slightly different way of running the story

[CardDiceian]

Further to my previous post about the combat being brutal,and player characters often being wiped out - I wonder if this idea would work.

Players previously have always been invested in their character / characters - So, if that character dies, then for them the story is over. Game ends.

How would this be? - Rather than being invested in the character, the players are more tied into the story - regardless of who lives and who dies.

EG - players start with a small band of humans on a mission to rescue a hostage from a group of orcs - Raid is a failure, humans are killed - Game over!

OR

OK, Here you go. You now control these four surviving orcs and their hostage.... What do THEY do? - head back to town with ransom demands? - Carry on down the road to next town to sell slave etc.

It becomes a continuing, fun story, with plenty of conflict, and any casualties along the way are just part of the ongoing saga.

[Shostak]

If your group likes the idea, then that is absolutely a good solution.

Your previous mention of brutal combat might have slipped past me--it's hard to read everything. So, my apologies in advance if this was already discussed:

It might seem counterintuitive, given the proportion of the rules devoted to combat, but a great way to avoid loss of PCs to violent death is to give the players non-combat options, or ways to choose fights in such a way that they lessen the danger of PC mortality. Outsmarting and outmaneuvering foes can be pretty exciting play. It also makes combat you do include even more exciting, due to its not being ubiquitous.

[rattraveller]

The game Paranoia played this theme to the max. Every character was one of six clones. When you died, sometimes before the mission even starts, a replacement which could be slightly different showed up very quickly. In order for a more story drive game to work you need a way to get replacement player characters into the game quickly. Some ideas are rescued prisoners, members of other parties who join yours, followers are promoted to full characters, a spell which brings in a replacement, discovery of a gate, former foes who join your side

[Skarg]

Or how about the mode of play that In The Labyrinth describes, where the game is not "the story" but "the campaign", and a player may have multiple characters in different places in the campaign at the same time, doing different things at the same time?

A dead character may just be a dead character, if the PC has several and can add more.

It also avoids the need for things like super-easy-healing magic or piles of mana for wizards so players don't feel deprived when their one character gets tired or hurt.

What we tended to do was a bit of a mix, with one or two PCs per player, but many allies and friends of the PCs, sometimes run partly by players, sometimes as NPC allies of the players, but always with part of play being assembling a group of characters that makes sense for a task at hand. i.e. if you're traveling someplace dangerous, you probably need to expect some people to get hurt or killed and be able to have that not be a disaster, so you want some extra people along and a physicker, a wagon people can rest on when hurt, etc.

[JohnPaulB]

Originally Posted by CardDiceian

Further to my previous post about the combat being brutal,and player characters often being wiped out - I wonder if this idea would work.

Players previously have always been invested in their character / characters - So, if that character dies, then for them the story is over. Game ends.

How would this be? - Rather than being invested in the character, the players are more tied into the story - regardless of who lives and who dies.

EG - players start with a small band of humans on a mission to rescue a hostage from a group of orcs - Raid is a failure, humans are killed - Game over!

**snip**

It becomes a continuing, fun story, with plenty of conflict, and any casualties along the way are just part of the ongoing saga.

How about that Deadly Brawl is just an intro to your next scene: Adventures in the Spirit World. Unbeknownst to the players, their characters have to die. The characters next wake up in spirit bodies in a surreal afterlife where weapons aren't made of steel, magic is warped and the PLAYERS have to figure out what is happening as their characters wander in purgatory or Dreamlands or whatever you propose.

When the character dies in the standard brawl, take the player to the side and tell him his dead character dreams he is watching the brawl from up above. The player is to observe what happens in the game for it may affect his game later. After all the PCs die have them wake near each other in loin cloth and nothing else. Run it as a Horror game or a mystery...

Unfortunately, this type of game hasn't been developed yet for TFT, so you'll have to create it.

[David Bofinger]

I remember someone, don't recall who or where, suggesting a way to play horror stories. Everyone got given characters at the start. All of them got brutally killed by unspeakable horrors in the first quarter of the first session, most without even seeing what happened. Then everyone gets new characters and are told that the big news this morning is that several people were brutally massacred last night, and the new characters decide they should investigate.

I played it once in a kung fu versus Aliens convention game, not really horror but occasional horror bits - it was Aliens rather than Alien. It seemed to work pretty well. The random generation procedure involved taking go stones from a bowl (black good, white bad) so we could put a lot more white stones in the bowl during the initial phase and the game would be rigged without it being obvious. I think of about thirty expendable characters put into the abattoir about two made it out and had to be upgraded to real character status so they could continue to be played.