Character Death

Pavel

If no one ever loses a character in a faction conflict, you lose the stakes

I almost agree, here, but there are other stakes possible beyond losing a character. But, at least in my experience, players prone to wanting ‘dramatic’ character conflict are often purely interested in combat of some kind resulting in a character being left unplayable – that’s their version of victory. I hope that in more recent times such people have found other avenues and that we’ve entered a more story-driven era, but my experience is hardly unique. It might explain why so many people are reticent to offer up their characters to the slaughter. They put in all this effort to build a character, create interesting stories, and suddenly that story is cut short to feed an ego instead of completed to feed a narrative.

Faraday

@Roz said in Character Death:

I wasn’t on The Greatest Generation, but my impression of how people have talked about it really points at the expectation aspect to me. People went in knowing their characters were almost surely going to die. That was, from everything I’ve heard, kind of core to the game’s conceit: there were limited-time campaigns, and PCs would die. When players expect to lose their characters, it reframes our entire approach.

This exactly. It’s like playing the Paranoia RPG. It’s right there on the tin that you should expect your PC to die. I might still be able to play and have fun with my friends, because at least I know what I’m getting into.

More importantly though, it’s a different kind of fun. In MUs, I’m in it for the soap opera. I want the long-term stories. I couldn’t care less how quick and easy the chargen process is, or whether I get to carry over the XP to my new character, or whatever other “compensation” you try to give me for losing my character. All of that is irrelevant because unwanted/unexpected character death is the equivalent of flipping over the chess board in a middle of a match.

I’m not saying games with PC death shouldn’t exist. To each their own. It’s just not for me because it’s undermining the very reason I’m playing the games in the first place.

Pavel

@Faraday said in Character Death:

In MUs, I’m in it for the soap opera

In which case when your PC dies it should come back as your PC’s lost twin brother who immediately falls in love with his dead brother’s widow’s sister, who it turns out is actually adopted former European royalty.

somasatori

I’m personally very firmly on the side of pro-character death, but I do see @Faraday’s point in that we all come to games with different perspectives on what’s important.

I suppose, to me anyway, if you are playing in a game that’s attempting to emulate a TTRPG, regardless of which one, there should be some expectation of character death. Playing D&D, it’s expected that you might die (though admittedly there are many ways to offset that through resurrection and raise dead spells) pretty early on considering low HP. There is definitely a different vibe between starting out a D&D campaign and starting out a campaign of Dungeon Crawl Classics, of course, but … I dunno. Maybe this is just my personal experience with gaming coming up.

Pavel

@somasatori I think the difference in view comes at least partially from the fact that D&D is born of wargames with RPG elements tacked on at the end. Originally, the ‘story’ was “we go through a dungeon and kill shit.” So mechanically, combat and death and dying are at the absolute forefront.

Whereas other systems have other intentions. If you’re playing Vampire the Masquerade, for instance, and your first instinct in character conflict is to rampage and kill everything… you’re kind of playing it wrong.

Which is just another way of phrasing what’s already been said, really, that different games have different intentions around character death. In D&D I go into it knowing my wizard could die within the first thirty seconds of our first combat, but in a Lords and Ladies game I’d expect my Earl of James-Joneston to die when it is the most dramatically appropriate and narratively satisfying.

somasatori

@Pavel said in Character Death:

Which is just another way of phrasing what’s already been said, really, that different games have different intentions around character death. In D&D I go into it knowing my wizard could die within the first thirty seconds of our first combat, but in a Lords and Ladies game I’d expect my Earl of James-Joneston to die when it is the most dramatically appropriate and narratively satisfying.

After which you play his twin brother, the Royal Consort of the Queendom of Latifah.

Yeah, I get what you mean. I do suppose this is where WoD games can kind of add to the confusion of this situation since you would definitely not run most Vampire the Masquerade games this way, but you could, and most likely would, run a Werewolf game this way. Then you have the two different game lines on the same MUSH trying to cooperate with another when the theme and tone are so vastly different.

Ashkuri

Killing off your beloved character and making yourself and all your friends cry is some of the best fun you can have out here.

I’ll die on this hill (which is also good character death)

somasatori

@Ashkuri said in Character Death:

I’ll die on this hill (which is also good character death)

Good being the operative term. There are many times when character death has been cheap or not earned, or seems sort of pointless such as in a plotline that doesn’t work or if you feel like you’re being targeted OOCly. This also returns us somewhat to the topic of factional conflict, since that can be such a contentious part of it. But, yeah! If you have a good character death that feels meaningful, it can absolutely propel the story into the stratosphere.

MisterBoring

I sort of want to run a tragic post-apocalypse game where the player characters are vat-grown worker humanoids with incredibly short lifespans who are dedicated to cleaning up and rebuilding the world after a disaster while the actual inhabitants of the world are safely sleeping in a bunker somewhere. The tragic story comes out of these characters trying to make the most of their short lives before they inevitably reach time out and melt into goo, or otherwise die violently dealing with one of the many dangers of the wasteland.

When you enter character creation each time you will receive a notice that the chances of your character’s story coming to an end by violence or tragically by simply running out of time are very high. I think it would also be cool to do this on Ares because I have a feeling I could rig up a system on the characters page where each little character portrait has a timer under it and a green border, and when the time runs out, or the character dies sacrificing themselves to let their short term best friends kill the Gnarlbeast of the Voided Lake, it automatically shifts it to red and puts a red skull and crossbones on their character picture.

Faraday

@somasatori said in Character Death:

suppose, to me anyway, if you are playing in a game that’s attempting to emulate a TTRPG, regardless of which one, there should be some expectation of character death. Playing D&D, it’s expected that you might die (though admittedly there are many ways to offset that through resurrection and raise dead spells) pretty early on considering low HP.

I don’t come to MUs to emulate a TTRPG experience, but even if I did, I don’t see the association between TTRPGs and PC death that you do. As @Pavel also pointed out, different games have different expectations. I’ve been in plenty of TTRPG campaigns through the decades, from games with my family, to various clubs, to games amongst strangers at Gencon. In all that time, there were exactly two campaigns where PC death was expected. Naturally some of that is selection bias in terms of what RPGs I play and who I play with, but it wasn’t exactly hard to find like-minded people who just want to chill and tell a story.

MisterBoring

@somasatori said in Character Death:

If you have a good character death that feels meaningful, it can absolutely propel the story into the stratosphere.

As someone who also enjoys a good character death, I find it sad that there are some people who would refuse even the most epic of story ending character deaths. I understand not wanting your PC to die, especially in an arbitrary or uncool fashion, but if your PC sacrifice ties off an 18 month plot and removes one of the biggest antagonists in the game permanently, choosing not to do that and allow the antagonist to continue attacking the PCs effectively spits on everybody else that worked toward an ending to that plot. (Yes, I realize that’s a very very specific example, and yes I still hold it over the person that did that to this day even though they regularly attend my home tabletop game.)

Pavel

Of course, none of what @Faraday or I say should be taken as an indictment on people who enjoy playing a MU like it’s a CoD lobby. We simply wouldn’t play on those games, nor would we expect the other folks to play on games we like. Both types of games should be allowed to exist, so long as expectations are expressed and managed appropriately.

Roz

I’ll die on the hill that MUs are not TTRPGs, even when they’re using the bones and theme of a TTRPG system, and that trying to insist on a connection between them has been to the hobby’s detriment. Unless you’re playing on a private game with a small group of people, the fundamental structure of MUs is just too different from a TTRPG table.

somasatori

@Roz said in Character Death:

I’ll die on the hill that MUs are not TTRPGs, even when they’re using the bones and theme of a TTRPG system, and that trying to insist on a connection between them has been to the hobby’s detriment. Unless you’re playing on a private game with a small group of people, the fundamental structure of MUs is just too different from a TTRPG table.

No, they’re not TTRPGs, but many of them use the same genre emulation techniques that TTRPGs do, which I feel has had some effect on the way that various MUSHes have played out. I could say you wouldn’t go into a Star Wars game expecting it to have the same tone and theme of a WoD game, which is obvious, but you could say the same thing of other urban fantasy games like Under the Stars. If you play Werewolf the Apocalypse on a MUSH the pastiches and themes of Werewolf are going to be there, because you’re using the mechanics and themes of Werewolf the Apocalypse, as unto the same for Dungeons and Dragons, Star Wars FFG, etc. It isn’t a TTRPG exactly, but games that are based on TTRPGs will still usually have some relationship to how the game functions on a player-to-player level. Going back to Werewolf, packs ostensibly work the way they do because it’s an easy way to to bind PCs at the table together. If you encourage packs in your Werewolf MUSH then you’re suggesting that a TTRPG dynamic is part of your game.

That said I kind of feel like this isn’t part of the discussion of player death broadly and could be its own topic altogether haha

Edit to add: although I’ve been on a lot of WoD games and it’s kind of been my main setting for most of my MUSH career, I really do like when people make their own settings and themes and feel like that pulls in a direction that makes it more focused on the MUSH’s theme/story and less around the gamification of the MUSH via whatever RPG book predated it. There’s so much that can be problematic about the grognardian insistence that a MUSH play out like a TTRPG, which I’ll also agree has absolutely been to the detriment of the hobby.

Muse

On Liberation I played Lola Darling (at least that’s what she said her name was ) and I frequently had the writing advice ‘kill your Darlings’ in my head. Which I suppose is my weird way of saying, I am team character death.

I also tend to sit a little further back from my characters, and focus on the story they’re a conduit for telling, and not just how they experience the world. And the reality is, good stories involve strife, and I am always hoping my characters root deep enough in others, that if they die, an impact will be felt, and that will also become part of the story.

MisterBoring

I think it’s odd when people say MUs aren’t TTRPGs, but I could take the rules of almost any MU, print them out and run a tabletop group with them.

Roz

@somasatori That’s just games sharing a setting/theme with its source material, which isn’t the same as emulating the experience of playing that specific TTRPG. Playing a Star Wars MU* is not the same thing as watching the movie. Playing a Mass Effect MU* is definitely not emulating the experience of playing the video game. But I feel like people always trip over this when it comes to TTRPGs in a way that can be actively detrimental to a MU*'s development, because if people are thinking about emulating tabletop on a MU, they’re not thinking about the process from a MU-first perspective.

Playing CoD in tabletop and playing a CoD MU are wildly different experiences. Playing tabletop and playing MUs in general are wildly different, and the challenges they face are also entirely different. The core structure is different: one is a private experience with a small handful of players getting constant DM attention. The other is a persistent lobby of numerous players, many of whom don’t know each other. The systems require a different approach in order to support a persistent environment that players can exist in without constant DM attention.

@MisterBoring said in Character Death:

I think it’s odd when people say MUs aren’t TTRPGs, but I could take the rules of almost any MU, print them out and run a tabletop group with them.

And yet that experience would still be different! Sharing some mechanics doesn’t make the needs and experience the same.

ETA: Baldur’s Gate 3 shares rules with D&D 5e, and yet no one would say that the experience of playing these two things is the same!

Pavel

Netball started off as a misinterpretation of the rules of basketball (at least based on an alleged anecdote, it works for metaphorical purposes). They evolved to be different sports with different practices and experiences even if they came from the same root. But they’re more similar to each other than they are to, say, snooker. And those three are all more similar to each other than to Formula 1 Racing, even though they all fall under the category of sport.

So while MUing isn’t precisely TTRPG, it’s a close relation that comparisons can be made so long as the inherent differences are acknowledged.

ETA: To, hopefully, simplify: MUing and TTRPGs are cousins. There’s lots of “genetic” overlap, but there’s also lots of difference. So one isn’t necessarily wrong to say they’re in the same ballpark depending on where you’re measuring from.

MisterBoring

@Roz said in Character Death:

Sharing some mechanics doesn’t make the needs and experience the same.

I think that depends on the person in question. I go into any RP situation be it LARP, tabletop, MU, or forum / pbem game looking to participating in the telling of a rewarding collaborative story.

Faraday

@MisterBoring said in Character Death:

I think it’s odd when people say MUs aren’t TTRPGs, but I could take the rules of almost any MU, print them out and run a tabletop group with them.

You can play TT with literally any rules or no rules (diceless/freeform) though. Many TT systems are adapted to LARPs too. So yes, they are mostly offshoots of the same family tree, but they are all very different experiences IMHO.