Quote:
Originally Posted by Opellulo
Why a GM chose to include a scenario where certain death (of a PC or a NPC) is necessary? Maybe is a plot device (damn you Salazar, I will have my revenge!) maybe is a teaching moment (never wake up a sleeping dragon!) maybe is the climax of a story (where all bets and brakes are off).
|
Or maybe it's just something that arose organically during play. Perhaps the PC's are on a quest to rescue villagers from the orcs who abducted them. During the battle that follows their botched attempt to sneak in and sneak out with the villagers, one of the orcs, realizing he's no match for adventurers of this caliber and wanting to survive, opts to take one of the villagers hostage, with a knife to her neck. Or maybe the PC's uncover a mole in their organization, and the mole takes one of their coworkers hostage, a gun to the man's temple. Or a member of the party gets captured and the others go into hiding - so the Big Bad parades the bound PC out, forces him to his knees, has a guard raise a crossbow to aim at the PC's throat, and demands the others show themselves or he'll order his man to fire.
Sure, in each of those cases, the GM is making a decision to have the NPC behave in this manner, but it's not as part of some railroad plot - it's simply a case of "What would this character do in this situation?"
And, of course, the opposite situations could occur - a
PC (even a heroic one) might take an enemy hostage to escape a bad situation, force enemies out of hiding, etc. If the game system lacks any means by which the PC could make good on his threat, the player may opt not to even try, reducing his options ("Hmmm... Realistically, I could grab the Black Prince and put a dagger to his throat, and his father should call off his guards and let me go free. But seeing as the Prince is at least a 10th level fighter and I only have a 1d4/x2 dagger, it would take me something like a dozen critical hits to even get him to 0 HP, so that's not going to work. Guess I'll just run for it?"), and I prefer characters to have a lot of options on how to deal with something whenever possible.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Opellulo
I personally don't like the genocide level of killing there is classic fantasy roleplay games: I like instead to build my scenarios around moral and ethical challenges, and then let the players chose their own path around (or through) it. In my games the fights are quite scarce (no more than one or two for session) and they are almost always because of PC choices: so I design them to be challenging, dangerous and interesting in an effort to make them memorable.
|
Yeah, a lot of fantasy gaming involves killing ridiculous numbers of enemies (in no small part because this is how you advance via experience points). A lot of players really enjoy combat, however, so when playing with those large body counts are nearly inevitable (unless using rules that make death unlikely, and having plots/settings/tropes that discourage killing your foes - or at least
encourage keeping them alive).