When it comes to traditional pen &
paper RPGs there are two types of games you can play and I will judge
you as a person depending on which you favor. There is the
no-fail-state heroes can't die power-fantasy that a lot of early
DnD-goups seem to have favored and there is games where your
character can actually die. I despise the former, as it makes all
combat and adventuring devoid of risk and thus pointless. As a friend
of mine once said: „Adventure without risk is Disney world.“
It's for the same reason as Superman
stopping a simple thug from a robbery is, while a good thing to do,
not exactly heroic as there is no personal risk involved. If I know
that my game master won't let me die in an encounter with a group of,
say, orcs, what's the point of fighting them? If a battle was
hard-fought, with actual risks and even casualties involved, it will
make victory much sweeter and, if the heroes actually fail, it will
make defeat a poetic thing, a part of the story.
There are role-playing systems that
focus on you failing, mostly the horror-games like Call of Cthulhu or
Little Fears, where it's the exception rather than the rule for the
player characters to have any sort of good outcome from the story.
But I strongly believe that even in a long-term campaign with
different storylines, death of their characters should be a risk that
players just have to face.
When I first DMed a game, my own
homebrew post-apocalyptic setting, it was with a group of mostly
strangers at our university role-playing club. I told them before
playing, even before character-creation, that I was going to handle
this in a realistic way. I told them „when bullets fly, people will
die“, trying to get them to consider avoiding lethal violence where
at all possible, as real people would – if you get into a
firefight, there is always a very high risk of gruesome injuries and
in an age where the next hospital might be a thousand kilometers of
wasteland-travel away, you better think twice before starting a fight
like this. This goes for any risky behaviour. Just be careful, I told
them. They didn't listen.
The first thing they do after leaving
their tribal village and set up camp for the first night in the wild
is to split up in search for a source of water. They go out in random
pairings so when a lynx attacks one of the groups, it's the groups
geeky scholar-type (and medic) and the mechanic who get hit. So they
have barely started their adventure and one of them is unconscious,
with a heavy stomach-wound that's going to get infected and he was
the one who could do first aid. It went on like that, culminating in
an ambush that killed two of them, while crippling another two. But
they learned fast. It wasn't about skills and die-rolls, it was about
decisions. It was about the skill of the players more than it was
about the skill of their characters. And they started to enjoy their
victories. Because they were hard-earned, surviving a fight was
something the players celebrated and had their characters celebrate
too.
And that is a principle I have held
high in GMing: The harder the obstacle, the merrier overcoming it.
Also, defeat doesn't have to mean death. How many RPG-groups ever get
the idea of surrendering if they can't win? It's a possibility, you
know? Another thing about any open-form game has always been for me
(and a few other I have played with have adopted this philosophy in
their own campaigns): Put the players in a situation where you, the
GM, do not know how they could survive it. If the game is free-form
enough (the limited environment of a dungeon isn't a good example
here), the players will find a way that you didn't think of. After
all, they have several brains, you only have one.
I like open-ended RPing more than any
other form. And there needs to be risk. In the next installments of
this series, I'll talk about the deaths of a few player-characters
I've had. Except for one, I enjoyed the experience of all of them.
It's just a part of their story – and how many heroes in actual
heroic literature end up living to an old age?
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