One thing I’ve never quite made up my mind about in the OSR is the enthusiasm for extremely low hit points and extremely lethal gameplay. On one hand, I understand the appeal. If your fighter has 6 HP and the ogre can kill you in one hit, you have a very good reason not to fight the ogre. You scout, you plan, you set traps, you look for another way in, and you learn that “we can probably win this fight” is not necessarily the same thing as “we have to fight this fight.” That’s good stuff. It makes combat a choice instead of the assumed solution to every problem.
I’m an older gamer myself (54) and I’ve watched this hobby go through enough editions and fashions to recognize a particular kind of argument often made by gamers my age. There are plenty of us who look at newer games and complain about “power gaming,” “player aggrandizement,” or characters who are simply too capable, and sometimes that turns into sweeping complaints about younger players and what’s supposedly wrong with gaming these days. I don’t want to make that argument in reverse. I’m not interested in saying that newer games have made characters too powerful, or that players today need to be mentally tougher, or that we somehow had better games because our characters died more often. I think that kind of generational gatekeeping is mostly tedious and embarrassing. And honestly, I have a hard time believing that anyone who is genuinely happy with how their life turned out spends much time worrying about how younger people play pretend with their friends. My questions are about game design itself, not about what kind of gamer is playing it.
I think the problem is that there’s a point where character vulnerability stops producing interesting decisions and starts producing disposable characters to no dramatic purpose. A character dying can certainly be a meaningful consequence, but it can also just mean that six or ten or twenty sessions of character development gets thrown away and you roll up Blargon the Fighter II. If that’s because of foolish play, fine, but a bad die roll shouldn’t permanently end a great character, and I don’t buy the argument that it’s “realistic.” Death from cancer, car wrecks, and other rolls of the dice are common enough in real life. In a game about dragons, don't talk to me about realism. I’m not convinced that “too bad, make another character” is inherently more legitimate than what might have happened to Blargon if he had survived. There’s a difference between making players wary of consequences and making characters disposable for the sake of some nebulous old-school principle.
In fact, I think there are fates more interesting than death (and in many systems, there are detailed mechanisms for this, but these tend to be a little heavier than I like). A character who survives the dragon fight but loses an eye, their sword, half their friends, and their reputation might have a much more interesting story ahead of them than a character who simply takes 9 damage and dies. Capture, injury, mutilation, lost equipment, ruined relationships, enemies made, objectives failed--these can all make a player find a creative way around a fight. I don’t think the goal should be to make characters safe, but to make failure more interesting than “you’re dead.”
So I’m not sure I’m actually opposed to low hit points or lethal combat per se. I think what I’m questioning is the assumption that character death is automatically a “proper” consequence, or that believing so is somehow proof of a more robust, masculine approach to roleplaying. Risk is good. Fear is good. Failure is good. Consequences are very good. But death is a specific consequence, and sometimes it feels like the least interesting one. If the threat of death makes players think creatively, great. But if the primary result is simply that we keep generating new first-level fighters to show how old-school we are, I’m not sure what we’ve gained.
Yes to all of this.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that character death shouldn't be so easy. I too enjoy living consequences like a horrific scar, a mutation that is tough to hide or an insanity. As a GM, sometimes it is fun to set the odds against the characters and force them to get creative rather than fave certain death. Sometimes, in my experience, ending a campaign without losing a PC can give a bit of the old Dick Dastardly feeling of "curses, foiled again". But having them all there but in someway changed for the next campaign is a great feeling too and leafs to interesting gameplay choices. As a player, I of t en make choices when backed into a corner or if I can't see another solution that might lead to my characters death. Those choices are never made flippantly and hopefully if Blarhon does perish it is in a cinematic and epic way that will become a legend in future campaigns.
ReplyDeleteThere's an interesting set of tensions that have developed in TTRPGs generally over the course of their evolution and the reactions to those developments and the influences they've had on related genres including video games. In the beginning, the rules existed to simulate situations, in the precursors to modern games, simulating whole battlefields, where the individual could be represented in whole with just one or two numbers. With the move towards D&D and pathfinder, the rules morphed into simulating particular situations and individuals, to the point where you would need a small book to contain all the representations needed to simulate the individual character, and a significantly larger book to contain all the representations that could be relevant to simulating an overarching simulation.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere along the way, clever gamers and game designers noticed that all this representing and simulating wasn't really the point, the point was the stories that emerged out of doing that. The stories and simulations only guided and directed the stories, but sometimes, the representations and simulations got in the way of telling the stories, or at least, got in the way of telling the stories they wanted to tell. They noticed that the old, simple rules did a much better job simulating and telling the story of, say the Battle of Argonne than the crunchier, simulate-everything rules. And a big part of that is lethality. Most of those little soldiers only have 1 hit point in those "games.". From the individual character perspective, it's hard to get more rules-light (or more lethal) than Warhammer 40k, for example.
So the increasing lethality in certain games and game variants, I reckon is a response to the kinds of stories the GM and players want to tell and be told. Games where it's easy for the characters to die from a bad dice roll aren't telling stories about the characters, they're telling stories about the world and the events taking place in it. Games where it's harder for the characters to die are telling, or at least trying to tell, stories about the characters and their development. But these latter games have a different problem. Rules-light games often don't have enough "crunch" to represent and track that development, and to make it matter in terms of guiding or directing the future story. That's very freeing, but it also makes those stories and settings feel somewhat arbitrary and insubstantial unless the gaming group is very disciplined regarding their "canon" and takes good notes. Crunchier games with lots of talents and skills and levels and exp on top of equipment and attunements, etc., helps make character development tangible, but comes with the real cost of not just the administrative headache, but of players (and GMs!) mistaking the levels marked on the sheet, or the mechanical advantages granted by a talent for the actual character development itself.