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Post by doctorlovecraft on Mar 4, 2012 21:53:48 GMT -8
I can recall one of my favorite times gaming was about fifteen years ago, when I was in a Call of Cthulhu campaign. The group I played with had never played before (they were all 2nd ed. AD&D players) but I had and knew what was up right away. They should have gotten a clue when the GM had us all role up 3 characters a piece so we had backups. What ensued was a 6 month long cacophony of horrible deaths. I had no problem with this as it was par for the course when Playing CoC but the group became more and more enraged with the GM as time went along and thought he was killing them on purpose. In the GM's defense they kept doing stupid things like trying to confront the villains head on and they didn't seem to learn over time. I lost characters when they did stupid things but I didn't throw a fit. For example, there's only one skeleton and there's seven of us. We can take him. Said skeleton proceeded to mop up the party and my character died. The GM had us keep a folder that we kept all of the dead characters' sheets in and it soon became stuffed with PCs. He did this so we could fondly remember the characters and what had happened to them but the others thought he was being vindictive and rubbing it in. The rest of the players mutinied and told the GM that we either go back to AD&D or that they all would quit playing altogether. Now I had a blast and think that they were all being childish. Don't get me wrong. I am not callous. I cut my on D&D red box and I've lost many characters both new and old, loved and hated, to unfair Gygaxian 50% death traps and overpowered monsters (really, who puts three gray oozes in 1-3 level adventure?) in my time in gaming. It can hurt to lose a character, but I learned early not to take it personally and that it's all in the spirit of fun. I also learned, in good order, not to do stupid things if there were dire consequences. Almost all of the deaths in our CoC game were the players' fault. I currently play GURPS which is a pretty fatal system and the group, I am with now, is OK with it. We had a bar fight where one character got killed by getting his throat cut and another lost an eye, just barely surviving a knife to the brain. I am recently considering GMing and am curious, not so much for my group but in general, where would you draw the line in killing characters.
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maxinstuff
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Post by maxinstuff on Mar 5, 2012 3:01:56 GMT -8
If it is Call of Cthulu - it's perfectly ok to kill PC's. Early and often I say!
What exactly do these guys want to keep the same PC's for anyway? They hoping they can level up and defeat Cthulu?
Seriously......
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 5, 2012 5:11:31 GMT -8
I think it's fine to handle killing characters with whatever frequency, from someone practically dying every adventure, to the characters being practically *unable* to die...
... as long as the GM and the players are all on the same page about it, before starting. How deadly a particular game could get is one of those important things to discuss prior to starting a campaign. Kind of goes with the whole "feel of the campaign" discussion.
--Pukka Tukka
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 5, 2012 5:12:29 GMT -8
But , CoC, and the GM had them make three characters to start? Yeah, that's some clueless players... and if this is their regular GM, he should've known better, sat them down, and said, "You're all probably gonna die or go insane, a lot!"
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Post by jazzisblues on Mar 5, 2012 7:19:54 GMT -8
I think it's fine to kill characters if the death has meaning or advances the story. I try not to kill characters in meaningless ways or in meaningless fights but if they do something dumb and get dead, these things happen.
I call a little bit of doucheyness on the gm for not saying up front you should make 3 characters and here's why ... It's not the killing or insanity causing among the player characters, it's not being up front with them about the nature of the game.
One Pathfinder game I played in I went through not less than 7 characters in a year's time. The shortest died his first night. That said, most of them were fun deaths and a couple were truly spectacular and heroic.
Just my 2 krupplenicks worth, your mileage may of course vary.
JiB
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Post by clockworkmonk on Mar 5, 2012 11:33:01 GMT -8
I am also in the camp that character deaths should really occur when meaningful and in service to the story. I only employ the death rules in my games by consent only. So far, only one character has died and it was a wonderfully in-character kind of moment--a petty spat with another character ending up with them attempting to kill each other in the heat of battle and one of them actually succeeding. We rolled to see whether or not he would have died-died (he actually could have survived but been severely maimed), but he decided that his character dying actually made the most sense so we went with that instead.
But that's just my personal preference. It depends on the kind of game you're playing, the kind of story you're trying to tell, and really, what the players want out of it too. Campaigns that I run are high on story and character development--I want my players to become engrossed with their characters because we're all telling an epic story together. Other GMs definitely go down the more hardcore, this-is-how-it-works route. One campaign I'm playing in, all the original characters are dead except for one. One player was really coming into fruition with their character, a new one that was rolled up two sessions previously when the original died. That character ended up getting killed randomly and undramatically, due to terribly horrendous rolls and the fact that no one was around to be a hero in that moment. The GM let it sit because that's what the dice dictated. Had I been running the game, I would have deus ex machina'd the crap out of that because there was so much story that could have been worked with that, well, now we'll never see. I've found that this model leads to certain trade offs: none of the players are really willing to role play so much anymore and get very invested in their characters or the story because we're all paranoid that the GM will find one way or another to kill us off.
For me, though, I never let dice get in the way of a good story.
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HyveMynd
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Post by HyveMynd on Mar 5, 2012 16:32:59 GMT -8
I call a little bit of doucheyness on the gm for not saying up front you should make 3 characters and here's why ... Yeah, I agree with this statement. Damn it JiB, stop being so reasonable; you're making me look like your groupie or something. Jeeze. As pukkatukka said, it is a Call of Cthulhu game and anyone who's even remotely familiar with the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft knows those stories don't end well. But upon seeing that most of his group wasn't familiar with the fiction or the CoC game the GM really should have made clear what kind of experience the players were in for. Requesting the players to make three PCs each before the game even started pretty much says "I AM going to kill you several times in this story" and kind of gives the GM a license to be a dick which I disagree with. Plus, the evil GM in me thinks it would have been that much more shocking when a PC died if the players had only rolled up a single character each. I'm also of the mind that PC death should only happen when a) it is meaningful to the story or b) is the result of incredibly bad player/character choices. However, I also think that combat should be dangerous regardless of what system you're playing. The real world is full of examples of people dying from minor accidents that seemed totally survivable or living through situations that seemed absolutely impossible; that's where the randomness of the dice come in when playing a game. When I GM, every combat has the potential to kill characters if they simply rush into it unprepared. I don't mean that I design impossible encounters or encounters that are meant to kill the PCs mind you. But the way I see it, if the situation has gotten serious enough for weapons to come out, then they're serious enough for someone to die or get really messed up. Violence has consequences and I show that in my games. One of my favorite games was a 1960's hard boiled story using the nWoD core rules. The Storyteller (not me) explained to the group that hard boiled stories are gritty and dangerous. To represent that, he told us "If someone has a gun to your head and you force them to pull the trigger, we're not going to roll dice. You're just dead." It made the game crazy tense and created that "well, I'm fucked unless I go along with this" feeling that hard boiled stories have. It was great.
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Post by jazzisblues on Mar 6, 2012 7:38:51 GMT -8
I totally agree with HyveMind here. Combat should be dangerous and scary. At the very least should never be entered into casually by the players. If the players are being casual about it imho they are either (a) not fully invested and emotionally involved with their characters, or (b) are not sufficiently challenged by the bad guys.
One of the games I played in back in AL was a Pathfinder game that totally came out of the mind of our GM and when I say totally I mean totally. None of the monsters could be found in any of the books. That not knowing what the capabilities of the beasties were was unnerving and made every fight more scary. I will also point out that I died 7 times in the course of that year plus long campaign.
JiB
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joegun
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Post by joegun on Mar 6, 2012 11:53:31 GMT -8
I call a little bit of doucheyness on the gm for not saying up front you should make 3 characters and here's why ... Yeah, I agree with this statement. Damn it JiB, stop being so reasonable; you're making me look like your groupie or something. Jeeze. As pukkatukka said, it is a Call of Cthulhu game and anyone who's even remotely familiar with the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft knows those stories don't end well. But upon seeing that most of his group wasn't familiar with the fiction or the CoC game the GM really should have made clear what kind of experience the players were in for. Requesting the players to make three PCs each before the game even started pretty much says "I AM going to kill you several times in this story" and kind of gives the GM a license to be a dick which I disagree with. Plus, the evil GM in me thinks it would have been that much more shocking when a PC died if the players had only rolled up a single character each. I'm also of the mind that PC death should only happen when a) it is meaningful to the story or b) is the result of incredibly bad player/character choices. However, I also think that combat should be dangerous regardless of what system you're playing. The real world is full of examples of people dying from minor accidents that seemed totally survivable or living through situations that seemed absolutely impossible; that's where the randomness of the dice come in when playing a game. When I GM, every combat has the potential to kill characters if they simply rush into it unprepared. I don't mean that I design impossible encounters or encounters that are meant to kill the PCs mind you. But the way I see it, if the situation has gotten serious enough for weapons to come out, then they're serious enough for someone to die or get really messed up. Violence has consequences and I show that in my games. One of my favorite games was a 1960's hard boiled story using the nWoD core rules. The Storyteller (not me) explained to the group that hard boiled stories are gritty and dangerous. To represent that, he told us "If someone has a gun to your head and you force them to pull the trigger, we're not going to roll dice. You're just dead." It made the game crazy tense and created that "well, I'm fucked unless I go along with this" feeling that hard boiled stories have. It was great. It's OK HyveMynd I'll be your groupie! I agree with everything JIB and Hyvemynd are saying here. I have nothing more to say, I just wanted to bump my post count, and give Hyvemynd some love.
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Post by daeglan on Mar 6, 2012 12:14:28 GMT -8
I am of 2 minds. 1. If the player is terminally stupid it should be fatal. 2. I do agree that a death should mean something. Even if it is you made an idiot move.
I also think if you can't figure out that player death is likely when the GM says make 3 characters to start the came...you kind of deserve what you get.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 9, 2012 14:18:44 GMT -8
It's okay to kill characters as long as it is within the scope of the players expectations. Sadly I find that character death is so rare in the balanced encounters of 4E that my players freak out if they come close to it. And very enjoyable it is to watch.LOL.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using ProBoards
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