[Nevercast] - Truth through Mastery
Ar Kayon:
Dindenver,
Quote from: dindenver on December 20, 2010, 09:52:25 AM
Really, I just want to play the Tech Hunter, but my fear is that their technology knowledge comes at a price of being paper thin in the combat arena. If they have a passable role in combat, then this would be my ideal class. For instance in Jeremiah, the nerds had the lowest HPs, lowest AC and the worst BAB (It was OGL d20). They were almost the only ones who could figure out tech, but it didn't matter because they couldn't live long enough to take advantage of it.
Every character in the game possesses professional-level skills. If danger is a common aspect of their profession, then it follows that such a character can handle danger. In my next immediate post, I will give the full explanation of the tech hunter in order to fully answer your inquiry.
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1) Character Death is almost always treated as an indictment on the skill or thoughtfulness of the player controlling that character. In other words, many GMs say, "I am not trying to kill your character, if they die, it is because the player did something stupid." There is really only one way to interpret this statement after your character dies.
All it takes is one shot to kill your character. I can understand this logic in games where it takes about 15 hits to die, AND you can heal, but in Nevercast, a bad roll will eventually catch up to you no matter how clever you are. Pray that you’re wearing good armor when that happens.
I would like to be clear on the nature of character death in my game, but rather than insult my audience’s intelligence and state it explicitly, I trust that they will grasp this concept after a few sessions. This includes the GM; he’ll learn on his own not to mindlessly throw violent situations at his characters (making players feel powerless as their characters constantly get cut down), but to carefully set up events so that character roles have an opportunity to demonstrate all of their functions in a meaningful way.
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2) Even with fast character generation, there are several issues outside of that, that hamper the players ability to play the game at the table. For instance, the fictional restriction of how the one character got out to a place where, apparently, an entire party couldn't get to safely.
3) And how can the existing PCs trust and accept a total stranger into their midst. Much less trust them and give them a fair share of the money, tech, etc found at the site? And if they don't then how can that character be expected to face their fair share of the danger?
These two issues appear to be outside of a system’s jurisdiction and inside that of the GM. At best, the manual can provide guidelines of engagement for difficult player situations so that the GM’s actions do not appear to be arbitrary or contrived.
This may not answer your questions in the manner you were hoping for, but the character death concept has not been fully fleshed out yet. Perhaps only playtesting will grant me the insight I require.
What I am hoping for is that the PC experience will be so rich that death will not be perceived for the drudgery in making a new character and waiting to get back in the game, but as an exciting climax before the actor bows out. I doubt that will happen, but if it does, then it would be superfluous for me to introduce any mechanics or guidelines to address the subject.
Callan S.:
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I would like to be clear on the nature of character death in my game, but rather than insult my audience’s intelligence and state it explicitly, I trust that they will grasp this concept after a few sessions. This includes the GM; he’ll learn on his own not to mindlessly throw violent situations at his characters (making players feel powerless as their characters constantly get cut down), but to carefully set up events so that character roles have an opportunity to demonstrate all of their functions in a meaningful way.
It wouldn't insult my intelligence to outline explicitly - to me that process has me learning some illusionism, where I learn all sorts of skills to make the players fear for their characters lives, while really they'll live or die simply as I dictate. That might be entirely wrong, but I don't mind it being stated explicitly to clear up how I'm wrong on that.
Death is an interesting subject. One approach is use a variant of luck from warhammer, where the GM rolls your luck for the day and as a player you don't know how much there is. Switch the idea to the GM rolling your survival points for the game week, which you don't know. Suddenly find your out of points? Your characters dead. And the GM doesn't secretly adjust the number of survival points, neither. It gives play to it all, but also engenders that fear of the unknown. Without illusionism.
There's a quote I came across recently. It's about writing books, but it could apply to anything
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Since implicit rules are generally invisible, the tendency is to always think that the guy who follows explicit rules is the one constrained
Ar Kayon:
Hopefully I can strike a balance of survivability by calibrating the numerical value of weapons vs. armor instead of resorting to, uh...metagaming I suppose.
I'm certainly not opposed to the idea, as the actual effects will be disguised from the players, but I want the concrete in-game logic to be enough to fully carry play (this has to do with my aesthetic design preferences more than anything). In my opinion, this can be accomplished with precision. Using well-defined character functions (what tools are available interact with the world), well-defined setting objects (exactly what areas and character functions are particularly dangerous), and finely-tuned combat mechanics, I intend for gameplay to reliably allow an average death rate of one in five sessions (or two violent encounters).
dindenver:
RK,
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I would like to be clear on the nature of character death in my game, but rather than insult my audience’s intelligence and state it explicitly, I trust that they will grasp this concept after a few sessions.
So, I played a game like this before, FASA Star Trek. It was horrible. Because we tried to play like D&D in space (this was the 80s after all). So, naturally, we busted out the fight rules, because that is what you do. We were all trek fans and, of course, getting shot by a disruptor is serious business, But nothing in the rules (except a bunch of numbers that we didn't understand because we hadn't played yet) told us to steer away from combat. The point is, please be explicit. It sounds like you are trying to come up with a new approach to adventure gaming. And if that is the case, you will have to teach people the skills to engage your game successfully.
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This includes the GM; he’ll learn on his own not to mindlessly throw violent situations at his characters (making players feel powerless as their characters constantly get cut down), but to carefully set up events so that character roles have an opportunity to demonstrate all of their functions in a meaningful way.
This is a difficult skill to learn, for any game system. If your game is at all new or different, any help you can provide to the GM will be invaluable. It will mean extra work and writing, but it may mean the difference between success and failure for your game. Imagine you are trying a new game. You bust out the rules, make characters and do a quick encounter. Everything goes horribly wrong. The GM checks the rules and as far as he can tell, he is running the game correctly. Some players will soldier on and try and figure out your rules. The rest will drop the game like a hot rock and bad mouth it to anyone who brings it up.
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These two issues appear to be outside of a system’s jurisdiction and inside that of the GM. At best, the manual can provide guidelines of engagement for difficult player situations so that the GM’s actions do not appear to be arbitrary or contrived.
OK, well, if your intention is to make a highly lethal game, you need to solve these questions. This can be solved simply by having the adventure groups consist of pools of NPCs that are pretty much useless until they get promoted to PCs. Or by setting up extreme setting elements that would encourage the PCs to trust each other (they are all members of the same guild, religion or are being attacked by an external force that is killing all the NeverCast characters without exception).
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What I am hoping for is that the PC experience will be so rich that death will not be perceived for the drudgery in making a new character and waiting to get back in the game, but as an exciting climax before the actor bows out.
OK, to be clear, I love to make characters, short-changing the Character creation process is a con, not a pro. Admittedly, if I am pretty much guaranteed to lose a character once per 4 hour session, then a 2-hour character creation process is probably a bad idea. But still, there are other consequences of character death than having to make a character.
Anyways, all of this is to say, sounds like a cool game, I'd like to hear more about it.
Ar Kayon:
Dindenver,
I'll respond to your post first before I get to the other character role stuff. I promise I'll move on, but I believe this particular issue - that of PC death - needs to reach some satisfactory conclusion. I have not game mastered for real in years, and it seems like most people here have more insight than I do on character death. Furthermore, I was almost never a player, so I can only make conjectures on how certain aspects of gameplay will turn out until I get down to the playtesting stage.
Quote from: dindenver on December 25, 2010, 04:05:44 PM
But nothing in the rules (except a bunch of numbers that we didn't understand because we hadn't played yet) told us to steer away from combat. The point is, please be explicit. It sounds like you are trying to come up with a new approach to adventure gaming. And if that is the case, you will have to teach people the skills to engage your game successfully.
So what you're saying is that if the idea is not explicitly understood, gamers will continue to dive into the same habits, getting annihilated, and not knowing why? I think I get it. Players may have habits derived from games with radically different creative agendas, and by default they will invoke those habits, expecting to be as successful.
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Imagine you are trying a new game. You bust out the rules, make characters and do a quick encounter. Everything goes horribly wrong. The GM checks the rules and as far as he can tell, he is running the game correctly. Some players will soldier on and try and figure out your rules. The rest will drop the game like a hot rock and bad mouth it to anyone who brings it up.
Ok, you’ve made your point. Give the GM all the tools he needs to recognize and run the game the way it was intended to be played - as if the characters were real and the world is always pushing back. I should make this understanding concrete.
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OK, well, if your intention is to make a highly lethal game, you need to solve these questions. This can be solved simply by having the adventure groups consist of pools of NPCs that are pretty much useless until they get promoted to PCs. Or by setting up extreme setting elements that would encourage the PCs to trust each other (they are all members of the same guild, religion or are being attacked by an external force that is killing all the NeverCast characters without exception).
I wouldn’t want trust to be a granted quality of play between player-characters. Yes the game is lethal, but it’s not machine-gun lethal; death isn’t chasing you every second and a highwayman on every mile-marker. Instead, there should be large blocks of role-playing and exploring and very short bursts of terrifying danger in-between (tasting oh-so-sweet should you prevail). Thus, player-characters should have a good amount of time to establish trust before something bad happens.
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OK, to be clear, I love to make characters, short-changing the Character creation process is a con, not a pro. Admittedly, if I am pretty much guaranteed to lose a character once per 4 hour session, then a 2-hour character creation process is probably a bad idea.
The reason why character creation is swift is because the system this game is based on streamlines the process. There is only one mechanical subsystem to address upon creation - skills - and the actual background and persona of the character itself are intended to be developed during play. Also, the skilled maneuvers/abilities that are based upon skills are not cherry-picked by the players the way a similar system (feats) would be. Furthermore, I doubt that I will introduce a granular point-buy method. For example, instead of distributing X amount of skill points all over the place, you pick, say, Y amount of level 4 skill types (within pre-determined skill categories), Z amount of level 3, etc. This is to ensure that a character is actually a professional-level in his chosen role while still maintaining a decent gradient of functional variability between characters of the same role. I’ll elaborate on character creation later when the details will be fleshed out more completely.
Finally, I don’t intend for characters to die once per session. In my opinion, such an overblown level of violent conflict will compromise suspension of disbelief as well as create the subtext that this game favors combat over other aspects of play. Also, I believe that one 4 hour session is not enough time to build the necessary dimensions of a player-character. How do I intend to goad players into building these dimensions? I have no idea yet, and I may have to start a new thread specifically devoted to emergent character design tailored to a simulationist agenda (if anyone has links to existing threads, I would appreciate it).
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