God I missed Jhon!

Yeah, and maybe I should have addressed that more directly, it just kind of rubs me the wrong way. Since the overall push of this community has seemed to be for depth and roleplaying (even in systems that don't push for it), this sort of "why bother" idea seems to undermine it.

I wouldn't play a first level mage with no story, but then, I probably wouldn't be playing in the kind of game where the GM is likely to kill off said mage with an ally cat - so perhaps we're just on different wavelengths.



Hear, hear!


~PS

Is that another way to say "familiar"? And if your ally cat kills you does that mean you're a bad master?

The problem I encountered with player lethality was in a long-running game where after a few months, maybe half a year, each of the original characters had gotten killed. Eventually, the new characters that had replaced them looked around and realized that while they'd been filled in on why what the party had been doing was important, they had no in-game reason to care. We continued on, but the blush was off the rose.

I'm for PK, but there are always associated issues with it. I think everyone in our game group is okay with the idea that their character *could* die. We're playing Coyote Trail right now and it uses the more realistic (as opposed to D&D) "wound" system, where taking wounds affects your combat/skills.

We did have an incident where one DM ran two campaigns in a row for us. In the first campaign, we had a PK die a few hours in. He was bummed, but rolled up a new character for the next session. Two sessions later we had TPK (fun game story - it came down to one character vs. one monster, character rolled a 20 but the GM wanted two 20's for crit, as a result character was 2 dmg short of killing the monster and died on the monster's turn).

Next game. Different players, different quest, switching to Pathfinder. Same player has his character die about half way through the adventure, which was a few sessions in. He had to roll up yet another character. In the climax/finale of the adventure, because of the excuse that the GM had to make for the new character meeting up with our party, the GM *had* to take over the player's character for a few rounds and use him as a pawn of Baron von Badass.

The GM later confided in me that he gets the feeling that this player is getting disgruntled with him as a GM. It's not that he (the GM) picks on this player, or that the player rushes into the lethally spiked pit o' death with the corpses littering the bottom. When it comes down to it, it's the dice (as mentioned in the episode, the "extra player" at the table) and the fact that this player is more of a role player and less of a Min/Max'er.

I realize this is an isolated instance but there might be situations where the GM could throw a player a boon so that they're still having fun - like Dan said with mis-directing the critical hit into the boxes. In the case of the TPK that came down to one critical die roll, even though we had TPK it was a lot of fun because of that uncertainty. No one had bled out yet and the last player standing was a Pally w/ a healing wand, spells, etc., so the fate of about four characters literally did come down to one die roll. Everyone, including the GM, was jumping around the room and shouting like it was the winning field goal in the Superbowl (or winning penalty shot in the World Cup Final for our Euro friends).

I had that very thought when recording this episode when either Dan or Chad was talking about the majority of the party dieing but I didn't get around to bringing it up. So thank you, My favorite Martian-god!

*alley cat

Noting old Keyboard. Keys stick.

D'oh! I totally repeated that error, too.

I'm going to blame it on the fact that our dog's name is Ally (pronounced like 'alley'), so i see that spelling and that's how I hear it.... ...yeah...

~PS

Most of these remarks apply to games where resurrection can't happen(WoD) or isn't easily available yet (low level D&D). If you can get rezzed with relatively penalties that can be worked with, then I have no issue with PC Death.

GM Minion:
The reason I don't run high combat + high lethality games is basically what Martian_God and Pat pointed out. You end up with a rotating cast, and it's really hard to get any sort of player investment in their characters or the story if they know that there's an extremely good chance they're going to lose said character.

That said, I'll let players die for stupidity, because they overextended themselves, or because I was able to wear them down. What I don't do is kill them with the proverbial bolt-from-the-blue, create situations that will kill them if they don't do things exactly right within a time limit, or kill PC1 because PC2 did something idiotic.

PC Minion:
Maybe I've had bad luck, but the killer GMs I've played under tend to either approach tabletopping as a wargame, are focused on the story that they think Character X's death will create and try to kill him off, or they have a lethal world because they want the game to have a certain tone. The last two tend to backfire in my experience, as the players either lose interest in RP in favor of min-maxing, become fatalistic about their characters ("Why bother making something original? I'll be making a new character in two months anyway") or simply stop caring about anything other than what's set directly in front of them. Even then, they only pursue the plot because they know the GM will probably find a way to screw them if they don't.

I had a similar experience with a campaign... by the end, only two of the original characters that started, finished.

I adapted by working the new character's backstories into the plot, even if in a small way, so they did have some reason to care