 To Kill, or Not to Kill. That is the Question., GM question |
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 Nov 12 2004, 03:00 PM
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#26
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Moving Target  Group: Members Posts: 138 Joined: 24-September 04 Member No.: 6,700  |
brrr...now this sentence coming from any GM would make me simply get up and walk out of the gaming group. pcs die all the time, heck I lost the first SR char I made to a sniper rifle in sr2 aafter spending 6 or so hours making him. I didnt mind.*shrug* my fault for saying there was a 100k bounty on my head in my background. I have also lost MANY chars to random damage rolls.. *shrug* or reallly stupid actions <trying to reach that stone ledge after falling 100 m>.. *shrug* now having an npc plan my chars death is ok, go for it, fully up to the npc`s ability. but having a gm decide now I think tomorrow it will be good for the storyline if your char dies, good dramatic moment?? Here is where roleplay is NOT like a book, the players actions should matter, roleplay is not the same as storytelling. If a GM wants absolute control he should be writing books or telling stories or some such thing, not playing in a group with other people. /end rant :) DS |
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Nov 12 2004, 03:08 PM
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#27
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 276 Joined: 29-September 02 Member No.: 3,348 |
:eek: So how is that fun? |
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Nov 12 2004, 05:21 PM
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#28
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Incertum est quo loco te mors expectet; Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 6,548 Joined: 24-October 03 From: DeeCee, U.S. Member No.: 5,760 |
It's fun in the same way that the Alamo or the Titanic are neat movie ideas.
Have you ever heard the song Southside by Moby? I love that song. I love the idea of my crew and me hopping into our party wagon, loading our weapons, and preparing for a fight where we know a lot of us aren't coming back from. There's a desperation to it, an anxiety, the stakes are high, and so is the adrenaline. And when your final moment comes, when you know its time to throw down your hands and you've been bluffing the whole time, there's nothing like going down fighting, with no fear of anything, going down like a hero. That's why it's fun to die, to throw yourself into the mouth of the beast. PC death is a tool, and how you use it really depends on your group. You can use it to increase the feeling of risk, to create drama or roleplaying opportunities, or an excuse for some fresh blood, or just because you know its time. If you play the game only to advance your character, death isn't fun. If you play the game just to see what the plot is, death is a distraction. But if you play the game to take a risk, or to do something you wish you saw in the movies, or just to do something you've not done before, death is the final adventure. So to answer the original question, kill the PCs if you feel it would increase how fun the game would be. If they need to learn how dangerous the world is, let them run in, guns blazing, and wake up in the hospital a few thousand nuyen poorer. Death in that case is best used as a threat as to what happens if they don't change. I wouldn't kill them straight off for not knowing the world, but if they resist learning, make their brushes a bit more... terminal. |
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Nov 12 2004, 08:49 PM
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#29
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Target Group: Members Posts: 85 Joined: 24-September 02 From: Centerville, UT Member No.: 3,307 |
I think many of you are misunderstanding this quote. It doesn't mean that the GM should routinely plot the death of the player charcters - it means that the best character deaths are the dramatically appropriate ones that the GM (and possibly the player) have planned for in advance. Absolutely there are times where it is necessary to fudge die rolls as a GM. They should be rare events but they do occasionally occur. Just the other day I was running D&D for a newbie group. One particular character was being played by a kid of maybe 14, and it was probably the second time he had ever sat down to an RPG. During combat this newbie got critted by the big bad and knocked down to -9 hit points (for you non-D&D types, that means he was going to be dead the next round unless someone saved him). His buddies got over to him and brought him around again with a healing potion and he leaped back into combat. The next round I rolled ANOTHER crit on him. Knowing he was going to be dead if I let the result stand, I fudged it into a complete miss, and he took out the baddie on the next round with a crit of his own. Dramatic necessity. It would have been flat out unfair to kill the kid through no fault of his own right after he just had a very narrow escape from the exact same situation. He may have walked away from the table with a bad taste for gaming in his mouth and never come back. Fotunately, unlike life, rpgs can be fair. |
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Nov 12 2004, 09:40 PM
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#30
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 239 Joined: 10-February 04 Member No.: 6,068 |
Of course the ultimate goal of this game is to have fun, so never let that be overrulled by anything, but I would do 2 things,
1) Explain to these players that the SR world is extremely dangerous and if they do something dumb, they *will* die. 2) If you are dealing with not so smart players, or people who don't know the world very well, you have to consider their character's insite. If you see a player doing something their character would think is stupid, give them a roll on their character's intelligence, and if they pass, tell them their character would know that was a stupid idea, but let them go ahead with it should they still want to. |
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Nov 13 2004, 12:46 AM
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#31
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Running Target Group: Members Posts: 1,326 Joined: 15-April 02 Member No.: 2,600 |
Yeah, but I find it strains the suspension of disbelief. I've had players who thought characters should only die "if they do something stupid", or think that if they can't solve the mystery, the gm will fudge it so they make it to the end combat. All I can say is, I don't get it. The part about the "do something stupid" that I have a problem with is that, who's to say whats stupid? As a gm, I pretty much get the final word on the subject, but I am aware that the authority to declare an action stupid doesn't have with it any special power to be correct. Sometimes, no matter how brilliant a group of players you have, you will be staring over the screen wondering who these morons are and how they got into your house. The thing I had to realize is, as a gm, my judgement of what was the right or wrong thing to do was based around having perfect information. I had read the module or designed the adventure, so I knew the repercussions of the pcs actions. Pc's don't have that benefit. They make their decisions based around the information they have, which is the information that I give them. If they're tackling a scenario in an asinine manner, then there exists the possibility that instead of them being morons, I presented it poorly. (Sometimes they're just morons. It can go either way.) Further, just because something is obvious to me doesn't mean its obvious to anyone else, or even especially right. What if the gm's idea on how to tackle a situation is moronic? Are any of us infalliable? (Its a rhetorical question.) I've played in games where the gm decided on the correct course of action and would punish the party for not doing it (and not consciously, just if you deviated from what he thought was 'right', it was skewed against you). All I can say is, for a group of players, its not the most fun way in the world to spend a Thursday night. I prefer to design open ended scenarios. I try to know what capabilities and motivations the npcs have, and come up with a few ways they and the pcs are likely to meet. But I find its fairly useless to try and pick what path the pcs will take (except in the broadest sense), and all but impossible to say how it will turn out. Letting the situations play out in unexpected ways is where a lot of my enjoyment of the game comes from. |
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Nov 13 2004, 01:14 AM
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#32
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UMS O.G. Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 444 Joined: 18-May 04 Member No.: 6,335 |
halalujah brother. It took me a while to get over it but I started designing adventures that only had an objective. I made sure I could think of at least two ways to get there and then didn't care how my players reached it. I am also a big fan of weird dice rolls changing events. I had a player nuke a car off the map that was supposed to get away. The target was 24, he rolled a 26 = car-beque. I thought out the repercusions for a minute and moved on with the story. When your game goes totally sideways you can have a lot of fun on the ride. |
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Nov 13 2004, 06:26 AM
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#33
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Manus Celer Dei Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 17,013 Joined: 30-December 02 From: Boston Member No.: 3,802 |
It's really easier to predict players than many people would have you believe.
Not that that's an excuse for not being prepared for them going off the tracks anyway. ~J |
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Nov 13 2004, 10:03 AM
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#34
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Target Group: Members Posts: 82 Joined: 6-August 04 Member No.: 6,544 |
I don't know if you're reading this in time, but have them bring throwaway characters and run them though Supermarket Showdown (or what ever it's called). Kill those charcters (if that's the way the dice roll) and let your players know, that's how lethal SR is. You'll get some very careful runners after that.
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Nov 13 2004, 11:55 AM
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#35
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Immoral Elf Group: Members Posts: 15,247 Joined: 29-March 02 From: Grimy Pete's Bar & Laundromat Member No.: 2,486 |
Food Fight. ;)
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Nov 13 2004, 04:02 PM
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#36
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Manus Celer Dei Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 17,013 Joined: 30-December 02 From: Boston Member No.: 3,802 |
Run them through Food Fight and then immediately after run them through Supermarket Showdown ;)
~J |
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Nov 13 2004, 05:20 PM
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#37
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Immoral Elf Group: Members Posts: 15,247 Joined: 29-March 02 From: Grimy Pete's Bar & Laundromat Member No.: 2,486 |
I am so thinking about writing Supermarket Showdown. :D
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Nov 13 2004, 05:24 PM
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#38
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Manus Celer Dei Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 17,013 Joined: 30-December 02 From: Boston Member No.: 3,802 |
If you want any assistance, I'd be more than glad to help write it :grinbig:
~J |
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Nov 13 2004, 05:45 PM
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#39
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Immoral Elf Group: Members Posts: 15,247 Joined: 29-March 02 From: Grimy Pete's Bar & Laundromat Member No.: 2,486 |
I am actually inspired ... in a serious way. I might end up submitting it for Commando membership, because as always I'm having trouble putting something down in text. We'll see. :D
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Nov 14 2004, 03:01 AM
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#40
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Target Group: Members Posts: 34 Joined: 14-November 04 From: Atlanta, GA Member No.: 6,826 |
For what it is worth, if there is no fear of dying, then the players may not take the characters seriously. My personal approach is this;
Not every player thinks like I do, therefore I do not penalize the players for not doing things exactly as I had planned. If there is something fairly specific, I let it default to a skill roll, or in the case of my last game, an attribute check with penalties. ((A team member went down out of sight of the rest of the players as they were scrambling for the van. They started to drive off... )) If you are killing players left and right, then perhaps you may want to rethink your game. |
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Nov 14 2004, 04:05 AM
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#41
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 276 Joined: 29-September 02 Member No.: 3,348 |
Wow, this sounds exactly like a D20 game I was in, including the day we played. |
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Nov 14 2004, 04:16 AM
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#42
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Senior GM Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 1,406 Joined: 12-April 03 From: Redmond, WA Member No.: 4,442 |
As a GM, I feel it's my job to ensure that they get satisfaction out of their play, and I believe they get the most satisfaction if they feel like they have overcome a tough challenge.
Sometimes they fail. That raises their satisfaction when they succeed. Sometimes characters die. That raises their satisfaction when they live. Sometimes they come close to losing a battle, and since I roll in the open and target numbers are shared, they can tell how close it came. Once I started a run, told them to run characters they didn't care about, and said that only one character would survive. Due to their actions, however, two survived, and as a group they were proud of themselves. This is the type of alternate game that experienced players can enjoy. Brand new players might enjoy it too. Tell them it's just for fun, to get them into the game, and they should just pick a premade character (for example, the book archetypes on my web page are in a format to print and hand out to a new player). After they have some experience (dying) they can pick what type of character they'd like to try next. When I GM for players in my home campaign (going 5 years next month), I no longer figure out ahead of time some ways for them to succeed. I know what they're going up against, and I know how their opposition has defended themselves, but I don't prepare holes in those defenses. They may have to try multiple investigations till they come to something I haven't thought of. |
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Nov 14 2004, 10:27 PM
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#43
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 326 Joined: 26-February 02 From: Vigo (Spanish Kingdom) Member No.: 1,446 |
When I said that you can plan PCs deaths so they happen "appropriately", I didn't mean that you had to run such a scene on rails. No. Maybe you planned a carefull and perfect death for the character, and still, he planned and worked, suffered and fought, and got away. Great. That adds a new twist to the story told. Sure, that death would have been great, and the player would have remembered the character for all his life. Still, another opportunity for such an appropriate death might come once this new twist of the story has developped.
Rail-roading players is never an option. Which doesn't mean you can't plan on every aspect of the game to try and take it on the best possible road (the one you think it is, in any case), even if it does take a lot of time. In any case, predicting player's actions isn't that hard, specially if you've GMed them a while, so planning on that basis is a good way to have a carefully planned development of any scene. If they choose other roads and surprise you, though, you must have info behind so you can adapt to the road they choose. |
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