Quote:
Originally Posted by RGTraynor
I dunno ... my guess is that your players can count. If you claim that it will take an hour or so out of the game and be a major hassle to create new characters, and you claim a high mortality rate, but it only actually takes a few minutes to create a new interesting character, and you don't actually have a high mortality rate?
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I think you've gotten caught by a false-to-fact presupposition. The argument seems to be "IF it took an hour or more to create a new character, THEN I would be reluctant to kill characters" [this part is a false supposition and a logical conclusion about what would follow if it were true] "BUT it takes only a few minutes, and THEREFORE I am not reluctant to kill characters." The "if it were" part is not an assertion of fact and therefore does not contradict the "but it is not" part.
However, I want to say that this isn't the only way to deal with this. My own practice is to say that if your character dies then you sit out the rest of that session, and between that and the next session we will create a new character for you. That doesn't create the same reluctance to kill characters, because it doesn't disrupt the game.
And I think I would rather do it that way, because it seems to me that a character that someone comes up with in a few minutes in the middle of a session is not likely to be a very interesting character.
In the Call of Cthulhu campaign that I've been playing in for years and years, one of the player characters engaged in a suicidal attack on the cultists earlier this year, and got shot dead. And a session or two later his player had drawn up an interesting new character: the younger sister of her previous character, a young woman from a rich family back east, who had thought that her older brother had died in the war and was having to cope with grieving for him a second time and finding out about the weird supernatural things he had been caught up in. That seemed like a perfectly workable approach to me.