Death, resurrection and consequences.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by whswhs

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.

It's also a question of victory criteria.

To the modern mind, the victory criterion is survival. But to many of the millions of NPCs in my distinctly non-modern historical fantasy and alternate history setting, Ärth, survival is extremely secondary, especially for those who don't have families or who don't have children to support.

Pagan characters tend to think of lasting fame as the victory criterion. If they can do something truly spectacular, it's worth a lot of risk. If a few hundred men can hold of many tens of thousands of enemy invaders, even if it's in a narrow mountain pass, perhaps a blockbuster movie will be made about it two and a half millenium later? And if they say some awesomely snarky one-liners, maybe some (or all!) of those will be included in the movie?

Keltic pagans are sure they'll be reincarnated upon death, with the quality and status of the next life depending on how well they lived. Being brave, courageous, gives lots of "karma". Norse pagans are equally convinced they'll end up in Valhalla if they die in battle (or in Folkvang, of which the details are hazy, but it'll probably be nifty anyway), or if they die in some circumstances that don't strictly qualify as battle maybe they've been awesome enough for Odin to choose to bend the rules a bit?

Christian and other Abrahamic characters aren't supposed to seek fame and glory. Many do, anyway. What they are supposed to be willing to do is self-sacrifice for a greater good. Not suicide-assassinations, unless it's the proto-ismaeliste (the hashasins), or if some other Moslem decides that Olav Tryggvesson's megalomania and general high competence represents too great a threat (which is a reasonable analysis - he is dangerous). But taking risks, in general, in an effort to help others. Dying as a martyr makes sense in their theology and worldview.

My point is, survival isn't a victory criterion for them either.

It'll be interesting to see if players also buy into this thing, or if they consistently end up deviating from the setting norm, as exemplified by the many NPCs (especially the important ones), in terms of the victory criteria held by the characters they choose to create.

[vicky_molokh]

A question to the GM:
How do you feel about the concept of a limited stock of permanently-burnable Fate Points, like in WH40K Rogue Trader/Dark Heresy?

I.e. that each character gets a very limited and most likely non-replenishable number of Extra Lives to account for the rare very-unlucky roll. The permanence and non-replenishability make it have a final cost, but death is still a bit further away.

In the current Exalted campaign I'm playing, we got one such second chance each (nobody spent it so far, but we've been close to it).

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Jose

My biggest problem with this is just- doesnt this take the consequences out of said players bad decisions?

No, it does not. It simply changes the set of consequences.

When I started out in RPGs, it was early D&D. Resurrection was just another service offered by the same clerics who'd patch you up if you got badly hurt. It was hella expensive and often required inconvenient travel to the relatively rare facilities where it was offered, and being dead took you out of the action for a while (think of it being in the penalty box). These were consequences: cost, inconvenience, time out of playing, and almost certainly failure (at least temporarily) at whatever you were trying to accomplish. It just largely removes the specific consequence of permanently removing a character from play.

Now, to be fair, other players will probably be miffed if you offer it to this guy and not to them, so yeah, if you do it for this guy you'll probably have to do it for others, so don't do it unless you're willing to incorporate it into the game world as a potentially repeatable thing.

[Ludek]

Well there is no point in penalising pc unless there is good story reason.
One at fault is player and he should feel some form pain but pain is not
for itself you just want to give hime reason to avoid reckles behaviour
it's consequence for player.
My idea for player consequence is taking xp from his charcter since xp
are player thing not character. How much ? I would say more than 25
since it's cost player pays at character creation in advance while he
enjoyed full xp budget as oposed to hypotetical player who bought
advantage and had blocked points for potentially long time. Charging
25 after pc death makes buying extra life at character creation waste of
xp. Personally i would double cost and just reduce xp gains in half till
debt is paid. I would not give special disadvamtages just to "balance books" but i might add them if it would fit and enchance story if player
agreed. Paying off those disadvantages would ve possible after fiting
resolution in the story.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Ludek

Well there is no point in penalising pc

This is another aspect worth considering when deciding how to handle character deaths.

TBC mentioned "time out of play", and thus presumably a loss of xp relative to the other characters. It was a fairly common practice back in the day to start the replacement characters at level 1, counting on the geometric nature of the xp chart to catch them up quickly, but always leaving them a level behind those that didn't die. Or, in the GURPS context, 25 CP short since they had to buy an Extra Life.

But was the death something that added to the game, or subtracted from it? Was it dramatic, heroic, touching? Or just unlucky, or stupid?

If the first case, why should a player be punished by having his next character docked because of his good play? Loss of anything seems to fall back into the "I won the RPG" mindset, where "death" equals "lose".

In the second case, are those poor players going to get better because of the punishment, or is it going to be something they resent and that gets in the way of attachment to or investment in the new character, maybe just throwing it away again since they don't care?

[Jose]

Originally Posted by 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.

I like this- Im considering a corporation trying to clone psionics and they need a character for this. The dead character was a psionic and they might need a control for the testing of their clones- So Im thinking of an enemy in that defect sometimes grotesque clones will show up where the players dont need them and even has psionic powers and some hints that cloning psionics will be a really nasty thing for the world.

Originally Posted by 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.

Id prefer to keep that nasty handwavium out and its not that bad- I made a mistake on that frozen stasis was a thing (We are running a TL 10 game) and the character was frozen shortly afterwards due to her corpse having a chance of being a hot potato later. Her death wasnt by laser to the brain, so her brain is intact and the stasis was really fast.

Originally Posted by Shostak

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.

Ill keep that in mind for the future and state it at the start of a campaign.

Originally Posted by whswhs

My feeling ... sleep.

Its exactly these kind of things that worry me, Im thinking it can only be done very shortly after death and only works if there is so to say a brain to recover. It would take the worst out of it.

Originally Posted by 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.

Im thinking a sibling.

Originally Posted by whswhs

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.

Well, what would be fair? Im thinking of making the player pay for extra life or getting enemies as mentioned above.

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

It's also a question of victory criteria.

To the modern mind, the victory criterion is survival. But to many of the millions of NPCs in my distinctly non-modern historical fantasy and alternate history setting, Ärth, survival is extremely secondary, especially for those who don't have families or who don't have children to support.

Pagan characters tend to think of lasting fame as the victory criterion. If they can do something truly spectacular, it's worth a lot of risk. If a few hundred men can hold of many tens of thousands of enemy invaders, even if it's in a narrow mountain pass, perhaps a blockbuster movie will be made about it two and a half millenium later? And if they say some awesomely snarky one-liners, maybe some (or all!) of those will be included in the movie?

Keltic pagans are sure they'll be reincarnated upon death, with the quality and status of the next life depending on how well they lived. Being brave, courageous, gives lots of "karma". Norse pagans are equally convinced they'll end up in Valhalla if they die in battle (or in Folkvang, of which the details are hazy, but it'll probably be nifty anyway), or if they die in some circumstances that don't strictly qualify as battle maybe they've been awesome enough for Odin to choose to bend the rules a bit?

Christian and other Abrahamic characters aren't supposed to seek fame and glory. Many do, anyway. What they are supposed to be willing to do is self-sacrifice for a greater good. Not suicide-assassinations, unless it's the proto-ismaeliste (the hashasins), or if some other Moslem decides that Olav Tryggvesson's megalomania and general high competence represents too great a threat (which is a reasonable analysis - he is dangerous). But taking risks, in general, in an effort to help others. Dying as a martyr makes sense in their theology and worldview.

My point is, survival isn't a victory criterion for them either.

It'll be interesting to see if players also buy into this thing, or if they consistently end up deviating from the setting norm, as exemplified by the many NPCs (especially the important ones), in terms of the victory criteria held by the characters they choose to create.

His character very much had that kinda outlook.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

A question to the GM:
How do you feel about the concept of a limited stock of permanently-burnable Fate Points, like in WH40K Rogue Trader/Dark Heresy?

I.e. that each character gets a very limited and most likely non-replenishable number of Extra Lives to account for the rare very-unlucky roll. The permanence and non-replenishability make it have a final cost, but death is still a bit further away.

In the current Exalted campaign I'm playing, we got one such second chance each (nobody spent it so far, but we've been close to it).

I like this idea and would actually like something like this. I take it in GURPS you could do it like a buyable success.
Or make a rescue worth some points? "You really dont want to bite it? Its 10 points and we can turn back the watch and re-do a little of this but only for survival."

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

No, it does not. It simply changes the set of consequences.

When I started out in RPGs, it was early D&D. Resurrection was just another service offered by the same clerics who'd patch you up if you got badly hurt. It was hella expensive and often required inconvenient travel to the relatively rare facilities where it was offered, and being dead took you out of the action for a while (think of it being in the penalty box). These were consequences: cost, inconvenience, time out of playing, and almost certainly failure (at least temporarily) at whatever you were trying to accomplish. It just largely removes the specific consequence of permanently removing a character from play.

Now, to be fair, other players will probably be miffed if you offer it to this guy and not to them, so yeah, if you do it for this guy you'll probably have to do it for others, so don't do it unless you're willing to incorporate it into the game world as a potentially repeatable thing.

Well mostly I want to keep it somewhat serious. Its one of the reasons I have gripes with this...

Im thinking of allowing a sibling to come into play, especially since family and their deeds were important for that character. Basically- you can do the same race and keep most of the personality but with shuffled around skills and a little revised.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Jose

I like this idea and would actually like something like this. I take it in GURPS you could do it like a buyable success.
Or make a rescue worth some points? "You really dont want to bite it? Its 10 points and we can turn back the watch and re-do a little of this but only for survival."

I'd say the price of Extra Life if you want a guaranteed survival where a person shouldn't. Anything less and suddenly Extra Life becomes a dubious investment (as do various indirect survival-ensuring traits).

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I'd say the price of Extra Life if you want a guaranteed survival where a person shouldn't. Anything less and suddenly Extra Life becomes a dubious investment (as do various indirect survival-ensuring traits).

Extra Life can easily be reduced from 25 to 10 points, with 5 or 10 points of lasting side effects and a further 10 or 5 points of strings attached.

It's just not good word building for the GM to suddenly invent something like that. It's the kind of thing that ought to have been present in the world all along, and thus influencing the decision making processes of all the billions of NPCs who live in the world, and having influenced the evolution of various forms of cultures in the setting, from the departure point that is the maturation of that kind of technology.

[Murrkon5]

If It was my world, I'd say the imperfect technology of this resurrection triggers a "bioshock" reaction in the reborn character. You might be a darned good copy, but still a copy. This cellular core disruption and DNA argle-bargle results in:

- Though mixing and matching new Disads can be colourful fun, it is more work for the GM. I'd just go with the GURPS Disad "Stress Atavism", pretty much as written. Remove the "animal" references is all. Each copy's brain and nervous system has degraded and this is the result. First copy is "Mild", the second is "Moderate" and then "Severe". If the character insists on a fourth, start tossing in things like "Epilepsy" and such.

- If that's not enough, I'd add a Physical Quirk, or remove a Physical Perk, per copy. For a little individualism.

- The (Stress Atavism) is also a social stigma. Few folks would be comfortable dealing with an individual who could go all "ape man".

That should hopefully give any character, Player or otherwise, reason to carefully consider a resurrection.

[LemmingLord]

A brother could work.