The Gaming Den

What happens when your replacement dies? Is your replacement's replacement's -2 levels?

Existential Despair kicks in when character death is frequent and feels inevitable. It doesn't go away because replacement characters come in with a level penalty. Fuck, it doesn't go away when replacement characters come in at level 1. Believe me, 23 years of AD&D has proved that beyond reasonable doubt.

If players are confronted with genuine per-encounter risk, then the looming face of iterative probability ensures that basically none of them will keep the same character by the time they get to end of the campaign. And in situations like that, the players will treat their characters as expendable, because they are going to be expended. The alternative is even worse, which is to have the Players get really pissed when their characters do in fact inevitably die.

Coming up with some rubric by which players get to bring in a character who isn't all the way level 1 doesn't really change that. If keeping your character alive is an impractical life goal, people will either give it up voluntarily or become frustrated, which causes them to behave irrationally. Either way, you aren't going to get the behavior you want.

-Username17

How about using something like the Death Flag? That way the characters don't die when they lose, but instead something bad storywise happens when they otherwise would have died, or something similar? I think you can keep the gritty feeling that way, since even in something like Sin City characters don't die off constantly (or maybe they do and I haven't read enough), but they often continue on bruised, beaten, battered, but still rather alive and angry enough to rest for a day or two before going after the people who beat the crap out of them.

Bad idea, they'd just keep the death flag down if they thought they might die and then rambo their way through. And you still have to answer the question of "What do we do if someone with their death flag up dies for real?" with the answer "They die and stop playing for this session."

Yeah, that was why I asked about what happens when you send in the replacements.. because in a D&D esque system you become progressively more likely to die, and that's going to cause paranoia.

Grek wrote:Bad idea, they'd just keep the death flag down if they thought they might die and then rambo their way through.

Isn't losing a good enough reason for people to fight on as hard as they can? I see this as a "being left for dead" sort of mechanic--if you lose, you might be captured, or you might crawl back to your base and take a day or two to recuperate, and so on, while the world continues to revolve. It gives a way for people to lose, and for bad things story-wise to happen without death being the last word a character has.

Grek wrote:And you still have to answer the question of "What do we do if someone with their death flag up dies for real?" with the answer "They die and stop playing for this session."

Isn't this the norm for D&D until death becomes cheap anyway? So it's not any worse than D&D is now.

Ghostwheel wrote:

Grek wrote:And you still have to answer the question of "What do we do if someone with their death flag up dies for real?" with the answer "They die and stop playing for this session."

Isn't this the norm for D&D until death becomes cheap anyway? So it's not any worse than D&D is now.

In games with my group when someone dies (and resurrection isn't available yet) they go and make a new character (or they have one already made) and we integrate them into the story on the spot. The people I play with have enough system mastery that they can make a cleric with weird or obscure prestige classes in about a half hour. Also, even when death is common because my friend who runs the game sometimes likes "deadly combat", it still isn't all that common because we typically optimize. We find mostly curbstomping things and dramatically altering the gameworld's political, social, and economic structure to be a lot of fun.