No PC death marginalizes non-fighters?

[RyanW]

Archers and "striker" mages deal damage slower but safer. Except they aren't really safer if the players realize their characters are immune from bad decisions due to a GM aversion to killing/crippling their characters. Healers become largely useless when no meaningful damage occurs to the PCs. The only really useful characters in combat become high DPS fighters and mages who buff those fighters' DPS. Not the sort of game I want to play in... and I like playing fighters.

Sorry if that seems rantish. Something came up that made me start thinking about this, and it just now struck me what was needling me about it.

Anyone else ever notice a similar situation, or feel like I'm way off base?

[vicky_molokh]

I thought it would be the other way around:
If losing a fight is never a serious threat (assuming non-death consequences aren't as bad as dying), then noncombatants such as mages or diplomats tend to be more important.

[mlangsdorf]

I have a fairly decent aversion to killing PCs in my game, but I'm totally willing to hurt them, knock them unconscious, take their stuff, and/or make them run from clearly deadly foes. So healers are useful because they keep the other PCs in the fight and let them continuing adventuring after suffering severe wounds.

As far as archers go, ranged combat is necessary to deal with highly mobile foes who strike and retreat and to counter enemy archers. It doesn't matter if the archer isn't as deadly second per second if he's the only one who can engage the flying enemy archer or the enemy crossbowmen in a tower.

So I'd say you're way off base.

[GodBeastX]

Death shouldn't be the only determinate of success. Characters can become wholly unplayable because of poor decisions... I sense an article I could write on this subject.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Anyone else ever notice a similar situation, or feel like I'm way off base?

No PC death doesn't mean that PCs don't get incapacitated or lose fights, it just means they don't die. If you were to just rule "PCs who fail a death check are rendered immediately unconscious for an hour", it wouldn't affect the outcome of most combats at all, and defensive or support styles have their normal value.

If the only way the GM can come up with to not have PCs die is to not have them take damage, combats in general will be completely meaningless.

[GodBeastX]

Here you go, an article inspired by this thread: Death - How to Deal With Immortal PCs

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I thought it would be the other way around:
If losing a fight is never a serious threat (assuming non-death consequences aren't as bad as dying), then noncombatants such as mages or diplomats tend to be more important.

I think it's a question of blatant fudgery vs subtle fudgery. If some of the player characters are skilled melee combatants, then the GM can keep everyone alive via subtle fudgery, which may well be tolerated by all the players, unlike the blatant fudgery needed to keep alive a party of non-combatants through several intense combat scenarios.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Archers and "striker" mages deal damage slower but safer. Except they aren't really safer if the players realize their characters are immune from bad decisions due to a GM aversion to killing/crippling their characters. Healers become largely useless when no meaningful damage occurs to the PCs.

It is of course wrong to think that the only meaningful damage is death or permanent crippling. The primary advantage of ranged attack ability is not so much safety (since archers and spell casters tend to have poor defenses) as it is to pick your targets with a much greater degree of freedom rather than being stuck with the opposing side's other frontline fighters.

[Randover]

I would like to support RyanW point of view. Of course I don't play typical DF, my campaigns are usualy heavily story oriented. And players know a meta-game that if I kill there character a lot of story dies with the character.

Story aside lets talk about FUN FACTOR. Everybody enjoys winning. And it takes very special circumstances when we can enjoy losing. Sometimes I was in situation when my players were simply lame...I had my game well prepared but they simply pulled the unfair trick of not comming ready for the game. And then you can guess what happened the game sucked.
I like to show or even teach my players what I want from them. (I am a teachers asistent for kids with learning issues.) But simply sometimes we don't connect well or at all. It is especialy hard in these clashes to find solutions and I had to drop few campaigns because my players and I didn't share the same view.
Yes I think that most of time you come to an agreement or slightly ajust the game. But sometime GM wants to play something completly different that the players want. And it is pretty hard to get over it.
Also I have to admit that I am quite pigheaded about certain details that I enjoy. And I feel like that players should be friends and at least realy try to understant something new.

[Ulzgoroth]

It sounds like the implied situation is that the party gets into decisive battles where the melee fighters get to get stuck in and demonstrate their very superior ability to rapidly chop through enemies compared to projectile-users or mages. And you're seeing the increased likelyhood of character death from being in close contact with the enemy as a cost due for that.

Um.

I'm not a fan of fudging characters out of death. But I really don't think 'your PC is more likely to die than others' is a particularly desirable balancing factor between character concepts.

Archers, as noted, are useful not because they're less likely to be torn apart, but because they can reach targets that other people can't for a wide variety of reasons. Also, unless they're very cinematic DF Heroic Archer Scout types they should usually resort to melee weapons in melee situations if missile fire isn't more valuable. GURPS isn't a game where archer and melee fighter are conflicting concepts.

Spellcasters, likewise, do all kinds of things. If 'I'm behind the lines, so I can run away' is anywhere near the top of your reasons to play a magic user, I definitely wouldn't want to work with that magic user! (Usually GURPS magical types are going to be sub-par in melee, though.)


It also sounds like there's some kind of thing with 'not killing PCs' being overextended into making 'fights' merely exercises in killing enemies that are prevented from actually achieving anything, let alone winning. Which sounds terrible entirely aside from the way it would devalue healing abilities.