Death, resurrection and consequences.

[Jose]

Running my ultra tech, mostly hard sci-fi campaign one of my players made a bad call- He made his character do an all-out attack(GURPS, you lose all defenses for a better attack.) while attacking combat robots with lasers.
Said character had destructive laser surgery to the face and died from it.
Zap headshot.

Now the player really liked this character and feels that a lot of potential has been lost- I see the same.
Im considering resurrecting the character, of course with the help of a shady medical corporation and nanites. Which will result in perhaps some quite nasty quests to challenge the players.

My biggest problem with this is just- doesnt this take the consequences out of said players bad decisions? And if I wave this around and the other players die? Its going to be resurrection nanite hell?!

Do you guys think it would be fair to do such a thing and make it a deal with the devil sort of thing?

[Michael Cule]

Out of game, offer the player the choice:

"He can come back but there will be... costs."

Don't specify the costs. Imply you are doing him a big, big favour.

Then burden the re-born PC with let us say 25 points of secret disadvantages. (That's the cost of an Extra Life so that seems fair.) If you are giving him an experimental version of Unkillable then charge for that. ("There are problems with the regeneration but I'm sure we'll fix that in version 2.0.")

Suddenly having blackouts in which the Mysterious Benefactor takes the character over to do shady deeds is a possibility. As is discovering that you are only one of a set of copies made of the dead character and some of the others are your Evil Twins.

[simply Nathan]

Personally I don't believe any sort of resurrection at all is suitable to a hard SciFi game or story except with characters who are AIs. You might be able to clone a body, but memories and personalities? Not so much, I think.

[Shostak]

Originally Posted by Jose

My biggest problem with this is just- doesnt this take the consequences out of said players bad decisions? And if I wave this around and the other players die? Its going to be resurrection nanite hell?!

Do you guys think it would be fair to do such a thing and make it a deal with the devil sort of thing?

It would take a lot of the consequences away, yes. That doesn't mean that it is a bad idea to discuss this problem with the players, though. Personally, I think that mortality is an important issue not to be diminished. When Spock died in The Wrath of Khan, it was great storytelling. When he came back in the next movie, it was lame. At the same time, though, too much mortality can really take the fun out of things.

Sorry, that might not be very much help. It is probably best to be very clear about mortality at the outset of a campaign, just so that the players know exactly what to expect and what will be expected of them if their characters die.

[whswhs]

My feeling is that if you allow this to happen once, it will happen over and over again, and change the quality of the game. I've had that happen in a campaign I was running, though not with resurrection; what I inadvertently allowed the PCs to have was effectively teleportation gates.

Whether you want to change the quality of the game is of course your call.

On one hand, if you say no, and the player objects, point out that if you say yes, then they are accepting a world where they can never get rid of any enemy permanently, not even by pureeing their corpse.

On the other hand, if you want to say yes, I suggest having the rationale that with the brain destroyed, the memories are lost too. They can have a character with similar basic traits, but they only remember up to a while ago—perhaps even before they met the other PCs, so they have to be reintroduced. And they have to roll in some way to see if they remember various of their skills. Effectively it's a sort of amnesia going back a few months or years, to whenever they were backed up. Though again, they won't be the only people in their world who've done this, and a really paranoid foe may well back up ever night before going to sleep.

[Johan Larson]

What was your existing policy on character death? Different groups handle it differently. Some want heroic adventure even if it means the GM has to pull strings make sure bad things don't happen to the players. Others want it gritty, with death lurking behind every door. Did you discuss expectations with the players before you started the game?

[RogerBW]

In a Reign of Steel game I was running, a player character took on a Tarantula with pistols. This didn't end well for him.

But the Tarantula was intrigued, and eventually he ended up returning to the party… in a freshly-built RAU-05, with a number of command overrides. Unfortunately the supervisory processor wasn't particularly smart, and it couldn't call home for help without giving him away… but it could tweak his perceptions.

What this meant in practice was that he got one last adventure with that character, who was then permanently out of play.

[LemmingLord]

Id say no.. The original character is dead... But there is nothing to say he can't play a new character with the same character sheet and a different name. Think Han Solo and Lando Calrissian. Maybe mix up some quirks.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Jose

Running my ultra tech, mostly hard sci-fi campaign one of my players made a bad call- He made his character do an all-out attack(GURPS, you lose all defenses for a better attack.) while attacking combat robots with lasers.
Said character had destructive laser surgery to the face and died from it.
Zap headshot.

Now the player really liked this character and feels that a lot of potential has been lost- I see the same.
Im considering resurrecting the character, of course with the help of a shady medical corporation and nanites. Which will result in perhaps some quite nasty quests to challenge the players.

My biggest problem with this is just- doesnt this take the consequences out of said players bad decisions? And if I wave this around and the other players die? Its going to be resurrection nanite hell?!

Do you guys think it would be fair to do such a thing and make it a deal with the devil sort of thing?

Fair is probably not the issue, so much as the effect on your game and game-world. Once you undo death once, you've set a double precedent. You've made your world a place where death is not necessarily permanent, which is going to have implications.

In the real world, you've also set the precedent that you as GM will at least potentially let a player kill off his character, and then get that character back. That too will have implications. Even if you declare it a one-off, the precedent has still been set.

About the only way I know about to get around that problem is to impose sufficient costs, for both character and player that it sort of cancels out the benefit of regaining the character...which kind of defeats the purpose anyway.

For ex, if the restored character permanently loses 50% from all attributes, and is forced to play that way (all skills reduced, etc.), that puts a real cost on it, but it also makes the character different.

Now the player really liked this character and feels that a lot of potential has been lost- I see the same.

That's what makes death what it is, though. Something valued and valuable has been lost. Otherwise, what's the big deal about death? Also, if he got away with it once, what's to keep him from all-out-attacking another laser-armed robot? After all, there's nothing to be lost by trying...

I'm not saying you should or shouldn't. Just make sure you've thought it through first.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

That's what makes death what it is, though. Something valued and valuable has been lost. Otherwise, what's the big deal about death? Also, if he got away with it once, what's to keep him from all-out-attacking another laser-armed robot? After all, there's nothing to be lost by trying.

It's a classic moral hazard problem.

Two businessmen meet in an expensive hotel. After they greet each other, one asks, "So, Fred, what brings you here?"

"Well, you know, my factory burned down. The insurance paid five million, and I'm taking a couple weeks off before I rebuild. How about you, Mike?"

"That's quite a coincidence. My plant got wiped out in a flood. I got twenty million, and I'm taking a couple weeks off myself."

Fred leans close and asks, in a low voice, "So—how do you start a flood?"

If you issue theft insurance, and you pay back 100% of the loss, with minimal inconvenience, you'll find that the insurees tend to skimp on antitheft measures, especially those that are costly or inconvenient. No insuree loses much from a theft after the policy pays up; but the amount of theft goes up steadily, followed by the amount you have to pay out and the rates you have to charge. On the other hand, if you have a moderately large deductible, and investigate every theft carefully and a little inconveniently, insurees will complain, but they'll make an effort to keep theft down.

Making high-risk behavior have consequences in your game will make your players complain. But they'll also play their characters less recklessly. The very fact of the complaints is evidence that you're giving them an incentive to do so.

Of course, you have to ask yourself—do you want prudent, tactical play, or do you want wild and crazy? If you want the players to take chances and use high-risk strategies, then reducing the consequences of high-risk behavior is a rational strategy.