[RPGs] Minor Rant (Not fair, completely biased, and YMMV)

[pyrephox]

From BRPS, not commented there because it would be diverting the discussion from the topic of the post. But.


1. The ability to play a character in a setting where it's kill or be killed is limited. Sooner or later you die, you lose the character and the time you wasted creating the character is gone.

I HATE THIS. Yes, I use the big, scary caps of doom. I hate it. Time playing or creating a character is not 'wasted' if that character dies, damn it. If you're having fun, then the game is doing what it's supposed to do: be a game. You play.

It is not an investment. (Yes, you are investing time. However, the payoff is immediate: fun and interaction with others. That is all there is.)

I hate the line of thought that says it only matters if the character survives. Stop worrying about the damned character.

Play the game. If you didn't spend so much time bending over backwards to try and negotiate your way out of harm, or whining about the danger that you character might die, then you MIGHT be able to seize the moment and get some roleplaying done.

The code of Bushido says something along the lines of, "A samurai must accept that he will die. Death is inevitable. It is only by accepting death that he can live in the present moment, and attend to the battle right here and now. Fear of death distracts. It's only by understanding that you /will/ die that you can learn to truly live."

In RPGs, at least, it makes sense.

Comments

[cpip.livejournal.com]

Well said. I've never grasped the idea that "my character's death means I've wasted time." If I had fun, well, heck, why does it matter? Am I so attached to a character that I simply can not come up with another idea to play in the world? Did I get everything I wanted? Nah. But, hey -- that's life, and that's gaming too.

(On the other hand, I've been trying hard NOT to kill off PCs in the DL game, for instance. Possibly because, at present, bringing in replacement characters would be a bitch. Things will change, I suspect. But that's my own ramblings.)

[sariel-di.livejournal.com]

I dunno -- kill-or-be-killed doesn't appeal to me, mainly because my best characters are the ones I A) have some kind of emotional investment in (read: I enjoy playing them, I like the concept, and I don't have very much trouble figuring out what they'd do reliably on short notice) and B) have involved in plenty of subplots in addition to the main plot. And, yes, in that situation a character death is a 'lost investment' and a 'waste' -- because even if the subplots are still active and I can tie a brand-new character into them, I can't finish them with that character, and I can't keep playing the character I enjoy until I no longer enjoy playing it and can tie up enough loose ends to bow out of the game.

On the other hand... I don't play kill-or-be-killed, typically. And while I'd ask the GM if s/he was open to negotiation about retconning or deus-ex-machinaing so that my character could still be played (if not necessarily in the best of shape...) if the death wasn't voluntary, I would suck it up and deal if the GM said no period, even if it wasn't plot-mandated. (And if it was plot-mandated or voluntary, I wouldn't even ask.)

So, uh, yeah. There is a valid mindset that says 'character death == waste' and 'kill-or-be-killed =/= fun', IMO, but that mindset stays out of kill-or-be-killed games and sucks it up and deals when the GM says 'make a new char sheet'. [snrks]

(Also, I disagree with the statement that "the ability to play a character in a kill-or-be-killed game is limited", specifically because there are people who can have a lot of fun doing that sort of thing and don't mind the chance of character loss. If you're cool with that, you can have a lot of fun. Manipulation! Dramatic Death Scenes and Combat! Ruthless characters, or Highly Moral character angst as they deal with the need to kill-or-be-killed! Et cetera. I'd still prefer 'there is a chance you may possibly die, and there is a chance you may be able to talk the GM into helping you fast-talk your way around it if the GM likes you and feels merciful and it works with plot' over 'yeah, you've basically got 50-50 odds of survival at chargen, after that depends on how many warm bodies you can get between you and the guys with guns and how long they stay there', but that's purely a personal preference.)

[pyrephox.livejournal.com]

See, I still don't understand it.

It's natural to be bummed, or a little upset, when a character dies, especially unexpectedly. But that doesn't mean I didn't have fun. It doesn't invalidate or waste all of the time I spent playing with that character. I had fun. And just like I don't think a Monopoly game is a waste if I don't win, I can't see how losing a character could ever be a waste, unless I wasn't having fun in the process.

And that's not to say I don't get emotionally involved with my characters. I do. I care about them. I think of how they'd react to little things, that are never going to come up. I write fanfic bits about them. I theorize about where they're going, I create goals for them, and I let them pursue those goals to their fullest extent.

But in the end, the journey is more important than the goal, and there's ALWAYS another character. It only takes about an hour to come up with a new concept.

[sariel-di.livejournal.com]

Well, it doesn't invalidate all the time, no. But it does feel like a waste. "I did all that buildup in chargen and pre-planning/brainstorming with the GM and/or other players, never mind all the buildup in the actual game, and then...fzzt? Nothing? Dead in a random encounter from bad dice luck? I don't get to wrap up the subplots, or play this particular character any more ever unless I can port it over to another game? (Sure, other characters are and can be fun, but if I didn't like this one in this game I wouldn't've still been playing it in this game.) And if I make a new character for this game, I don't even get as much preptime as I did with the other one, so I probably won't be able to flesh it out as much and therefore won't enjoy it as much? Um."

Like, oh... in SSO? I've got no problem shelving Betharan to NPC status. She's incredibly fun to RP and as far as I know most of the other players/observers and the GM like her and her plots, but since she's incredibly hard to come up with IC reasoning to get her involved with the other PCs instead of other NPCs, it's better to shelve her. And I like Salathiel, and had time to bounce ideas off Beth before bringing him in, and could tie him into various of Betharan's subplots as well as generating new ones of his own so I can still see how they get resolved (and the Betharan-chargen work wasn't wasted.)

But if she'd been soul-killed in the Big Marches Fight Scene? (Trauma isn't much of an OOC problem in IN when you and the GM don't want it to be, and ethereal death is even less of one. Soul-death's a big problem.) Yeah, I would've asked Beth if she was open to deus-ex-machinaing or retconning her way around it, even if I'd had Salathiel statted and GM-checked and ready to go in her place, and even though I do have a couple random side-timelines I can run versions of her in. There was a lot of work put into the Elder and the attached subplots, a lot of characters attached to her, and frankly, death-by-random-encounter just isn't worth it. (Now, if it was death-by-running-into-Asmodeus-specifically? I'd most likely raise the question, but be a lot more comfortable with leaving it. Not that I would want to keep playing Betharan any less, but it'd be really really hard to ICly get her out of that situation if Asmodeus felt like killing her, and it'd at least be a more interesting, 'worthwhile'-feeling death.)

I'm not knocking the journey in the slightest, but when it has to end, I'd rather it end at a place and time that satisfy me and (at minimum) aren't objectionable to the other players and GM, instead of me getting suddenly knocked off the road and having to hack myself a brand new path and miss everything that was farther along the road I chose to start with. It takes me about five seconds to thirty minutes to come up with a new concept, if a while longer to stat it out and write up background and all, but it's not necessarily going to be a concept I feel comfortable playing, or as good a character as the first one was.

(In other words, I am a total fanatic for character development and plot development, erring slightly toward the former, but my fanaticism is 'developing all the way to the end, as much as possible overall', and my definition of 'end' is 'when the game's over, or I can't stand this character any more and can stop playing it okay'. Again, not knocking people who have no problem swapping in charsheets midgame, or who enjoy playing games with an extremely high risk of permanent PC death, or who prefer combat-centric games, or what-have-you. It's just both boring and disappointing to me, which is why I play other types of games.)

[pyrephox.livejournal.com]

See, that sounds more like writing collaborative fiction than roleplaying, to me.

My characters have goals. I have goals for my characters. But although the characters fully intend to achieve their goals, and work towards those just like as anyone would a deeply-held passion, I the player don't expect that I'll ever achieve the goals I have for them. They're just things to keep in mind as I go through the game.

And I can't even imagine having a battle scene without real danger of PC death or, at the very least, PCs being disabled. A big, dramatic confrontation that decides the fate of the fledgling realm? I want to feel fear! I want to see blood and glory and hear the players suck in their breaths with apprehension as they have to decide whether their wounded character will stand and hold the line as the enemy closes in, or if this is the moment of breaking, of pulling back and preserving its own safety at the cost to the greater good.

I want to be 3 points away from losing a Force, out of Essence and far from reinforcements, as a grinning Calabite closes in, mouthing obscenities. I want to know that if my character pulls back, this flank's defenses crumble, and my party members are going to have it that much harder. And if I stay, they may have time to come rescue me, but they might be late. They might not even notice. It may just be me and the Calabite and the gory, painful death of one or the other. I want to give my character the opportunity to make that choice, to flee and try to retrench somewhere safer, or raise her bloodslicked blade, and growl, "Bring. It. On."

And then know the GM /will/, with all six cylinders. If the character is clever, and the dice are kind, maybe she'll win. Maybe she'll lose. But either way, I'm having a ball.

Part 1 of 2 (it got longer than I expected)

[sariel-di.livejournal.com]

(Grah, lost a chunk of this the first time I tried posting.)

...ah, here's the problem, I think.

There is a MAJOR difference between "big, dramatic confrontation that decides the fate of the fledgling realm" and "random encounter". Likewise, there is a MAJOR difference between "big, dramatic confrontation that etc and happens only a few times at most over the course of the campaign arc" and "you're fighting desperately for your life every single gameday, knowing that you could die permanently at any moment". (Also a difference between the latter and Paranoia, where you can die but it doesn't matter because characters aren't supposed to have depth and have IC mechanics to replace them, but that's tangential, and I'm still iffy on playing Paranoia games.)

Again, to pull from past games:

PoaGH. Loved my character at the time, even if I wasn't having much fun with the game itself. A couple of the combat scenes, I would've aughed at character death purely because it was only from the GM wanting to screw with my character and make other characters look better. (harukami got this worse, but all of us other than one or two got combat-screwed overall. >.>) But in that last scene, where my character dumped all her Essence into a desperate attempt to Sing Fire on Alaemon to at least try to delay him so the other PCs could 'win the game'? I would've had no problem with her getting Traumatized or soul-killed for it. Uppity Bright Lilim of Fire. Versus pissy, stressy, already homicidal in game Demon Prince with a grudge against our party. Heck yes her death is logical and his isn't (barring Intervention). Plus, it's the end of the campaign arc, which at least feels like closure. My problem with that scene was when Alaemon both threw off the Song without a moment's hesitation or it touching him at all and completely ignored my character in favor of the two PCs the GM had arbitrarily designated as 'stars of the show'. (On the one hand, yes, IC priorities; on the other hand, uh, hi, there's ?five? of us PCs in the room and you're only letting two do anything AT ALL other than MST the scene.)

DGC3: Loved my character at the time, again. Said character being a Malakite with STRESS LIKE WHOA and currently majorly buzzed on Aura-of-the-Sword(TM), it was most IC for him to go try to attack a Calabite who'd just ethereally-or-celestially killed another angel. Character initiates the fight, character has obscene ethereal stats and respectable celestial stats and okay swordskill, player and GM go 'cool' and run the fight. Mechanics and dice proceed to actively attempt to rend the character down into componant Forces. Player goes 'augh', because, frankly, that is not a satisfying death. It's a tolerably IC one, but not a satisfying one in the slightest. Death by completely random encounter and horrible dice luck. Of a character I'm still having fun with, everyone else AFAIK is still fine with, and who has lots of potential for future gameage. And who just summoned his Archangel and is in the middle of the blessed VICTORY. The GM eyes the dice and the scene, and proceeds to rule that A) the Calabite is on its last few Soul Hits, B) finishing those off will actually soul-kill the Calabite instead of just stripping a Force (to save time because WOW that was getting long), and C) one of the other PCs can get involved in the next round just before the Calabite's turn. Other PC comes in to help, Calabite is soul-dead, Ryukage is irritated at the dice but very very happy that her character didn't get thrown away by random chance.

Re: Part 1 of 2 (it got longer than I expected)

[pyrephox.livejournal.com]

OOC BS should never be a reason for character death. I would have gotten irritated, too. :) While it's good to let all the PCs have their share of the spotlight, you don't actively screw one over for the purpose of it.

Unless they don't show up for a session and give the GM no warning. Then the PC is fair game. Ahem. >_>

More stuff in the comment on the second part.

Re: Part 1 of 2 (it got longer than I expected)

[sariel-di.livejournal.com]

Indeeeeeeeed. [laughs] Like I said, Haru got the "OOC BS == character death" more; I mostly got "OOC BS == character incompetance". But, yeah. Not a good reason at all, that. (Well, barring "OOC BS" in the sense of "the player is being a dick OOC and has quit or been ejected from the game, we need to kill off the character fast and get it out of here".)

[snrrrrrrk] I assume no mitigating circumstances at all? But, yeah. I dunno how happy I'd be with a GM who killed off my character (unresurrectably) because I wasn't there to protest (now, Trauma or making it hard to get back to the party, sure thing), but I can see annoyedness easily, and if the player'd deserved it/knew it was a risk.... [grins]

[nodnods]

Re: Part 1 of 2 (it got longer than I expected)

[pyrephox.livejournal.com]

Usually, with characters of people who don't show up, and don't give me warning, Something Unpleasant happens to them, and the party sends the session trying to cure them. :p

Part 2 of 2

[sariel-di.livejournal.com]

SSO: Betharan gets involved in the Big Marches Fight Scene(TM). She's helpful pre-fight, yay! Then the actual fight starts, whee! Which is essentially Everyone Vs Lots Of Cannon Fodder. Coolness happens, fighting happens... and Betharan turns out to have slightly poorer stats than I thought she did when balancing them (particularly in the Marches), in addition to much poorer diceluck. However, I had no problem with her getting drugged/poisoned by the ethereal she was fighting -- since the GM was again merciful and let someone notice who was able to help kill the thing. And the aftereffects of the drugging/poisoning resulted in interesting enough RP and character/relationship development, and the combat ended relatively soon after that so it wasn't a problem.

I have much less problem with meaningful death than I do with pointless death. (Yes, I know, any character death is likely to be meaningful to the PCs and NPCs left alive, but that's not necessarily meaningful to me or to my old or new characters.) I have vastly less problem with death in the climax of a plot arc or the end of a game than I do with death at any other time, and I have next to no problem with a death at the climax or endgame that has an effect other than just "horrify the other characters with the pointless tragedy of it all".

But kill-or-be-killed constantly? Very, very much not my thing. In my opinion: it dulls the significance of any given death, it requires me to either waste time generating loose ends in chargen that'll never be tied up or attempt to submit a flat character, and it does waste the time I spend ICly RPing and plotting for a given goal if my character dies for no reason except 'that's the way the dice fall, now lie down in that gutter over there and brainstorm a new character while you're at it'. (Or, for that matter, if someone else's character dies while essential to plot...)

I'll suck it up and deal if the GM says no retconning of my character's death, and I'll most likely enjoy the battle up to that point and the death scene itself if it's appropriate/meaningful/interestingly run. But I'm not going to enjoy death-by-random-encounter, I'm not going to enjoy death-by-playing-tennis-with-dicerolls-and-doing-minimal-posing, I'm not going to enjoy a rough average of no less than one character death a day, and I'm not going to enjoy dying in the climax if it boils down to "you're dead of fallout". (Even if I'm actively seeking an excuse to get rid of the character so I can bow out of the game or substitute a new one, I'm not going to enjoy any of the above. I'm going to appreciate them as excuses, but I'm not going to enjoy them.) It feels very, very much like wasted time and wasted potential.

Re: Part 2 of 2

[pyrephox.livejournal.com]

*grins* Aside from Paranoia, I don't think there's any game that's going to average one character death a day (unless we're talking seriously crazed GM, here), and I don't like games that are filled with random, pointless battles. But the battles that do occur...they're not random encounters to my character, if that makes any sense? I want them to have the chance of death, because my character thinks they do. She's fighting for her life, or her cause, or whatever, every time, whether it's a random demon tormenting a random human, or the end of game showdown with the Big Bad, whatever it is.

Too many battles, or too pointless of battles, is a seperate issue, I think. Related, but seperate.

Re: Part 2 of 2

[sariel-di.livejournal.com]

(Well, depends on how "kill or be killed", "a game of murder [and money and whatever else the tagline said]" is run... but. [snrks])

[nodnods] I can see that as a perfectly valid take, definitely. [grins] It's just that, for me, all I need of OOC "realism" in random encounters is risk of loss/pain/mutilation/Trauma. I can RP a character convinced that she's risking permanent death while OOCly confident that she'll live through this unless I screw up massively or there is Sudden Attack of Plot Dramatics involved. And I'll have fun with the RP, and still have adrenaline/worry because of it (there are LOTS of ways to hurt a character without killing them...), and not get too distracted by the dicerolls to enjoy the roleplaying.

(And, well...I'm more likely to try and figure out if my character would be willing not to fight if I do have significant OOC worry about her dying. If I know she's not dead and gone barring major, major screwup, I can play fight scenes or run-and-hide or what-have-you no problem. If I know she has a good chance of permanent death, I'm either going to mutter about playing Malakim kamikazes and suck it up, or I'm going to start playing Loopholist with my character's psyche as far as I can without breaking character. [coughs])

[wobbles a hand] Well, it does affect responses to character death, IMO. If you like combat-heavy games, you're less likely to twitch at character death (or you'll cling like mad to Exalted and other games with Dramatic Combat Mechanics and Near-Unkillable Characters). If you can't stand them, you probably have more issues with unplanned character death. (Not a hard-and-fast rule in either case, but a general tendency, I think. [laughs]) --Also, for what it's worth, my start in RPGs was "freeform" and then "Mage" and then "survival horror which I didn't like much" and then "In Nomine which I did" -- as opposed to, say, D&D or d20 or dungeoncrawly anything. Which may well affect my take. [snrks] But, yeah, not quite the exact same issue. [grins]

Re: Part 2 of 2

[pyrephox.livejournal.com]

That is, to be honest, part of my issue with no-death, the idea that because the character isn't going to die, someone reacts differently than if they knew the character /could/ die, if they did Risky Thing X. And no, I'm not talking about every moment being deadly. As I mention elsewhere, I've killed /very/ few characters, and I don't usually run games where combat is the focus (although /conflict/ often is, because without conflict, you've got a freeform chatroom with endless bar RP and not much else).

*nods* And likely, we are coming at it from different angles. I started with D&D, and I liked to play Mages. My characters died, a lot, and we never played a game past 10th level before getting bored and starting a new campaign. Now that I'm in my current group, made up largely of people who aren't in college and who have real lives...we do pretty much the same thing. One of us GMs a campaign, and then when they get bored, we switch off to a new set up.

Online games, I have a tendency to find frustrating, because without character death, they're so.../static/. It all becomes long monologues and romances and conversations about nothing in particular, because even if characters have a reason to go after each other, or if NPCs have a good reason to after PCs, nothing ever happens. There are no consequences for what a character does, for good or for ill. You can never get rid of your character's enemies, no matter how good your plan is or how ill-thought their response, and you have negotiate every little thing...and vice versa. People pull their punches, even when your character deserves to get smacked down, hard. It frustrates me. It likely always will.

[zamiel.livejournal.com]

You miss the most obvious counterpoint:

When my character dies, I have to stop having fun.

I've invested time and effort and caring into that character. I want to see them get to the end of their personal developmental arc. That's where a chunk of the fun is. If the character dies before then, the arc is broken and worse, the fun is over with that character, and I have to go back, create a new character which, by design, I won't have the connection to and whose arc is pointedly just starting. I have to do work, and then work my character back into a changed group dynamic.

Or I cam just go home and say "screw you" to that kind of mess.

Do you expect Frodo to die in a landslide on the way to Mount Doom? No. Why should Filcho, 12th Lvl Thief?

There are certain setups that necessitate a very kill-or-be-killed approach: Survival Horror, for example. But the necessary niches are a lot fewer than we, as players, get saddled with.

(From a GM perspective, I seldom run kill-or-be-killed. Its boring. Its done to death. And dead characters can no longer be tormented, and where's the fun in that?)

[pyrephox.livejournal.com]

On an intellectual level, I can understand that, I guess.

On an emotional and practical level, I really don't. I just...don't. The fun for me is in playing. Whether it's a character I've been playing for three years, or one I just made five minutes ago. Character deaths are occassions to cheer, to sniffle, to laugh, or to threaten the dice with vile and profane fates, but that's all. You make a new character, you play again. I just don't see it as work, I guess, and I like seeing how the other characters interact with a new personality and character. I enjoy those aspects thoroughly. And, truth be told, I enjoy the front-end mechanical stuff of making the character in the first place.

It's just...I don't get it. I get frustrated and irritated when it comes up as a reason not to play a Cool Game, because other people's attitude towards character death gets in /my/ way of having fun. Not because I kill characters very often. In my ENTIRE GMing career, I've killed four PCs through NPCs or environmental hazards. As a PC, I've killed...one, I think. Or, at least, voted to kill him along with the rest of the group, because he sold us out to our enemies, and then, when we spared him, tried to do it AGAIN. So the PCs knocked him down, tied him up, and blew his brains out.

[zamiel.livejournal.com]

The fun for me is playing. The difference is I'm well-aware that I have more fun playing an established, rounded character than in playing one fresh from the forge. Fun is not a binary, its a continuum. I would have thought that was obvious. Moreover, I'm no longer in college and I have other things to do with my time, including writing my own material. As such, I have a limited amount of time to get a maximum amount of fun out of my investment.

In that sense, the likelihood (rather than chance) of my character dying makes me make the intelligent choice of investing my effort elsewhere. I don't know how many PCs you've had die in the course of your gaming career, nor can I be expected to. If you tell me "I'm running a kill-or-be-killed game," I pretty much taken as given that you'll rate the chances of my character dying at over 30% or so a month, and that's unacceptably high for my investment and limited time. (Moreover, the very fact you think its important enough to state and like that tells me I'm uninterested.)

This is not a problem with other people. Its a problem with you. You and how you choose to communicate.

And I say this as a person from a strong Simulationist gaming background. I would never refer to it as "kill or be killed," I might, if I thought it important, call it ... well, Simulationist. "You have realistic chances of survival given this opposition." Of course, in reality, survival during conflicts was pretty low, so I'd have few takers. Unless I make it clear I'm simulating a genre emulation, the Simulationist mode of play is not particularly popular. (Historically, it only was popular until Narrativism became smoothed out mechanically enough to use.)

[pyrephox.livejournal.com]

"This is not a problem with other people. It's a problem with you. You and how you choose to communicate."

Yup. This would be why it's labeled 'rant', 'completely biased', and 'unfair'. And why it's in my personal journal, as opposed to a community.

And, for the record, aside from CoC, I've never /run/ a 'kill-or-be-killed' game. And CoC is more like fight-and-be-killed, play-smart-and-survive-for-a-while. I simply do not, and will not, excuse characters from logical consequences, up to and including character death. And I don't want character death to be excluded from the games in which I play, because it limits /my/ enjoyment.

[sariel-di.livejournal.com]

Yes! Exactly my point. (Well, one of my points. The other being 'this isn't personally fun for me unless the death is meaningful, and kill-or-be-killed constantly == overkill to me'. [snrks])

If I choose to app for a game that pitches itself as kill-or-be-killed or Survival Horror or Paranoia/Call of Cthulhuesque or 'send me at least two character sheets, you'll need them', I know what I'm getting into. If I choose to app for it and am accepted, I'm not going to scream at the GM for killing me off. But I'm unlikely to app for that sort of game, because it's not the kind of game I have fun with. (Now, a game that pitches itself as 'expect pain, angst, and trauma, although not necessarily fatally so'? Cool. A game where I walk into it playing a character with a good chance of getting into combat? I knew what I was dealing with when I made the charsheet, although that doesn't stop me from preferring a live character to a dead one as long as I like the character and the game and it fits with the game. But those aren't kill-or-be-killed.)

[zamiel.livejournal.com]

Part of it, of course, is totally the implicit game contract between GM and Players. Without it being explicated and explored before the game, there's absolutely guaranteed going to be problems. The prevalence of character death is one of the axiomatic necessities of spelling it out.

Pyre seems to be pissed because people don't want to play in a game she describes as "kill or be killed," and can't understand why. I simply point out this is her problem, not theirs. Not the least reason being a failure of imagination is hardly reassuring in a GM.

[sariel-di.livejournal.com]

Yeaaaaah. [snrks] This is why I've only played in one (non-freeform) game with a GM I wasn't even passingly familiar with beforehand -- and, ah, that game went the worst of any game I've ever been in. (Including the mediocre survival-horror-fantasy game, where most of the players had a lot of fun even if the GM and various observers and one of the other players hated all our concepts and the executions thereof. [coughs]) If I trust the GM to at least give me a fair hearing when I raise a problem, it's okay whether or not all the expectations are spelled out in detail in advance. If I don't... they need to be, and I'm still iffy about it.


I think she's more irritated with the argument that high odds of character death == actively limiting options instead of expanding them or being neutral, actually. But yeah, I have to say the "kill or be killed == majority of this game's concept" phrasing put me right off that person's game when I went to the userinfo, even though the idea of giant human chessgames appealed. [snrks]

(Actually, especially in a LJ game, although that's tangential to the overall argument of "is character death an annoyance or an essential risk". Dude. LJ GAME. It's not even like a MU*, where you can at least re@name your character when it dies. If you're making journals for the RP at all, they're either going to be hideously generic or hideously confusing, unless you're making a new journal every time someone dies and that sucks to do on LJ. ("Um, Player1? Why is your journal for the giggling homicidal maniac Black King's Knight full of entries about breeding rabbits?" "Huh? --oh, right! Remember the White Rook's Pawn from awhile back? He died last Wednesday. I reapped as this guy, and didn't delete the old entries when I redid the journal, 'cause, archives!" "...uh-huh...")

I mean, sure, most of the RP is supposed to happen over IM, so they could just be expecting OOC journals to friend and use the comm, but they do already have a black_npc or something like that, which implies that they plan to run a normal-ish LJgame, and, uh. [snrks] Anyway. </tangent> [grins])

[pyrephox.livejournal.com]

According to the game rules, the same journals get reused. I imagine, or at least if I were doing that particular rule, you'd mark each entry with the name/rank of your character. When the character dies, new header, and anyone who reads the rules isn't going to go back farther than the header says.

I'm not sure you could have a human chess game, of the type the moderators are talking about, without people killing each other. That's part of the thrill. 'Most Dangerous Game', hunting the long pig, etc. It's also part of the callousness of the arrangement...the idea that the Kings can and will use people's lives for a little thrill. There's no way it'd have the same 'punch' if it were "Pawn gets taken, character gets thrown in a oubulette." Or, "Okay, you're taken. Give me your little badge and go home."