Handling PC Death in Simulationist Combat
Roadkill:
Adam, you say you had hard-core players who are regular with you and have played the game before?
you seem to imply that they should just accept this kind-of-thing to happen?
Its a simulationist game, that means you've created it with decent realistic rules? its been play-tested enough that you know that sniper is not overpowered?
The player knows the rules well? he understood the risk?
Did you ask them if they die do they want you to be lenient or strict? Did you put guidelines for it in the rules?
If player death does not occur often because the players are good then when it does happen, because of a bad decision on the players part, a learning experience, and probably memorable.
There are 3 things you can do with this
1)You shouldn't alter the rules and give him a chance to be revived, the rules are the rules, it makes the game more tense & realistic & fun. I think there is nothing wrong with this, I think if you hold to this 100% consistently, as long as you warn them, players will enjoy/immerse in your game more.
2)Change the rules, make it so that dead anything, players & enemies, can be revived however many seconds, minutes, hours, after death. If in this setting players can do unreal things we can't do in the reality then reviving after death doesn't go against design. If this is what your players want, and you think it is a good idea then why not?
3)Giving leeway this once... I think this is the worst option, in the future what do you do? you'll be in a obvious predicament and accused of all kinds of things if you are not 100% consistent.
You could take Dindenvers approach and be a care-bear, nothing wrong with that as long as you don't change mind in the future, each to their own. I cant stand that approach personally though, but he raised a good point on how much will this effect the enjoyment of the player?
Will the player miss-out on significant game-time?
Does the game have rules for what players should do after death?
Players after death shouldn't have to start a totally fresh/underpowered character, have you got a system where the player can level up a new character to just a bit behind the old one? with the mechanisms that lower power characters can catch up with higher level ones because you get more experience if you defeat something higher than your level?
With rules that soften the blow of a character death this much, it become less about mourning the loss of the old character and more about getting to play a brand spanking new one!
What did that player do for the rest of that game?
Having a back-up characters ready to play for that dead guys (you know meet up with the solo guy who has the same objectives as you), doesn't really bother players in that it makes the story unrealistic if it only happens once, they all understand, you just have to be prepared with at least a few of these ready made characters. (which a player can change after the session).
But when I saw "Handling PC Death in Simulationist Combat" that means death happens and it shouldn't be argued with, if death is always at least a bit dramatic then its a merit to your system.
First Oni:
I've known my share of "Killer DMs" that don't bat an eye at killing a player's character. They're the kind of DM that has their players make one or two extra characters as back up. Needless to say, i don't play in these types of games.
Roleplaying is about the player's characters. It is not about the DM's inflated ego, the NPCs and how cool they are, or anything else. The story, plot, and world shoudl center around the players and what they do. That said, I personally put a LOT of work into each and every character i make. If one of my characters dies during a game, it shouldn't be because of something small. It should be cataclysmic, earth-shattering, and add something to the game. Not to say player characters should be bulletproof and never suffer, mind you. But suffering and dead are two different things.
In my games, if i see that a player is making a mistake that could get them killed i will usualy give some sort of friendly reminder. "Hey.... you sure you wanna do that?" is usually good enough to at least have the player rethink their action and make slight modifications. If they constantly ignore warnings, then they'll die due to their own stupidity, regardless of my efforts to keep them in the game.
But that's just the way i do it. Not everyone is the same.
I honestly think that the way you handled this situation in-game was the right thing to do. You need to bend the rules if its in the best interest of the game itself. If your players felt that strongly about it, then its probably because they feel the same way i do... the death of a character should mean something.
-Oni
Adam Riemenschneider:
Hello all.
First, I just want to apologize for taking a little long to get back to the thread (last few days have been busy, work wise).
Second, thank you for the responses. I'm not sure what kind of response I am looking for on this; I'm not sure if I want a question answered. I guess I just wanted to gauge responses. Thank you for giving me the chance to do that.
I know line-by-line responses are discouraged, so I'm not going to try to do that.
In general, though, here was the fallout of the session:
The event took place at the end of the night. I essentially try to schedule cliffhangers and "big scenes" that way, if only to give myself a week to deal with the heavier outcomes. The player was given a new character to play for the following week, who was one of the big contacts at the place they were going to. This was more of a plot convenience than a player chosen character, but we as a group have used this sort of a solution before. The player didn't miss too much of play time.
One point raised that I want to address is the idea that I was being sneaky with having the 1st sniper fall down. Within the game mechanics (and the players know all about this), there is a mechanic check for Stun/KO whenever a character is wounded. It's perfectly normal for people to fall down when they get shot, even if they're still alive. Also, there are courage checks one has to make in combat. The result of these two things is that enemy NPCs do all sorts of things in Factions that they tend *not* to do in other games - things like running away, hiding behind cover when it is tactically in their best interest to move or fire, falling down for a few rounds as they try to figure out if they're ok, and the like. Combats are "messy" in this way, and it is expected by the players.
The group wasn't turned on its collective head because of the way the enemy acted. The group reacted because they couldn't do anything about the fact that the character was *instantly killed*, and they didn't have a chance to help him.
Oh, I'm going to re-read the Right to Dream tonight, and will get back to you, Ron, in a day or two on the point you raised.
I'm pretty certain that, overall, the players are aware that they're in a gritty game. I realize now that I have to make an effort to reestablish this from time to time, if only in gentle reminders.
Here's a thing: the *reason* I have combat written in a realistic way is to essentially make combat fit *horror*, instead of action. Consider Saving Private Ryan, vs. something like Spider Man. When the fighting starts in Spider Man, I expect to see some awesome special effects and/or stunts. In Saving Private Ryan, I'm filled with dread and revulsion, and anger, too, at the "bad guys" who are shredding the characters I sympathize with. And when someone does something brave in Factions (making their Courage saves all the way), it means more in the story... if only because the *player* knows how fragile the character is.
Still, I don't want to derail my own thread.
I was surprised at the player reaction (desire to bend the rules), and that I went with them in the bending, even against the backdrop of "this is a heavy game world, folks."
One post, I think by Roadkill, brought up something I'd like to respond to, because it made me realize something that I've been doing since this happened. He mentions one solution being to change the rules to make reversal of death possible.
And it makes me realize that, although resurrection in this game world *is* meant to be possible, I hadn't addressed it in a direct way in any rule book or supplement. The world, even though it is gritty and modern, is still a fantasy. There are near-gods in this world that could raise the dead character, and there are (theoretically) rituals that could pull it off. Think Sandman level of near-gods, or rituals that take a month to pull off, even with half a dozen or more experts in the field (and failure means they could all die). These kinds of things are pretty damn inaccessible for your run-of-the-mill PC, but are dangled out there.
Of course, the player characters would want to try to do what they could to save their friend. That's in character. Who wouldn't? My mistake was/is not having a path to resurrection figured out. So I can say to the group, "Okay, you rush to his side. No vitals. You try to Heal Other? Okay, roll. Nope, it doesn't work. He was too far gone, probably had his soul flee before he hit the ground. Yeah, that's rough. I guess you're going to have to go on a big quest to meet an Element of Destruction when this is all done, to try to get him brought back from the dead, eh?
I mean, I forgot to raise the bar, and give them a goal... even if it was going to be a goal the characters would have, outside of the context of the playtest (and something we'd never get around to playing). I said "no" to an adventure hook that anyone, player or character, would take up.
Christoph Boeckle:
Hi Adam, thanks for the actual play account!
Your solution of giving the other player an NPC was quite neat I'd say. From my abstract point of view, this gives a sense that the fictitious world continuous to exist for the players even if their character dies. This could be quite empowering for Sim play. If the GM has at all times a series of NPCs (perhaps minimally fleshed out and not too deeply tied to the content you prepared for the upcoming sessions) that can serve as "replacements" from which a player can choose when his PC dies, you might get a powerful incentive to accept, or even seek, player character death, because it gives the player the option to explore the world from a new angle. This would probably put a strain on the "PC group" concept, but give rise to those funky "multiple-perspectives" scene-framings we get to see in works like A Game of Thrones or Crash (the movie). And nicely tie in to the gritty atmosphere you seem to have given a lot of attention to.
Adam Riemenschneider:
Ron,
I'm grappling with terms, here, but I believe the answer is "yes."
Where things got cloudy for me, is that the player knew that he was going to be able to play, even through his character had died. His death was "fair" mechanics-wise, and he acknowledged that, meta-game wise, he wasn't being too smart; however, the character in question had qualities that the player viewed as justifying his charging the enemy. This player was fine with the outcome. He knew he was still going to get to play, but that current character was gone.
It was the other players that wanted the shift.
And I'm *still* not entirely sure what each player's motivation was. The strongest proponent of having a chance to save him was the player of the group's healer. I honestly believe that the player wasn't motivated by wanting time in the spotlight - he was perfectly fine with other PCs having the same chance as he was to make the heal work. I think that, for him, the world/setting ought to rule out the possibility of instant death, as far as he understood the setting that we were playing in. He wanted to interpret death as something that took more than a second to occur.
Still, I'm glad the screwing around with the rules ended up as it did - no one made the rolls, and the character died. It hardened the party, and the characters had to deal with the trauma as they continued to plow on with their mission. And it was traumatic. They decided that, enemy or not, they were *not* leaving the body behind. So they built a stretcher and carried him. When they got to a place to rest/hole up, one PC, the (now dead) character's live-in girlfriend (making her Stress checks all the way), bathed his wounds and ceremoniously prepared him for burial. And then, using her abilities, buried him.
And I don't plan on messing with those kinds of core rules, during play, again.
Now, the player still got to play next session. Everyone was able to keep having fun. But what do you do in a SIM when a PC dies in the first hour of a session? So this goes back to Ron's question: If the death is essentially supposed to happen by the way of normal play, how does a player "keep playing?" Especially in a game like this, where normal character creation can be pretty time consuming (much crunch).
His tool for interacting with the story has been removed.
Solutions?
Besides making up a new character?
Did anyone ever play Wraith? In the way I had gotten to play it, each player had their character, and then *also* played another PC's "Shadow," which was basically their dark side that talked in their head and actually tried to "take over." It split your priorities as a player... your main Character wanted to accomplish the group goals (or your own goals, or whatever), but half of the time, you were actively plotting against another PC. So if you were really cunning as someone's Shadow, you could end up trying to do things that would ultimately screw over your own PC.
I suppose PC death could be handled by simply having the player play his character's own ghost. There *are* ghosts in this setting. I just wouldn't want to rely too much on this method of giving a player something to do.
Or, perhaps, when the character's consciousness stops being tied to the body (and heads for reincarnation or an Afterlife, depending on what the character believed in), I could write in some kind of "reality impression" that happens upon death, where a character can bend and tweak reality for a short while, even after death. The player in question is then in control of these effects upon the story, and it would be understood within the context of the setting that these things can happen (so it's not metagaming per see, but an in-game understood cause-and-effect sort of deal).
I'm going to have to play around with this a bit, because sometimes a friendly NPC that can fill the gap just isn't available within the context of the story.
I think it's kind of funny that players lose their method of contact with the story almost always because of their death (instead of their character just moving away), and so figuring out what the player can do begs me to answer what happens to characters after they die.
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