Total Party Kill

[Dracos]

https://medium.com/kickstarter/total-party-kill-3898fb82b5fb

Some pair of folks advertising their RP business...

I found it kind of interesting and self-absorbed, a view of single correct way to play, while simultaneously being disconnected from any way I've ever encountered people to play.  So wait, you carry characters for years, from convention to convention, in random scenarios with random people and random GMs, and talk down about how its not as real without just letting the dice land how they fall?  You mean just warping from setting to setting though, with different methods of ruling on things and random casts of companions is totally real roleplay?  I've heard stories but never actually encountered people that do that.  Then again, I don't hit the convention circuit.

The casual "Nobody survives my games, but I root for the players, they just are unlucky in dice" caught my eye.  Really?  All of them, in multiple games with different people?  I'm sure your math skills combined with a 'all dice land as they fall' don't contribute to casually obvious situations where even the right choices provide little chance of success.  It is all just unlucky rolling.

"Mainstream publishers weren't interested in my work, which idolizes Tomb of Horrors, so I had to go self-publishing!"  Maybe they just playtested poorly?

[Anastasia]

Pretty much. I'm fairly old school myself, but they take it farther than I personally like.

[Arakawa]

Pretty much. I'm fairly old school myself, but they take it farther than I personally like.

It's rather like those dungeon crawler games (Nethack & ilk) that rely on permadeath as a primary source of challenge, isn't it?

There are reasons why that approach to video game design hasn't taken off....

[Anastasia]

Pretty much. I'm fairly old school myself, but they take it farther than I personally like.

It's rather like those dungeon crawler games (Nethack & ilk) that rely on permadeath as a primary source of challenge, isn't it?

There are reasons why that approach to video game design hasn't taken off....

I'd say there's a niche for it. At the same time, I think video games are better suited to dealing with Nethack style lethality and character creation. Pen and paper games tend to be an investment of time and creative energy, so dying quickly and easily can present problems.

It's just a tough niche, since it turns off a lot of people fast.

[Arakawa]

I'd say there's a niche for it. At the same time, I think video games are better suited to dealing with Nethack style lethality and character creation. Pen and paper games tend to be an investment of time and creative energy, so dying quickly and easily can present problems.

It's just a tough niche, since it turns off a lot of people fast.

Yeah, Nethack doesn't have a lot of story to regret losing. If you die, the only thing you are going to miss is loot and XP.

So I guess it depends on whether the role-play is seen as primarily a story-telling medium, or just a way to string a lot of high-stakes fantasy-combat games together. I notice some of the world building fluff described on, say, the Balmuria threads is very detailed and seems tangential to the main things, which shows that attention and care is being put into the story and world in themselves, rather than treating them as a backdrop to roll dice in. Good RPGers are also expected to take good care of their characters. So, to tell a story, you may want some random input, but you also want to have some degree of scaffolding and stage-management.

Having a well-thought out character and tossing them into the garbage bin just because of an unlucky session seems bass-ackwards to me, a waste of work. It's like if Conan Doyle rolled dice before writing every Sherlock Holmes story to determine whether to kill him off or not.

_{(Actually, that's a completely weird analogy because Conan Doyle apparently had it in for Sherlock Holmes and wanted to kill him off real bad after he got done with the first X number of stories. Even so he never really managed to do it.)}

Another analogy that comes to mind is this fancy film director (Robert Bresson, I think) who deliberately made his movies nigh-inaccessible to a casual audience by refusing to hire professional actors and by instructing his amateur actors to deliver their lines in a flat monotone. Apparently professional quality acting and deliberate emotion is inauthentic or something. Likewise good stories have things like a well-defined beginning, middle and end and events are fudged to achieve this structure. So artificial, man.

* Arakawa de-rants somewhat.

[Anastasia]

I'd say there's a niche for it. At the same time, I think video games are better suited to dealing with Nethack style lethality and character creation. Pen and paper games tend to be an investment of time and creative energy, so dying quickly and easily can present problems.

It's just a tough niche, since it turns off a lot of people fast.

Yeah, Nethack doesn't have a lot of story to regret losing. If you die, the only thing you are going to miss is loot and XP.

So I guess it depends on whether the role-play is seen as primarily a story-telling medium, or just a way to string a lot of high-stakes fantasy-combat games together. I notice some of the world building fluff described on, say, the Balmuria threads is very detailed and seems tangential to the main things, which shows that attention and care is being put into the story and world in themselves, rather than treating them as a backdrop to roll dice in. Good RPGers are also expected to take good care of their characters. So, to tell a story, you may want some random input, but you also want to have some degree of scaffolding and stage-management.

Having a well-thought out character and tossing them into the garbage bin just because of an unlucky session seems bass-ackwards to me, a waste of work. It's like if Conan Doyle rolled dice before writing every Sherlock Holmes story to determine whether to kill him off or not.

This is all true, but at the same time I don't entirely agree. My take on danger and death in is this: combat and conflict has to have a meaningful risk to have tension. If there's no penalty for losing, the main source of dramatic tension is gone. That risk of losing a character needs to be there. No one wants to lose characters, but at the same time, that threat needs to be believable and fulfilled should the worst happen. After all, if you take the risk and succeed, victory is that much sweeter. A triumph over a real danger is more rewarding than a triumph that had nothing at stake.

It's sort of walking a tightrope to deliver the proper drama and investment while trying not to lose everything. It's one of the big appeals of pen and paper gaming to me (along with going on about tangential setting details and world building as you mentioned). When done properly, you get great stories that are rewarding to the players and DM alike. On the other hand, when it goes badly? Your story can end up like a jar of tomato sauce run over by a car: nothing but a big, ugly mess.

So to answer your original question, I'd say it's both about high stakes battles and telling a story. I don't feel one is exclusionary to the other. Pen and paper gaming works best when they're combined into one whole, as they both offer benefits to a game. You want that danger there, but you don't want it to turn into a roguelike where PCs die like mayflies.

(Side note: Nice to hear you read some of the Balmuria stuff. Thanks, I put effort into that stuff.)

[Arakawa]

This is all true, but at the same time I don't entirely agree. My take on danger and death in is this: combat and conflict has to have a meaningful risk to have tension. If there's no penalty for losing, the main source of dramatic tension is gone. That risk of losing a character needs to be there. No one wants to lose characters, but at the same time, that threat needs to be believable and fulfilled should the worst happen. After all, if you take the risk and succeed, victory is that much sweeter. A triumph over a real danger is more rewarding than a triumph that had nothing at stake.

It's sort of walking a tightrope to deliver the proper drama and investment while trying not to lose everything.

I guess. It's interesting that conventional stories try to deliver a sense of tension without having all that much possibility of risk due to the outcome being predetermined.

What I notice with a game is that there is a really significant difference between a character dying because the Grand Story-Significant Plan to Infiltrate Thing is going realistically awry, versus dying randomly due to running into some random spider that's X levels beyond what you can deal with (typical Nethack death; or rather, typical Nethack death is a cascade of tough luck, like stepping on a landmine and then spider). Thus it seems like RPG risk would tend to be scaled to how far along / significant the conflict is.

[Anastasia]

I guess. It's interesting that conventional stories try to deliver a sense of tension without having all that much possibility of risk due to the outcome being predetermined.

What I notice with a game is that there is a really significant difference between a character dying because the Grand Story-Significant Plan to Infiltrate Thing is going realistically awry, versus dying randomly due to running into some random spider that's X levels beyond what you can deal with (typical Nethack death; or rather, typical Nethack death is a cascade of tough luck, like stepping on a landmine and then spider). Thus it seems like RPG risk would tend to be scaled to how far along / significant the conflict is.

Pretty much. It's generally a decent idea not to make random/minor encounters as deadly or deadlier than serious fights. Not all the time, some randomness can be alright and all, but dying to a random monster does suck.

Conventional stories also have the advantage that while the author knows what will happen, the readers don't.  The author can always throw a curveball, after all. A good story can establish tension like that and questions on how things are going to resolve.