bit of a reference to the previous character. It doesn't seem much different than making a new character with zero reference to previous characters. If you take it that fairly regular character death means lack of attachment - well, I don't see much attachement in "Oh yeah, I had a kid once/caught this pickpocket once, pass my gear onto them when I dead" either.

Are you just doing it to try and placate people who would sour on the whole game if their character dies in about 5% of violent encounters? If your just trying to placate and aren't really interested in doing it, I'd say ditch it - it's going to show that lack of interest.

Hmm... perhaps this question was lacking too much context, my fault of course. Indeed, the idea of legacies and generations of a family holds a heavy weight, but the gameplay and character building isn't as "epic" as that idea might imply. Character building is only as deep as you want it to be. Think of TCGs you play, they have deep stories but most people aren't concerned with the, only the ones that want to be. It's not necessary to know who Reya Dawnbringer is in order to enjoy the game, but if you do know the lore it's that much more enjoyable. I am typically saddened by this trend in gaming now'days, but it does emphasize the point that a game can be enjoyable through the mechanics alone. My game would fall somewhere between D&D skirmish matches and a TCG game.  Your 'character' is a deck of cards and your 'legacy' is a book of a past character decks that allow you to follow the flow of the decks you have created while playing the game. The legacy within the game would be the renown earned by the family through the course of several generations from the eyes of the NPC guilds, factions, etc that exist within the game which earns the character various bonuses and access to new items, dungeons, and other goodies. This is aimed at casual players that may play once or twice a week. Death would likely happen, on average, once every couple of months (Normally about the time I would tweak, or rebuild a deck in my past TCG experience)

Sorry if I confused anyone, I think I may have put more weight on the subject than was intended. I suppose discussions about death might tend to do that ^^;

Bob,
  I don't like character death. I am letting you know my angle, so you can treat my opinion accordingly. I have never had a character death that was meaningful. I have had my character die because of bad rolls. I have had my character die because I didn't understand the situation. But never as part of a noble sacifice, or anything like that. I don't think that limiting character death allows for more contiguous story telling or better character development. I just think that basically, when somoeone's character dies, they don't get to play until two questions are answered:
1) Have they finished making a new character?
2) Can the GM come up with a credible way to narrate them into the current scene?

  That can be a matter of 15 minutes (or less if its a lite game and/or the player really knows their rules) on up to hours. this is not what most people would call "fun time." Don't get me wrong, I get a perverse joy from making characters, but its not really a group activity and it does nothing to make game night more fun.

  Maybe you should take a cue from Paranoia and have the character be clones (or magical dopplegangers if you prefer).
  I mean, if your goal is to take out character 5% of the time in each encounter, then you need to design it such that this does not equal "losing" or does not equal "no fun." Like maybe the character that gets splattered gets some kind of mechanical bonus that makes it worth it? Like maybe they can call upon the spirits of their departed ancestors a number of times equal to their generation (if you lost 3 characters, the 4th character can call on the spirits 4 times)? And those spirits can spy, use OOC knowledge (skills, histories, knowledge from beeyond) or give them a temporary stat boost, something appropriate in game.

  I dunno, I felt like I was rambling. Does any of that make sense? Or Interesting?

Maybe it's just me,  but on occasion self sacrifice has felt good.

What some of the games I have enjoyed have involved having some sort of organization involved. For instance in Call of Cthulhu we have had a group which investigated the supernatural and when someone died, it became part of the history of the organization including passing on information/objects/advise etc.

I think this could be cool in a game involving reincarnation. Your skills could pass on through some kind of past-life-regression or something.

I think the only reason I would have for feeling betrayed in such a game would be if death is too random. I prefer character death to be an important part of the plot rather than just a Diabolus Ex Machina that jumps out when you eat a bad peanut and roll a poor saving throw.

Some of the posters seem to be focusing on situations where this mechanic wouldn't work, but I think that's the wrong approach.  The question is whether there are some games that could be played in it, and I don't see why not.  If the players know what they're getting into, they can make characters who do have lineages of some kind; true loners might be inappropriate, but that's no different from saying a wizard is inappropriate in a hard science game.

As for me, it's not something I'd want to play exclusively, but it sounds like a reasonable feature for a game to have, and I'd certainly be open to trying it.  You may want to check out Pendragon, if you haven't seen it.  When a character dies in Pendragon, it's not uncommon for the player to go on to play the child (if they have one old enough), with some of their possessions and traits being passed along.  (Naturally, it helps that the characters in Pendragon take their lineage seriously.)

bobert wrote: Sorry if I confused anyone, I think I may have put more weight on the subject than was intended. I suppose discussions about death might tend to do that ^^;

There is something coming to mind about a game where you effectively played a magic weapon. That magic weapon was obviously intelligent and guided the wielder of it. I kind of like the idea of following the history of a magic weapon and playing though the variously historic figures who wielded it. Obviously it would be possible for the weapons to have been forged together and intended to fulfill different roles.

Actually just remembered about a series of crowns in Shadow World, however it is a bit of a spoiler if you play Shadow World with Role Master.

This reminds me a little of hot war, which I believe uses the relationship system to have the effects of someone's death ripple out through to those they are close to.

If you do something like this, in a way you could be setting up new characters for yourself every time you build relationships, discouraging the "sultry mysterious loaner" archetype (personal plus for me!).

Now such a system is not designed along a "PCs as pawns" paradigm, more on the basis of exploring characters as self motivating things. I suspect one way to inject purpose into such a system would be along the lines of creating factions, schools or legacies as you suggest.

As to the main question; about whether I feel cheated, that totally depends on how you explain the characters role to me: Certain activities require an amount of time to be completed, and if your time required to complete them is less than the mean time between deaths, then yes probably I would feel cheated.

So if you work out what things you want players to be doing, then you can set up forms of relationship that allow them to extend that task beyond the lifetime of a character. For example if you are using a character to learn about the world, then instead of risking that knowledge becoming "metagame" and so unusable (depending on the system obviously), you could give the lore-seeker a protege, who can continue their researches with the full advantage of that previous experience.

If you do set up such a system, it might be good to set up a contrast with the existing character when you set up the similarity in the relationship; whatever else he is, this guy is dedicated to his teacher's cause of destroying the lizards plaguing his towns, but he is more willing to form bands than just go it alone, etc.

In this way you avoid making the same character, but explicitly relate them to the previous one.

For the crazy barbarian guy, you could create a rival, who seeks the same objective through different means. He could be emboldened by his adversaries defeat, but mainly I suspect with such a character very little continuity would be required: Many such characters are focused on survival or being the best, just requiring the rival to be of near equal level would be enough for many players while still being fairly apropriate. I'd also require them to add a reason why they don't just team up to get it, which is just there to insure they actually are a rival and not another way of hitting the same cause. Actually that is a balance point, in that when you create these options, the best option should be the obvious one, so that it is not the best way to get someone loyal to your cause by being their rival, although it may a be pretty good one.

Finally on a pretty different note, people sometimes set up grand romantic plots and then get annoyed their character gets killed. Surely he would behave more cageyley if he wants to survive for his loved one, in other words sometimes the dilemma between long term goals and short term adventure can be addressed directly at a character level, all assuming they are able to make real choices at that level of course!

As a GM, I very rarely kill anyone anymore.

As a player, I want my GM to kill me.  I don't care if it's because of some sort of "Russian roulette", but every time my GM asks me what my HP/Health level is, I cringe.  Every time I fire a ray of disintegration, and the the dragon turns the other way because he's already hit me a bunch, I lose a little faith. Danger pulls me in. Playing without death is like telling ghost stories with the lights on.

I've tried to address this in my game by making it so that players *know* when they're in danger of dieing. I don't just mean, low HP, but that they're skimming the boundaries of death, and they know it. I don't know if this illusion would be broken if they played long enough... but so far my players have been afraid for their lives in nearly every encounter I've set them against. (I use a system where you can be inflicted with a mortal wound.  Without a mortal wound, you cannot be killed with the next hit.  With a mortal wound, you can be killed with any hit.) 

In my case, if I hit a player with a mortal wound, I GM-cheat and don't hit them hard enough to kill them, unless I think it is a suitable time to do so (ie. it is good for the plot or they were really asking for it.)

I to tend to make death meaningful, unless it would break the suspension of disbelief.

I try to make sure that the players are aware just how risky something that they are attempting is or if they are playing the odds once to often. A death which I was GMing for always comes to mind. It was Role Master, there was a gnome arcanist who has constantly pushing how much he could overcast by. So there they were down in the sewers which had nasty villains and the occasional ancient monster, the gnome made him self invisible and ethereal and insisted in walking at a 90 degree angle with just his head popping out of the wall, then he saw a group of villains and decided to overcast an element bolt at them. He failed, the result knocked him unconscious for longer than the duration of his ethereal spell. There he stayed to the spell dropped and pop went the gnome when the ethereal spell dropped and he materialized in solid rock. How could he not die at that point ... I think I would have lost credibility if I had arranged his survival at that point.

I'm with David on this, that as a GM I hate to kill but as a Player I hate the genuine threat of death to be removed. However, I also think regular deaths of a PC turns the game into an arcade. I certainly wouldn't devote the same amount of attention to each character; they'd be pages of hastily-generated stats.

Surely there's a middle-of-the-road way to get the best of both worlds. Whenever this subject comes up, I can't help but think of Banjo-Kazooie, a now older N64 game. When you died, you lost your progress within the level but not the game. PCs make progress, in a way, but I can't think of a way to pull off a similar kind of "death" without making it seem artificial. Any methods I can think of for keeping characters alive seem artificial as well.

A thought occurs to me; this type of thread is probably more suited to actual play, and I think it's a fair bet that if we post it there someone will have a huge set of archived threads relating to it.

Why is it more "actual play" than "first thoughts"? Well we're discussing an element of play in general based on our various experiences. That's a perfect fit for an actual play thread. Next person who thinks of a comment could start a new thread and link back to this one, or better, a mod could move this.

Whoops, have to edit myself.

This thread stays here, because it is about the game in design, mostly. But in terms of discussing death in play, if someone wants to make a sister thread in Actual Play, that would be excellent. It also stands a good chance of someone digging back and finding useful older threads for reference.

Bobert, long posts are totally cool as long as they're substantive, which yours are, so that's all good.

Best, Ron