Player Character Mortality

Is a good thing. 

Seriously.  I can’t imagine the point of playing a game that involved nominally lethal conflict in which there was an expectation that the player characters would not run a serious risk of death. Sure, certain campaign concepts might reduce the risk somewhat – the players might play the champions of the gods, for example, able to wade through normal men as if they were mere distractions. But if a player character goes up against a non-player character or monster of roughly equal power, the PC need be better equipped, or have chosen the ground, or engage in clever play, else his odds of winning that fight will be roughly fifty-fifty.

OSRBaron blames Dungeon Masters.

“You heard me right, Dungeon Masters. Plot intensive games where characters are tied so tightly to a plotline that their death in play could wreck an entire campaign are the fault of Dungeon Masters. Setting the campaign plots up to require characters to survive till the end of the campaign and not leaving an "out" in the over-arching story has lead to the creation of more and more safety nets for PCs.”

Erik Tenkar blames the elaborate character builds of later editions of D&D (and, implicitly, the complex, time consuming character creation of most modern RPGs).

“3x was the first time I saw players planning out their advancement 5, 10, even 15 levels in advance. It wasn't something I could comprehend, as just surviving to the next level was carrot enough for me. Was it the more complicated characters that 3x embodies that led to people assuming their characters were nigh immortal? Was the risk of character death significantly lowered starting with 3x? Was it the advent of computers assisting player record keeping that led to programs that allowed such planning to take place?”

And some of the blame has to go to computer games, including, but not limited to, CRPGs (and CRPGs are NOT roleplaying games). A key piece of strategy advice for any CRPG is ‘save early, save often’. This is the style of play that the designers assume will be employed. Sure, you could play ‘ironman’, and start from the beginning each time your character died, but even in a ‘sandbox’ such as Skyrim you’ll be seeing the same thing over and over again. In a real RPG, the experience of playing a new character can be genuinely novel, not simply a sullen retread through the levels until you got back to where you were before.  I quickly got bored of Skyrim – as I get bored of most CRPGs, after an initial surge of enthusiasm. There is simply no risk, or even an illusion of risk. When my Skyrim character enters the dungeon, my worry is not that he’ll die, it’s that he’ll ‘die’ and I’ll have to play through a section of the dungeon again. 

I wrote this post last week, but it is particularly appropriate now as tonight’s game ended in a TPK. I'm not a killer DM, I promise. More on that later.

This is not an argument for balance

Sigmar no.

Erik Tenkar posted a few days ago suggesting that running a skill-based RPG demands greater system mastery on the part of a GM than a class and level-based game. I thought of D&D and OpenQuest, and AD&D and RuneQuest II, comparing the two families of games. My intuitive response was; ‘No, he’s wrong. What can be easier than running a game with a unifying mechanic such as ‘roll under skill’? A GM can be up and running a game of, say, OpenQuest in no time at all. The eccentricities written into the variety of systems used to resolve character action in D&D demand that the GM doesn’t only have a feeling for the system, but real knowledge’.

But Tenkar is right, of course, to say that character generation, getting *players* up and running, can be far quicker in a system such a D&D. A player rolls stats and chooses a class, and away they go. Okay, they still have to buy equipment, but it is possible to streamline this process, with the help of a few dice rolls. A player rolling up a character in a game of OpenQuest or RuneQuest II has to assign skill points, choosing the abilities that are either class-based, or universal, in the simpler forms of D&D. Of course, that too could be streamlined by bringing in archetypes – kind of like proto-classes – in which all the starting skill points are assigned and a set of equipment allocated. Similar to the way careers work in WFRP1e/2e.

But there is one area in which an A/D&D-based system trumps a RuneQuest-based system in terms of ease of GM system mastery. Encounters. A RuneQuest-based system allows for pretty open-ended character advancement. Great. This supports the mechanical resolution of non-combat situations and encourages ‘gaming’ playstyles that emphasise those situations. Combat is ‘realistically’ deadly. Several adventures into a campaign, and two similar starting characters might be very different mechanically. By contrast, a 3rd-level Fighter is a 3rd-level Fighter is a 3rd-level Fighter. Boring?

Well, maybe. But if you want to run a free-wheeling on-the-fly sandbox campaign, that a GM can easily have a very clear idea of the capabilities of a 3rd-level Fighter makes judging the threat level of an encounter fairly straightforward – you know the abilities and levels of the PCs, and can, at a glance, measure this against the hit dice and abilities of the monsters. Note, I didn’t write, ‘makes balancing an encounter fairly straightforward’. By contrast, you have to have some experience in running a BRP-derived system to understand the interplay between outnumbering, skill levels, and equipment, before you even add magic into the mix.

It's not about finding a perfect balance, just understanding the relative weight.

I know that OpenQuest/RuneQuest are explicitly not games of ‘killing monsters and taking their stuff’. This is built into the system. And this is why, if you want to run quick, episodic games, I think that they are far more difficult games to prepare for as a GM, though they are potentially far more rewarding for everyone involved.

As you might read into this I’m still stuck on the system of the sandbox campaign.