But most games outside of the high fantasy genre tend not to have this mechanic openly available, yet they keep the “Zero you’re out” rule. Perhaps going zero takes you out of the conflict and you won’t get to do much. The GM could take the player aside and ask him what he might like in this instance… does he want to do something that may kill him but could save everyone? Sit there? Hide? Get knocked out? A guy who just got his leg removed is pretty much out of a fight as much as the guy who got gut shot, although the fellow without a leg may have a better shot of surviving.

The frustration is that while a couple die rolls are impartial to anyone rolling them, character death is the one thing that can’t be rectified later or a future challenge to later conquer, unlike losing an arm or a certain skill. I think that needs to change as the losing of the character should be up to the player and the GM together, with the dice strictly “suggesting” a strong change needs to happen.

A hand removal can be fixed later on and that skill might have to require special training to get it back, giving him some sort of new understanding.

If you botch an Auspicious Occasion roll, you get sent back to hell and have to make a new character, or wait a hundred years to be retrained or something like that. The beginning of our game involved being summoned to the Forbidden City. I botched. I “made” a new character exactly like my previous character, got summoned to the City, and botched again.

Then I made lunch for the guys and stopped playing.

***

I’m not sure how the threat of that is supposed to make the game more fun. I’m a big fan of rules that prevent awesome things from happening AS LONG AS the alternative is something else awesome. I think that’s the big point of the stakes thing in Mortal Coil; I’m weird in that I want to work for my fun, or at least, work for my achievements. I don’t want everything I think is cool to just happen, because it’s easy to think of things which are cool, right? Isn’t there some kind of rule or principle or other thingy which talks about how the fiction needs to be able to go in unexpected ways?

I think if the players are too effective, you lose some of that. But completely castrating the players doesn’t do anyone any good, either. Maybe there’s a way for players to become effective in a different area than their characters, when character effectiveness is limited? Because players should totally be able to participate fully, even when it makes sense for their characters to have limited potency.

The quick answer is, “There is no reason why you should stop effecting the fiction after your character dies.” The reason most players’ experience with character death works this way is because the kinds of games that allow you to continue affecting the fiction after death haven’t been written yet. This is an excellent design track to tackel, IMO. It would involve a lot of creative solutions to allow death to be a gateway into sustained fiction control. Your post is very well thought out, Nathan. I enjoyed reading it.

Peace,

-Troy

Thats another good point. Fights, in most fiction, are NEVER about whether the protagonist is going to die. Sometimes if there’s a cast of protagonists, one of them might be at risk (here I’m thinking of the first episode of Firefly, for example). A fight might be about whether you finally cap an enemy, but as long as there’s still pages left in the book (or minutes in the movie), it is the rare piece of fiction that kills off the protagonists before the end.

This whole “the protagonists are always potentially about to die” is something pretty unique to RPGs, in my experience.

Consequences are much more interesting, or they should be. In the OVA campaign I’m running it’s been working out that way quite unintentionally. The actual fight will be sort of interesting, but finding out later that the heroes inadvertently helped create a race of catgirls was the far more engaging part. In contrast, the player of the one PC that has actually died (albeit in a rather interesting way) so far has never been quite as engaged in the game since.

Dev, back to you in a sec.

Jon, my thought progression is something like “my character changing in unexpected ways is always way more interesting than my character taking damage, so why would I ever settle for taking damage when I can generate interesting fallout instead?”. I’m kind of thinking here of when we were playing Mortal Coil and we had that lame conflict with you and the Congolese guard, and by the rules you took Harm. But, like, I didn’t particularly want your character to not be able to have as much effect in conflicts (which is all that Harm does). It so happened that we set lame stakes to that conflict, so it fell flat on both counts. So there’s a dissonance that I’m poking at - the interesting part of the conflict was the stakes, right? The Harm didn’t really matter one way or the other, except to make it harder for you to succeed down the road. Right?

Dev, your comment is right on, and hopefully in responding to it I can be a little clearer in what I’m trying to actually talk about (which I’m having trouble expressing, as you can see…

So, yes, an appropriately designed set of mechanics can create interesting choices for thematic play. I’ll be self-aggrandizing a bit and submit that Approachs from Carry work like that - sometimes, because of the dice you have, you MUST make a non-optimal mechanical choice in a conflict, which tends to mean you make a thematic choice instead.

But, like, if my characters stats are the only way I, as a player, have to effect the fiction, and they go down due to damage (or whatever), that limits BOTH character AND player effectiveness. Limiting character effectiveness is fine, for reasons you state. But if I, as a player, become less able to influence the game, that blows! For thematic play, it’s all about player desires changing the fiction. So, if a game is set up such that I the player get shut out when my character goes down, then that seems less than desirable for thematic play.

To your question, about why you would mechanically lower a character’s effectiveness / ability to affect the fiction (in a case where you cared most about story or theme): Perhaps part of the theme is that you need to reflect the consequences of earlier choices, and without consequences those choices ring hollow. It’s possible that ineffectiveness could itself be properly thematic. Also, mechanical ineffectiveness could push people to use other resources to find success. (Ex 1: you’re Dex is at -5 now, so may consider talking instead of fighting the dragon. Ex 2: Your Will is down to -4, so are you willing to activate your Demonic Contract trait to restore it?)

I think that in general linking player and character effectiveness is not a design goal as much as a side effect of having players mostly play a single character, which I personally find a satisfying way to play.