Is it just me, or are more players today less tolerant of any form of elimination? I do not remember anyone in the past complaining in the context of "I am not playing so I do not like this."Sometimes my character dies. Sometimes my last unit gets killed. And when this happens I often am not the last one to lose. The game continues without me, and I never had a problem with that. Am I weird for that? What do the rest of you think about games in which players can be eliminated? How do you deal with it? Have any of you ever found ways to accommodate players who got eliminated?
>>94425154You are experiencing OC play culture at it's finest.https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html
>>94425154Player elimination is extremely poor design, yeah. Good games have long since moved past this.
>>94425159buy an ad.
>>94425154Peoples' real lives now are shittier than they've been any other time in the last half century, can't say I blame them for not wanting to be shit on in the games they're trying to play for fun.
>>94425171Why is it poor design? According to who? How are you supposed to win a miniatures game or threaten the players in a TTRPG without elimination?
>>94425185>threaten the playersnot allowed when playing fantasy superheros
>>94425179How is running of HP in a TTRPG the same as getting shit on in life? (For example.)
>>94425185>>94425188I threaten my players by flashing my gun every time they crit.I don't do miniatures games though. The metagame turned into the OK corral.
>>94425185>How are you supposed to win a miniatures game or threaten the players in a TTRPG without elimination?Do you really have so little imagination that you can neither think of any possibilities, nor even conceive of other kinds of game?
>>94425185When you show up to play a game, would you rather play that game, or not play it?
>>94425154Those are baby mode GMsI have experienced the opposite from players actually. They make a technicolor tiefling and drop out 2 sessions in or ask to make another character in the best case.
>>94425236>Do you really have so little imagination that you can neither think of any possibilities, nor even conceive of other kinds of game?Yes, now what else are you supposed to do.
>>94425154Have you tried not playing D&D? 5e/2024e is kind of a magnet for the hobby's retards.
>>94425159>tho'stopped reading there
>>94425404You're supposed to not be completely retarded. I can't help you with that.
>>94425185Players are not characters.You are talking about characters, not the players.
>>94425236I can think of plenty of board games, card games, etc which do not involve elimination and they are fine games but they are not RPGs nor are they miniatures games where elimination appears to be categorical. When there is more than one player in a miniatures game, how is the game won without eliminating players besides some gimmick objective which is not the core game? Show me an RPG in which death, knockout, or otherwise incapacitating a character is not on the table, even if it's not permanent? In particular, an RPG with an otherwise typical genre or premise (e.g. dungeon crawling, action-adventure, sci-fi) instead of something so idiosyncratic that its mechanics only work for its specific premise.
>>94425453They are not characters in a miniatures game. That is the foundational difference between them and RPGs. A player whose army is out of units in a miniatures game is eliminated.
>>94425619Goal post shifting. We're specifically talking about player elimination via death, not temporary incapacitation.
>>94425185Imagine you are playing a game of Risk, you and 3 friends to a total of 4 players. The game takes 3 hours to finish. The first player is eliminated before he can get a proper foothold just 20 minutes into the game. The second player to lose is an hour into the game. The last 2 players in the game then spend the next 2 hours slugging it out until RNG rewards one of them enough to snowball into a win. The flaws in this model are obvious. The game goes on for way, way too long and leaves the eliminated players in an awkward lurch. If you are actually playing with friends, and not some randos at an autistic board game night at a game shop, your friends sitting around twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do is a bad game night. This is true whether the game is Risk or EDH or any other game with hard elimination. Once you are out, you are basically just eating snacks and browsing your phone until the game ends.Now, consider instead a game like Carcassone or Lost Ruins of Arnak Call to Adventure or Eclipse. Players can get ahead or fall behind, but victory and loss is determined once the end state is reached and there is always a chance (however slim) of a comeback until the final bell is rung. It means that even a losing player still gets to play just as long as the others.And those are competitive games. Collaborate Games (Arkham Horror, etc) where all of the players are working together against the game share victory and defeat. Hard Elimination as a game state makes for a worse social experience for any group of friends participating in it than games that handle victory and loss in other ways.
>>94425154Character elimination as a threat is much more interesting than character elimination as a consequence. You want players to FEEL like it can happen, but you want to make it actually happening as rare as possible because the consequences of doing so are pretty much never worth it. All of that time and effort invested in the character, both for the player and the GM, vanishes in an instant and all tension is lost as a result. The new character will always be inferior in the game, the 'new guy' that doesn't fit into the established party dynamic for RP and mechanically doesn't approach threats with the same gravity as the other PCs because as a fresh face there is less concern if he dies so he has nothing to lose. You spend the rest of the game as the disposable one so that the longer lived characters can stick around.Character death needs to be handled with care and intent. It should never happen just because of a bad dice roll, thats caveman thinking from the dawn of the hobby. We've evolved beyond that. A bad dice roll isn't interesting, and its the most surface level impact, only wowing the sort of player that would be equally entertained by jangling car keys. Losing a character due to reasons beyond your control is novel precisely once, and never again. And using character death punitively, to punish players for actions that the GM disapproves of, is universally shit. PC death should only happen as a direct result of player choice. Sometimes that choice was made with foreknowledge: the heroic sacrifice to save the rest of the group, the willing suicide run to take down the bad guy, the fatal flaw that the player knows is a bad idea but also feels that it fits what their character would do. Sometimes the choice is one of sheer stupidity: the player decides to jump straight into the volcano because they have a 'brilliant plan' that they think will save them (it does not). Sometimes you play stupid games and win stupid prizes.
>>94425154I mean, I don't know what the problem is with the character dying, yes, the character is dead, but you can use it in other campaigns as if nothing had happened.It's not like anyone cares if your character died in another unrelated campaign, it's the multiverse after all.
>>94425154People want to tell whole arc with their characters and end it on their own terms. For games with such players (GM included), it's preferable to skirt away from killing their characters.
>>94425154The time character creation takes on average has only grown longer over the years, with games placing less and less emphasis on a resource-management meatgrinder.More often than not, you just need to play games that actually bill themselves as a brutal meatgrinder, and then make sure you set up the game in a way where introducing backup characters is very straightforward.
>>94425154It depends a lot on the system and campaign. If there's lots of social and intrigue stuff going on and you're three years deep into a game, then getting crit in the back of the head and dying with no save just feels like ass. Your new guy is starting way behind the curve, has to get to know everyone, doesn't have the same rapport, doesn't necessarily fit into the existing conflict neatly, etc. People want to play their story out and if they have to just drop loose ends that they were interested in because they bought it in a random encounter that just kinda sucks. Also some games make generating a new character a huge chore. Pathfinder 2e is especially bad about this. >class feats>general feats>ancestry feats>skill feats>depending on what you even want to do your choices can be completely auto-pilotted or you wind up spending two hours on each list picking your least-shit options>you might stumble onto a cool build idea but it turns out the two mandatory feats you need are mutually exclusive with each other and you would brick both aspects of the buildI have a backup character I would be really interested in playing now, but I spent a whole week reading and tweaking and revamping him before I finally landed on something that I wanted to play. If my current character bit it before I had this idea I probably would have just walked out of the game because fuck going through PF2e character creation without a plan. Even when you know what you're looking for it's complete ass. And the later you get into a game the more garbage you have to sift through. I basically just gave up on the Skill feats for him; I'll figure them out if my current dude actually dies.
>>94425154honestly, I don't mind my own characters dying, but I don't want other people's characters to die because they barely learn how to use one character, I don't want to wait for them to build another one and (sort of) learn how to use them.Even if they make a clone of the previous one, I just know they'd end up fucking it up, forgetting they don't have certain skills anymore, that their character wouldn't know certain things, etc
>>94426258>Character death needs to be handled with care and intent. It should never happen just because of a bad dice roll, thats caveman thinking from the dawn of the hobby. We've evolved beyond that.Holy shit I never knew your opinion was fact and mine was because I was literally a subhuman who lives in caves and eats raw meat. You should have said earlier I wouldn't have spent all this time and effort coming up with my own ideas.You're up your own ass and don't interact with people enough. I'm in a table of 5 and when someone else was GM'ing and wanted to spare the party's life in a TPK situation everyone protested and refused to play any further. I'd love to say it was me who spearheaded that initiative but it wasn't. We ended up making new characters to continue the campaign once the GM was reassured that death was necessary for the game to be fun.
>>94426752And then the whole table clapped. That player's name? Albert Einstein.
>>94426020Read the OP again.
>>94426199So how can that be rectified in something like an RPG?A miniatures game or EDH can rectify that by playing 1v1. Asking to never get into combat in an RPG sounds absurd though.
>>94425378Id rather play it, which gives elimination games actual stakes. It makes makes me care about my character’s actions and take their limitations seriously, and thus gives the game more immersion value.
>>94425159What is this stupid language
>>94426199Nah. I've played both and if given a choice, I'd rather get eliminated 1,5 hours into a 4-hour game then go do something else rather than suffer an insurmountable points loss that leaves me in a dead man walking state (zero chance of victory/top half) but still needs me to do the motions. Especially since you still need to "play to win" or people will start screeching about muh kingmaking.
>>94425159>Gen X blog likely run by someone my father's ageSovl... I love these ramblings of middle-aged men type blogs.
>>94427216Same, they remind me of when my Dad was still alive. I basically bookmark every one of these I find.
>>94425154TTRPG goals shifted from being a game to play that story emerges from through chance to a story telling activity with the pretense of chance. Different crowds. Turns out there's more sales to be had pandering to pampered retards who can't stand the idea of losing or waiting and listening to other people, even their friends. This combines with increasingly bloated and bad game design that takes longer to do anything, so the waiting becomes more than 5-10 minutes. Its not weird to not want anything to do with that sort of shit. There are entire sections of ttrpg gaming like OSR that are geared towards a more direct player character threat game. They're not as popular but that's okay. Their skin was very hip for a while and marketing has been wearing it thin enough the bandwaggoners will leave in the next few years.
>>94425154You can either have a high lethality war game (or -like/lite) or players who are invested in and care about their character, but not both.Also nobody enjoys just sitting on the sidelines for hours while everyone else is having fun, especially if its a group of friends where the point is to have fun together.
>>94429094I think you're mixing up the cause and the symptom. WotC realized that they could make bank by printing splatbooks full of PC options of feats, spells, variant classes, etc. All of that adds together to make character creation more complex, and so naturally drives people away from playing more lethal games.The bloated game design is what has lead to modern games often being group storytelling, because trying to play it as a deadly dungeon crawl is just terrible. But people associate that as high lethality itself being bad, rather than the game being bad for high lethality.
>>94425200Why are your players threatened by you showing your gun your little winkle?
>>94429132>You can either have a high lethality war game (or -like/lite) or players who are invested in and care about their character, but not both.This. I tried OSR a couple of times. I tried with two mindsets.>Meatgrinder mindset. Stop caring about characters, throw shit against the wall until you win.I lost 3 characters in one session. I stopped caring about them immediately i just named them 1,2,3 and 4 in different languages>Attempt to care about my charactersAs soon as one character hit level 2 or 3, becoming a sort of leader, I became a complete coward because I rolled low on hit points. It was fun to come up with novel solutions, but it was stressful every session getting as much XP as I had.
>>94426199>Imagine you are playing a game of RiskI FUCKING HATE RISK
