A msg I saw on another board got me thinking. The post said words to the effect of "PC's should never die--setbacks are fine. Take all the gear. But don't kill them."

I also read the Actual Play T&T thread about characters dying off and there being a "stable."

I realized my goal, when confronted with a potentially high death-count game, becomes not-to-die.

I stop caring if the group (really) succeeds. I don't really care about overcoming challenges (per-se)--but I want to be around for the whole session. I don't do this in a sullen maner. I'll make a character who can realistically be played cautiously (not a front-line fighter) and try to play as "smart" as possible--if that means running for it when things look bad (carrying fallen comrades if possible) fine.

But I'm not interested in winning on the game's terms. Puzzles and traps are interesting perhaphs but engaged if I think I *have* to--and then only to the most minimal extent as I try to determine whether or not they'll kill me.

Now, looking at Continued Play as a goal, if I (hypothetically) in a Sorceror game decide I'm *not* risking humanity--because while I want to see how the cool story progresses, I also want to be relevant to the table at the end of the night, it might drive a very different play-style than one might otherwise expect of the mechanics (I'm not that familiar with Sorceror, so maybe I'm off base there).

In a hard-core dungeon-hack game where I could be klled and wind up playing a 1st level character along for the ride with 10th-level bad-asses I'd be avoiding as much step-on up and as much competition as I could. So I'm not sure this is traditional gamist play.

I'm not sure what GNS mode it's in--but I did realize I played that way the last time a GM I didn't know real well, ran a Savage World's game (I made the toughest character I could and played cautiously as I tried to figure out how tough I was in the system). In a sense, it's kinda exploration of the GM's *implementation* of system (are the spikes poisoned? or do they just do damage?)

-Marco

I'd just call this conservative Gamism. I mean, you are informed by the system that Death is a loss. So you play within that framework. If you applied this to Sorcerer, you'd merely allow yourself to go down to one Humanity, but never risk losing another point at that level, waiting instead to go up another.

But because that's entirely player controled (you can't lose humanity accidentally), there's very little to it. In that way, the mechanic itself supports Narrativism because it's not any challenge at all itself. Instead it just becomes something for the player to decide upon.

So in Sorcerer, you go along as long as you want, and only risk going to Zero Humanity when it would be dramatically cool to lose the character.

Similarly, if you could never lose that last HP in D&D unless you wanted to risk it, you wouldn't worry about losing your character ever, and it would promote Narrativism much more strongly.

Mike

I'm not sayin' I'd lose it accidentally (in the Sorceror case)--I'm saying that at a certain point my wish to keep engaging in the activity in a compelling fashion (not starting a new character half way into play) would over-ride my story concerns.

I'm not saying I'd always do this--just that I've felt the tendency come up. So if I understand this right and I'm at 1 humanity and I have a chacne to lose it--which I think makes for a cool story and is in character ... and I don't because while I'm willing to lose my objectives, possessions, character's freedom, etc.--I'm not willing to stop playing.

I would place this at the step-on-up level (meta-game), which I guess would be gamism--but it's a special case of a terminal condition, that interested me.

I guess I'm pointing out that in the case of a terminal condition there could be an over-ride that's not normally present in a gamer's play.

-Marco

I dunno. Sounds Narrativist to me. I mean, why would you want to continue playing Sorcerer, unless the story was still compelling? That is, you must be able to see that there's something interesting beyond the potential of the value of "going out" at the current decision, to merit not making the decision to risk it. In any case, it's not a tactical decision, so there's no challenge. "Losing everything", as in your example, is a very Narrativist decision, and certainly not a "tactically sound" choice.

This seems to be like those earlier claims that decisions can be made on an entirely social basis. But the reason you're giving is that you still see some reason to play. And given that Sorcerer doesn't present you with Tactical challenges of any significant measure, there must be another reason to continue.

As I've said before, playing with the mechanics in a way that produces story in the Narrativist definition is Narrativist, no matter how much playing with the numbers seems like a Gamist activity. Step-on-up refers to addrssing tactical challenges. Taking steps to move towards story is Narrativist.

Mike

Kind of a broad brush, don't you think, Mike? I'd be hesitant to sling around GNS labels without a much more concrete and specific account of play. Especially since Marco spends a lot of time playing "story as context" rather than "make story through decisions."

Marco, based on your description in your first post, I agree with Mike's comment about conservative Gamist play, but after that, the posts start getting more abstract and too vague for me to deal with.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: Kind of a broad brush, don't you think, Mike?

Dunno. Maybe this belongs in the GNS section--although I put it in RPG Theory originally because I found it dealing more with terminal nodes of play and how they shape decision making than a GNS mode in particular.

The reason to stay in a game rather than go out is this:

If I go out, the game stops. Let's say I'm loving it. It might be a 9 outta 10--but if I kick it up a notch to 10 by dying (say, the "makes-the-best-story-choice") then I have 4 hours to watch everyone else while they complete the story line. I *can* start a new one and interleve but I see that as patently second best.

So I decide not to risk death. That's a switch to Gamist play? In order to keep going?

This is clearly a meta-game concern and it might be Conservative Gamism. In a minimize winning chances to minimize losing sort of way ...

But I think my point is that when facing a terminal condition (death ... or winning, really) the effect can be very powerful (maybe singularly so)--enough to override other concerns.

Maybe not much of an observation, but there it is.
-Marco

I think its a fairly interesting observation. And I agree that I got off on a tangent with the GNS stuff. I'd still contend that Sorcerer would tend to put things into a Narrativist cast, but that's neither here nor there.

This does relate somewhat to the recent threads on splitting the party, however. That is, I think that if a designer wants to avoid Death being seen as such a big deterrent to these sorts of decisions, that he has to do some of the things that we discussed in terms of what keeps players happy when they're not in the current scene.

That is, if that 4 hours is really boring to me as a player, then yes, that's going to affect my decision making. So we have to make them less boring.

So how do yo do that (assuming that you want to combat it at all; it's also probably just as valid to leave this alone, but that's another subject)? Well, for one, only play four hour sessions or less. That way, unless the PC dies in the first four minutes, there'll be something less than four hours to watch through. Teh shorter the sessions, the less of a problem this is.

Have the player play NPCs after they die. They have to be aware that this is an option before hand. But if the system you're playing with allows for players to play NPCs regularly, then they might not see Death as an end to play, so much as a change. For example, in Universalis, character death is never a big deal in tems of participation, you just play another one (assuming that's not the end of the game).

Measures such as these might go a long way to making death seem less of a problem, and could lead to less "careful" play, I think.

Mike

Our horror adventure Season of Worms was built around this question (each player gets 2 characters at the outset. One is killed in the second act and then their other charater gets a chance to save the day).

A few thoughts: I don't mind 4 hours of sitting out with a couple of other guys so long as I know I'll get 4 hrs of personal time later (i.e. the party is split and the GM has decided to do an 8hr marathon or something). I'm cool with watching a few videos or whatever.

But it really sucks to just lose time. And going from being a tight-knit member of a team to "the new guy" kinda sucks too.

-Marco

Ron is certainly right that there's insufficient evidence for a solid conclusion here; but I also think Mike's pretty close to the target.

Looking at the D&D-style examples, you're in a game in which you've got a good chance to get killed, and you don't want your character to get killed. So you play him cautiously. That strikes me as terribly realistic; but it also strikes me as a gamist decision: I don't want the game to beat me yet, so I'm going to take precautions to prevent that from happening. I play some characters as cautious (and even when I play bold characters, I personally am cautious in my choices), but I do so in gamist play contexts where my goal is to survive and meet the real challenges of the game with a minimum of risk.

In fact, I'd say that risk minimization was a key indicator of gamist play.

But what of Sorcerer? Here you go out if your humanity drops below one. It's sudden, abrupt, terminal. Yet it's entirely in your hands. Now it's that you can make choices that will raise your humanity, or you can take the risk that it might go down again, and you're out.

It would appear that there is a sort of risk minimization here; but how do you minimize risk in this context? Your character chooses not to take the risk, not to do the thing that's potentially going to cost his soul. It is a moment of pure narrativist tension. There is every reason in the world for the character to decide not to take that step, and that decision can be every bit as dramatic at this moment. That is, we, the observers, know that if he turns to his demon to solve this problem it might well be the end of him; he recognizes that he is becoming too reliant on that demon. He makes the choice to solve the problem another way, and to do some things that will restore his humanity. He repents, at least for the moment, and begins to put his life back on the straight and narrow. We all know--probably even he knows--that he will be back to that demon eventually. The temptation is too great, the return too enticing. For the moment, though, disaster is averted.

The decision is made from the character's perspective.

In the gamist situation, the decision was made not to take a risk of physical injury and death, not to undertake a challenge that might be fatal. In the narrativist situation, it was not a decision about a challenge, but a decision about a moral or personal choice. There is no challenge involved in it; the decision is story. That the player wants to extend the story by keeping the character viable doesn't mean he's trying to avoid the challenge; it means he's having the character make the moral decisions that keep him morally interesting a bit longer.

You could have good simulationist reasons for wanting to stay alive, too. After all, I would like to stay alive; that seems realistic to me.

So it's not entirely conclusive, but I think Mike is probably on the money here.

--M. J. Young

Mike Holmes wrote:

Ron Edwards wrote: Kind of a broad brush, don't you think, Mike?

Well, that's me all over, isn't it?

But I'd agree that it's not going to be easy to say. More importantly, I'm not really sure what the pertinence of it is. What does it matter what mode this represents?

Marco, if you could shed some light on the reason for the concern, perhaps we could make more headway.

Mike

I'm agreeing with Marco a lot here. If I'm enjoying a game I don't want to stop playing. If my character is dead I cannot play. Seems simple to me.

As to what it means GNS-wise... I'm not well schooled in these things but my desire to avoid the death of my character seems to involve a fourth axis (but one that wouldn't come up in game design).

Social -
A choice based on the nature of the group playing the game - in this case the fact that I don't want to just sit and watch, or maybe that I've grown too attached to the character. Another example, when you don't do something because it would piss off the friend that you're playing with.

There is something that I am missing here. Why is it that the play is sitting out for the rest of the game session just because he died? If that happened to me I would be sevearly annoyed.

I mean lets look at it like this, I just did something increadbly in charecter and heroic. As a result my charecter died because of this act of bravery. So because I played my charecter correctly I don't get to play for the rest of the game session? I am capable of some failrly large leaps of logic but that just dosn't do it for me. If anything I would have the player make a new charecter and I would also give him some fairly hefty rewards for roleplaying so well. When he finnished I would put him back into the game as fast and as most conveintly possible. Forceing the player to wait untill the next game session to play again would be a rather harsh punishment when instead the charecter deserves a reward for exemplerary role play. I mean the way I always ran it was you are out untill you can make a new charecter and I can put you back in.

Is there something I am not understanding? It sounds like the fear could be resolved by just letting him back in the game once the charecter is compleated. This way he is still relevent by the end of the night, there is no 4 hours of thumb twiddling, and everyone I ever knew always allowed you to make new charecters at comparable levels.

Comte wrote: There is something that I am missing here. Why is it that the play is sitting out for the rest of the game session just because he died? If that happened to me I would be severely annoyed...

Solutions, well I only have one at the moment, it is the one I use and it has been fairly effective the past. The only time it screwed up was my fault. Before I begin I discussed player death with the players/ MOstly because this topic came up. They agreed that they would except minor railroading on my part to get them back into the game rather than them being forced to wait untill next game sessions. They brought up the point that just because we stop roleplaying for the evening dosn't mean that we will stop at such a point in time where it would be apropriate to bring in a new charecter anyway. That and most of the time through the game session we don't have time to play get to know the new guy anyway.

So the ways I've made it work is usualy in campain desighn. In most games it will work under the assumption that the player charecters are not the only ones working twords a patrtuclar item of goal . Take little fears for example, they may not be the only children looking for thier lost brothers and they are not the only children who decided to travel to closet land looking for freinds. In fact often times you could use the new player as an additional plot hook, for example I'll help you if you help me sort of thing. This also works well in many many diffrent types or roleplaying games. Especialy when you start the scene off with a combat, the new player's former freinds all dead, and him holding onto something that is vitaly important to whatever it is the main group is doing. This way while you may have forced the players into an unessisay combat, you have also given the players something for participating in the railroading experience. I find that by giving the players something valuable that they can use they hold it against you less, especily the player who you moved the game around so he can get back in. Once the player is in and aclimated you can hand the ball back to the players.

I have found that they ask questions, and talk in charecter in such a way that it will cause the new charecter to develope much more fully than if he sat down to write it himself.

In other options, this is more of a variation on the theme actualy. Once the player is finnished we call a soda break so I can lok over the sheet and do my best to make sure he will be up to speed with the rest of the group. Once he dose that I'd pull him aside ask he wants to do the above thing or if he want to be the former employer of a villian who is on the run. I of course let him pick the villian (we always have at least 3) and give him special knowlage of the villian's organization and internal structure. Once that is done the new player will swoop in after the break explain himself, and how he is on the run. One fight with lackys latter...or perhaps the villian himself and it works. I've found this to be a very fun way to bring a player into the fold. It is also highly logical, the new player botched some unrelated mission, he is now being hunted, it is best to just join the ranks of the people who have the best chance at taking him down.

This next one works paticularly well in horror settings. The player dies, as soon as the new charecter is ready the group receives a strange garbled phone call from the old charecters home. When they arrive they find the new charecter, wet, naked, and shivering on the carpet floor. He has a full set of memories and his own idenetiy. The only thing he dosn't remeber is why he's there. Obersvant players will notice that his body is scarred in the same place that the old charecter died from. From here the game session proceeds. That was an increadbly fun thing to do. There are others, but most of them follow along the lines of that last example where you have something snazzy cooked up for whomever dies next. Is that rail roading, sure it is. No doubt about it. But I also asked if it was okay first, in a round about way that reveiled nothing. I just said I came up with a neat story arch that could come into effect the next time someone died, do you want to give it a try. Well I hope that helped.

Comte, yes, you're missing the point. The thread that spawned this one assumed that this was not an option. Marco must have an aversion of some sort to using your suggestion, because I'm sure he's aware that he could just make another character.

In a hard-core dungeon-hack game where I could be klled and wind up playing a 1st level character along for the ride with 10th-level bad-asses I'd be avoiding as much step-on up and as much competition as I could.

Hi Mike,

Yeah--being able to re-enter "at level" quickly would help. I think a lot of my play doesn't facilitate that easily so it's not necessiarily that simple--but yes, it'd mitigate the severity of the "loss condition."

What struck the chord was that Ron's gamist T&T design would shift my play from one mode to another.

As far as playing games where I couldn't die: this is an idea I see hinted at (if you're fudging the dice, you're playing the wrong game). I think this is an interesting discussion--and not *nearly* as black and white as some people here make it out to be.

Note, however, that I don't consider the terminal condition a "problem" (did I use that word? I don't know)--just that it's a powerful effect.

-Marco

Marco wrote: What struck the chord was that Ron's gamist T&T design would shift my play from one mode to another.

As far as playing games where I couldn't die: this is an idea I see hinted at (if you're fudging the dice, you're playing the wrong game). I think this is an interesting discussion--and not *nearly* as black and white as some people here make it out to be.

Nothing should stop people from using Inspecters as a model for appropriate games. Heavens, no. That's not at all what I'm talking about.

I'm saying that my choice of game may more or less suit my needs at any given point in time--and that doesn't necessiarly mean I have the wrong game (I believe dice-fudging is always dangerous due to social contract issues--but that's only part of what I'm talking about here).

Ron *is* trying to put the emphasis on T&T's gamism. The result for me is very cautious play. Drift the game a bit and it'd be a more risk-taking dynamic dungeon romp. For me.

-Marco

Hi Marco,

You're hitting upon a principle that I, like you, been nosing around for some time now.

It basically comes down to this: "sit out" is a lousy player-consequence for an in-game outcome, for all but a fairly narrow range within Gamist play.

Let's leave all the power-issues out of it, which is to say, "losing the levels" when your 10th level dude is killed and you have to take over the 4th level NPC or whatever. I think we're talking instead about a game - which is almost all of them! - in which certain in-game consequences literally mean that you, the player, can't play for a while.

The obvious example is when your character eats a bullet, but Humanity going to 0 in Cyberpunk is another. Lemme see if I can break this down ... and this is a first try, so I'm not wedded to it or anything. Given that one's character has been taken out somehow ...

We see a branching: either go down A or down D.

Branch A: You keep playing no matter what. I like to think of this as playing Star Wars using a conceivable tweak of the Hero Wars system, such that Obi-wan's player is just as present and active among the group after the character's death as before. He can only use a limited set of the rules (e.g. lending Action Points from a pool based on Relationship abilities; spending Hero Points, etc), but the player didn't stop playing for a moment.

Branch A continued: B or C.

B: You can start a new character or take up an existing one as a player-character, eventually.

C: You can't. You're stuck with dead Obi-wan, unless the Social Contract lets you switch to new characters regardless of whether the old one is dead or alive.

Branch D: You have to stop playing, for some length of time, even if it's a matter of waiting until the party gets back to town.

Branch D continued: E or H.

E continued: F or G

F: Your character is just plain lost, and you have to get a new one - but getting a new one is kind of a "hitch" as far as you and the other players are concerned. In this sort of game, all sorts of loophole mechanisms usually exist to keep characters alive, up to and including fudging rolls (which is where that concept enters this framework).

G: Your character may continue but is diminished or altered in some way. (Alternatively, the character may be more powerful! as in Deadlands ...) But you still have to sit out for a while, and your re-entry depends on in-game actions as controlled by the other players. (Resurrection rules apply here)

H: You literally have to leave the game; there's no functional way to re-enter play. (Some circumstances of Social Contract and design result in this option even if no one ever really admits it or thinks of it that way.)

I'll betcha everyone can come up with multiple branches I've missed, or maybe some other framework entirely, but that's not the point. My point is that D/E seems overwhelmingly present in role-playing design, which has always struck me as awfully odd. Why play a game that's based on interactive contribution, but include a mechanism for booting contributors out? Again, I can see this quite easily as a particular detail of a particular design (e.g. tourney-style old-school D&D), but not as a default feature for the activity in general.

Anyway, none of this is intended to be especially profound. Here are the solutions or approaches that have seemed to me to do the best job of stepping out of the D/E model, without simply going freeform. Some of them overlap.

1. Games which permit player-character death to become more likely through player-driven rules-applications (e.g. choosing to spend Spiritual Attribute points rather than use them as bonuses during a climactic fight scene in The Riddle of Steel; choosing to bid exceptionally high during an Extended Contest in Hero Wars; entering Endgame in Violence Future).

2. Games with nigh-disposable characters that are very easily replaced without much loss of fun; in fact, this is much more fun than I thought it would be before seriously trying it.

3. Games for which the same mechanical results can yield very different in-game results depending on player decisions/narration (e.g. Dust Devils). Losing a ton of points in an early scene means a battered nose; losing them in the big shoot-out means a teeth-gritted final monologue while bleeding your life away in the mud.

4. Games in which character death is possible, but relies on a unique confluence of dice and choices that carries immense thematic-statement power (Sorcerer sort of does this, but not quite as well as Trollbabe or Otherkind). In these games, the "sit out" period is kind of like sexual afterglow; you don't want to keep playing just yet after a rush like that.

Best,
Ron

Ron, I'm surprised you missed Multiverser: character death ends the current scenario for that player, but play immediately continues in a new scenario. I suppose it turns the thing on its head a bit--when the character is killed, the world "dies" to him, but he continues.

I suspect there are other ways to produce a similar character dies but then continues effect. Toon does something like it, perhaps--characters are not killed, but "knocked down" and can't act for five minutes. That's a bit like character death, but most of the negative consequences are at least mitigated. You lose five minutes of play, but in most games it's not uncommon to be out of the action that long anyway, in my experience.

--M. J. Young

Hi M.J.,

See? People are already fillin' in the tree or Venn diagram or whatever it is. No more than I expected.

Can't remember everything all the time.

Best,
Ron

Seems to me that this is one of those bits of incoherence thats really old and hoary and embedded. A conflict between the needs of the minimum game element and the minimum sim element. In that respect I think that cunning devices to introduce new characters do work by aligning the two approaches. Paranoia parodied this by having replacement clones delivered by mail, or even artillery. But you know it all made a perverse kind of sense. I liked a lot of Comte's ideas, and I think anticipating the eventuality is probably a good thing in its own right. Perhaps games should have a character ending section in much the way they have a character creation section.

I also think its not necessarily too bad a thing for there to be a break in play. IME, with a dead character I'm prone to reflect on it for a bit, and observe the group dynamic that develops in its absence. Then a try to build something that makes a kind of sense in concert with the new dynamic.

Paranoia parodied this by having replacement clones delivered by mail, or even artillery. But you know it all made a perverse kind of sense.

Hi there,

Gareth wrote,

Perhaps games should have a character ending section in much the way they have a character creation section.