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[RPGs] Minor Rant (Not fair, completely biased, and YMMV)
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.
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.
no subject
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?)
no subject
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.
no subject
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.)
no subject
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.
no subject
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.)
no subject
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.
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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
no subject
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."