Workshop #2 is now available here. If you’re a patron, be sure to check the recent Patreon post first, to get your discount code.
Many thanks to the wonderful participants and all the points you raised:
This space is for participants and, I hope, for people who get the recording, to continue discussing the topic. We even started it with this little bit of chat, which I hope will continue in the comments.
In editing the sequence with Space Rat, I realized I missed an opportunity to land a point: who would have thought that the most explicitly competitive role-playing game ever written would also feature character immunity to death? The fact that this is surprising should tip us off that the whole historical death artifact was seriously skewing our thinking about any and all aspects/purposes of play. Somehow everyone had it baked into them that the “munchkins” were the ones who accepted and embraced character death, whereas the “good role-players” would necessarily ignore procedures in order to avoid it.
One last thing: this workshop is an excellent first-contact with Adept Play for people you know who might be interested in such things. No fancy talk, a straightforward topic, good RPG history, good learning. I rarely call for shares, but in this case, and with the qualifier that I’m not talking about huge anonymous blasts, I would greatly appreciate it.
14 responses to “Workshop: No, Not Blackleaf!”
Just like the first workshop, *Story, Story, Story*, this was eye-opening!
I found a solution to character death which works for me and which the workshop covers (high lethality, character stables, quick character generation and introduction) — but merely as one approach amongst many.
However, the workshop provides a far deeper understanding of the issue: specifically death as just one way of failure, **failure being at the core of fiction**, as well as eviction from play as the real problem.
This puts a lot of things into perspective for me!
Just scratching the surface of the implications for me: the way I played and ran *Rolemaster*.
I ran *Rolemaster* 2e for many years in the 90s, but in retrospect, we relegated the awesome critical hits to mere color — by using healing artifacts and Fate Points, and plenty of them! When PCs suffered a lethal or crippling crit, we got to chuckle and shiver at the brutality … and then made the result go away. When NPCs and monsters took a lethal or crippling crit, we cheered, but the details hardly mattered going forward: whether the foe disintegrated into a pink mist as his cell cohesion was nullified or he merely took a deep thigh wound and was stunned/unable to parry for 10 rounds and required weeks of recovery *made no difference*: the foe was incapacitated and no factor in the battle at hand anymore.
Allowing lethal or crippling injury to PCs was unthinkable as it would have stopped the adventures from going ahead. Can’t have new characters with the same importance to some prophecy or someone recuperating for weeks or months while saving the world…
I adore those critical hit tables and wish to one day return to them … in a context where the ramifications are allowed to be, **and to matter**, and we still get to continue to play.
Off the top of my head, excellent posts on *Bushido* and *Runequest* here at the site show the way — and the above is just one of many things I’m pondering now, many of them not even about death, but failure.
That’s an excellent example which fits right into the workshop discussion. I mentioned similar things in Cyberpunk, and I am now glancing sidelong at all those friends over the decades who praised themselves for using the ever-so-realistic rules de jour … which need to be assessed for whether they landed to any effect in play itself.
I have two nuances to add to your main points.
1. A key factor for both Mörk Borg and 3:16 is that the group is an in-fiction entity, i.e., “we are together,” and it’s not unreasonable to think that potential members are in the vicinity or available in pretty short time units. That’s really obvious in 3:16 (as well as involuntary at this point in the brigade’s history) and maybe only implied in Mörk Borg, but it’s strongly implied (wretched social castaways are all over the place and grouping-up is a sensible thing to do). So replacement is not diegetically coincidental but is potentially there at any time.
I don’t know whether this concept is required for the “tragic fragility” approach to character death, but it does seem to me to facilitate it greatly. More than one game has attempted to formalize it in the sense of playing the troop or squad with characters rotating out mainly by dying, e.g., Reign, but I think that needs a post of its own some time.
2. I absolutely agree with you about failure, as should be apparent, but I also want you to focus on the possibly more trenchant concept of defeat: such that losing the fight, for example, is its own thing independent of whether any of us died. In retrospect, since I’ve started thinking about this, I’m shocked at how thoroughly this concept seems to have vanished from “fiction” insofar as role-playing is concerned. If that’s true, and if defeat has been present only when the story-managing GM imposes a “you lost, they got away, the victim caught a stray bullet, boy that’s annoying, aren’t you motivated now” move in the interest of their alleged campaign’s next chapter … then no wonder “story” as a concept has been distorted into extraordinarily un-fun non-play, and people who actually do make stories via play always insist they aren’t doing any such thing.
Defeat as a concept seems to be missing in PLAY. How many times in fiction does the antagonist take prisoners even when such an outcomes is against their better judgement? I am thinking here of Goldfinger and Bond nervously trying to convince the villain to keep him around. So there is precedent in fiction for PLAY to continue after defeat. I have rarely seen it put into effect, however.
(Sean) Let’s take it further than that. In a lot of media, imprisonment isn’t defeat at all, but a pacing speedbump. Its usual function is to allow the villain to do a few more things as rising action, all the better for a bigger climax.
I’m talking about actual defeat in something important. As the slide said, “not achieving this specific thing you want, ever.” It could be something small or one-character personal, or it could be The Designated Goal in the big picture for all of us, or anything in between.
Your point is entirely on target about it somehow never actually being possible, or even conceptually present, in play. I don’t think that’s original to role-playing, but rather formed during the 1980s. I fancy now that I might trace “the absence of defeat” formation through the many (and connected) superheroes games of that time, text by text.
There was no discussion about Vampire (VtM or VtR) in terms of death. The characters have already experienced a kind of death and transformation into the vampire. Final Death is a part of the conversation, I hesitate to use zeitgeist, and something all (most) vampires fear. Of course there is torpor, for when you get staked or run out of blood.
What was the intention of creating functionally immortal characters? To raise the stakes of Clan conflict? To create space for defeat? To increase drama or change play but taking normal death off the table? Or was it just a “decision” that we should not bother examining too closely as there was nothing to really examine?
I don’t think the death in becoming a vampire counts at all, as it’s basically a superhero origin. The equivalent is getting staked or immolated, and in that, it’s exactly the same as the hit point criteria one might find in most RPGs. The play-issues surrounding it are the same as well.
I really enjoyed this workshop. It was thought-provoking in relation to the games I’m playing now and introduced me to a long list of new titles I’d like to explore (and it shot Space Rat right to the front of my “I NEED to Play This” list!) .
I hope to have more to contribute in future workshops, but as this isn’t a topic I have a highly enriched context for, I really appreciated just getting to listen and learn from everybody, including Claudio and Sam discussing toxic social experiences where death was weaponized to stop ‘misbehavior,’ Jon discussing all the different types of damage in Rolemaster, and Sean talking about the desire of everyone to be John McClain from Die Hard (meaning wanting their character to suffer, suffer, suffer, but also be guaranteed victory in the end).
I wanted to drop odds and ends of thoughts here to see if anyone else is interested in picking them up. I’ll split into two comment streams.
I was really struck by Ron’s discussion of how designers’ aversion to creating systems that would actually kill player characters (the “Medic! Cleric!” section) gave rise to a plethora of ways to represent exhaustion, injury, scarring, and diminished capability (the “Woe and Suffering” section).
At the time, I was reading a Doom Patrol collection that pulled together issues 98-105, and Ron’s discussion made me think about the ‘fun’ (if I can use that word) of fictional injury in those issues, particularly for Robotman. With that character, it seems like one of the reasons one would want to BE a superhero is so you could get crushed, dismembered, melted, zapped and all manner of other physical disfigurations, but then repaired. (I almost wrote here, “without the attendant psychological trauma,” but on the other hand Robotman in those issues has to survive the trauma of his own death and loss of his human body and sexuality, so it’s not like genuine pain isn’t present, but it is concentrated into the single point in time of Cliff’s car-crash.) Also, rambling about these issues brings to mind Arnold Drake’s later writing of Boston Brand in Deadman, who similarly has totally unique and fantastic relationships to death, injury and exhaustion. And how Neal Adams and Jack Miller beautifully realize the promise of those features of Deadman in a way that must have been inspired by Robotman. If I’m ever looking for inspiration in how to play characters in physical extremity, this is a vein of comics I’d return to again and again.
I was thinking about Sean’s John McClane analogy, and the more I think about it, it’s not a bad thing. As usual, if X doesn’t/cannot happen, then the question is “what can,” which is to say, what cannot be counted upon. Playing like that seems to me to be broken only when nothing can go wrong or fail, ultimately, and all we’re doing is riding the known ride.
Whereas, to stick to the film as a useful touchpoint, and only the original film, something very important is on the line which has nothing to do with crime, robbery, bad guys, explosions, or desperate fights in stairwells. It’s not subtle; it’s obvious throughout, stated outright at key beats, reinforced, and explicitly concluded. In plot terms, it also might in fact fail, even if John survives all of those things. As with many franchises, it is very useful to watch the original absent all memes and friends shouting out lines, then realize just how thoroughly the rest of the movies are robbed of a core of this kind.
So we’re talking about a form of Purposeful immunity, which excludes death simply because some other plot-topic is the real uncertainty, and it’s so overriding that hero death would be a cop-out. The hero themself “doesn’t know this,” so it’s possible to identify with their fear and stress and courage, but it’s all subroutine to the actual topic.
There is a really good game which does this, or rather, it is excellent in play when a group doesn’t forget the crucial component. Some play is available to see in Night Streets 2. I’ve found that the first “film” played with Extreme Vengeance tends to be a learning device as we sort of get how it works, and then the question kicks in pretty hard: well, if we’re operating on the logic of these movies, then what makes it worth doing? It’s not hard to answer and to do, and in that case, the rules make a lot of sense: beat the shit out of the heroes, who somehow crawl back from horrible failures and near-deaths, and as their defeats mount, their collective Coincidence is eroded and their Guts goes up. Because something which matters very much can still fail.
The game text suffers greatly from its parodic prose and from losing its steam in describing fun tropes, but as system, it’s so available toward this end that one can almost see the missing paragraphs in the text.
I’ve only seen the first Die Hard, and it’s weird to me that any more were made. It’s such an odd combination of content that clearly only works “right now, in THIS one movie,” and (if memory of when I watched it last year serves) it’s also free of franchise-building in a way that very few actions movies are.
I will definitely check out Extreme Vengeance and the Actual Play post/recordings.
I was also very struck by Ron’s discussion of how in Tunnels & Trolls there was an expectation that “life is cheap” and death would be sudden, random, and colorful. He put T&T into a broader context w/his own Circle of Hands and Gregor Hutton’s Three Sixteen and called them games of “brutal community,” where any single character may and likely will die, but the larger endeavour (The Circle, the Regiment) will go on past them.
I’m on session 10 of a really good Tunnels & Trolls game w/Sam, Jon and a friend I invited along named Dustin. At any one time we have anywhere from 6 to 9 characters between us. I’ll highlight a couple of features of that game that I think connect nicely with the concepts in the workshop: Exhaustion is an extremely salient factor when it comes to Wizards; going forward into the dungeon becomes a much scarier prospect when the Wizards are too low on Strength to throw an Oh-Go-Away or Take That You Fiend. I haven’t seen a similar dynamic arise with Warriors and Constitution, as so far we’ve either been so well matched against enemies that damage can’t get over our Warriors’ doubled Armor, or so overmatched that we either escape or perish.
On perishing, the fact that “life is cheap” in Tunnels & Trolls meant that for the first couple of sessions we treated death lightly and comedically. However, we’ve become accustomed to the system and gotten more proficient at using death outcomes as situational material (that is, taking seriously a character’s death as a factor in what our characters do and where they go next). And as we’ve gotten more skilled as players, we’ve played our characters as passionately invested in each other’s fates, with deep relationships arising in the moments of crisis. This has also meant that death (whether inflicted on us or by us) is much more hard-hitting when it occurs now, even though it is just as frequent. When I play T&T with a new group, I will warn them not to be fooled by the game’s surface whimsy — it can fucking devastate you.
Individual character death quickly become a rich source of situational material for us. However, we did have a session where our guys got ripped to shreds by a plasma-spewing tank-drone, and only 2 characters survived (a third was ‘lost’ and was rescued from confinement in a magical stasis-device several sessions later). I felt very strongly that I didn’t know yet how to play losing a majority of our existing characters. I felt stymied and like I needed to learn new skills. The workshop gave me language that I found helpful. I was missing the “community” part of “brutal community.” Textually, T&T doesn’t have an equivalent to the Circle or the Regiment. I felt like I needed something (unnamed and not formalized) to provide that continuity.
Here’s what I shared with my fellow players (somewhat edited):
***I am feeling stymied instead of inspired by this outcome because I feel like “the party” or whatever shared endeavour all our PCs are in together has been totally erased. I need something like the Circle or the squadron in Tunnels & Trolls, however sketchy. Such that our two survivors aren’t just bumping into some randos who are here for the “crawl,” but instead linking up with characters with some, any degree of shared identity or endeavour. And maybe most importantly such that the characters we lost mean SOMETHING to the new characters, instead of being just deceased non-persons.
***But I’m balancing that felt need against the necessity of T&T’s “brutal community” being minimalistic and not mandating specific behaviors. A strength of how unconstructed ‘the party’ is in T&T is that it puts all responsibility for developing relationships on the players. I love that those relationships only happen because and when and how we want them to, not because of any textual prompting.
***As an example of how minimalist the continuity can be, I’m thinking of Strikeforce Morituri, where by the end of the run there are no original members of the Strikeforce left and no new members know or particularly care about the deceased members — for quite a few of them, the deceased Strikeforce members are “those suckers who couldn’t cut it as well as we could.” But even that stance feels significant, from a reader perspective, because all the characters, alive and dead, are part of the “brutal community” of the Strikeforce.
As a result, Sam has explored some new approaches (adjacent to how he’s been using the Charisma stat) to how “the party” is hired/created. All four of us have been looking for opportunities to honor the ‘shared endeavour’ our characters are in. We haven’t named it or formalized (it’s not like our characters submitted incorporation documents to turn their adventuring into a start-up or anything). But at least for me personally it’s given me a sense that all our characters alive and dead are part of the same responsive situation, and also given the ‘new’ guys responsive material to work with. I’m really glad I had the concepts from the course to use as a lens on this game.
As an aside, I think this ‘missing community’ is why the “total party kill” is so dreaded, particularly when a group doesn’t treat the event as an ending and feel like they have to keep playing. Without some form of connective tissue between the old characters and the new ones, it feels like everything we did with the old characters is completely erased. It’s awkward, like having to create an entirely new TV show using a previous show’s costumes and sets.
I’d like to contrast my presentations of “Tragic fragility” and “Brutal community,” then review your point.
Tragic fragility: frequent character death, probably unavoidable in some cases (i.e. the dice fall this way, there you go), quick and sketchy character creation and replacement. A historical reference is Tunnels & Trolls especially in the context of multiple, simultaneously-played characters per player, but 3:16 and Mörk Borg add useful support content: a generally dystopic and doomed context for everyone (the world, basically) + a strong implication that a character is a no-hoper in a squad/group of the same, in which the “job” does little more than keep you going for the next deathtrap/suicide mission. Both of these games (i) associate a given character with the same person at all times, and (ii) offer subtle but real implications that you might sooner or later choose to defy the general horribleness of existence.
Brutal community: vivid and motivated character creation, placement into a shared pool for play, solid chances for character death, social or other content/context for shared activity + mixing up which character is played per player, one at a time, regardless of characters living or dying. Various designs hit it from different angles but I cite Circle of Hands as strongly focused on it.
I can see how they might get confounded, and in each case, over time, character deaths may become situationally important (as backstory). However, I see them as very different things, in part due to the relation between character and player and in part due to “life is cheap” in the former but not in the latter.
Since the content is similar between them, especially certain dystopic elements, the difference relies mainly on system. If we added system to some content similar to Strikeforce: Morituri, then it might be either of the two, depending on how it’s conducted.
It seems to me that you’re talking mainly about Tragic fragility for the T&T game. Maybe rounding out its original “well, I guess this is role-playing” design into a more supportive, situationally-playable context for frequent character death. Therefore maybe grading toward 3:16 or Mörk Borg, which makes perfect sense.
I really like your point that Strikeforce: Morituri’s content could be Tragic Fragility or Brutal Community depending on how it’s conducted. I’ll keep Strikeforce near to hand the next time I play a Brutal Community game.
I found those comics really inspiring for T&T’s particular form of Tragic Fragility, especially the original crew’s run on the Horde warship around issue #7. Harold/Vyking dies unexpectedly and meaninglessly. It is just horrible, no two ways about it. Later in the fight Jelene/Adept and Robert/Marathon know that they’re doomed, but dammit, they make their deaths count for something, for the larger conflict and to themselves. Both fictional states hit me hard as a reader. And they taught me how to honor T&T’s “sudden, random, and colorful” deaths while also looking for opportunities for characters to make their own meaning out of their deaths where they could.
Yes, thank you for the concept clarification! Ergh, I hope my conflation of Tragic Fragility and Brutal Community didn’t muddy the waters too much. In the interest of clarifying without an endless round of ‘what-I-meant-was, I’ll summarize:
In this particular game of T&T, it was important to me to round out T&T’s original design into a more supportive, situationally-playable context for frequent character death, and in doing so I was guided by the particular features of Tragic Fragility we discussed in the workshop. In playing through the particular play-state of a majority of our characters dying, I also found inspiration in the textual concepts of a couple of Brutal Community games (especially Circle of Hands) which are procedurally distinct from T&T and very much not Tragic Fragility.
I do have two bits of personal history to share about the first times I experienced player character death from both a player perspective and a game master one.
My first game of DnD was run by my Dad. I played a wizard and promptly got killed by rats. I was a bit stunned (being 11). My Dad told me it was alright and I should make a new character to get revenge.
It built a little story where the town wizard disappeared, so a young fighter, Darkblade (I was 11), went down below the village to find the wizard. My Dad’s support and demonstrating how the game *can* go on was super helpful and shaped my expectations of play.
Many years later, I’m running a big (8 to 12 players from kids to adults) 4th Edition DnD game at a game store. A kid and his Dad were at the table for every game. The kid was new and having a blast.
Then the players were ambushed by Lizardmen, and it went poorly. The party had to retreat, and the kid’s character died, bringing up the rear.
I saw the kid become disheartened, and I felt terrible. Luckily, his Dad had been playing *forever* and let his son know that it was cool. I assured the kid that he wasn’t out of play and could roll up any character at the same level. I offered to let him control a minor NPC, which he was game to do for the session.
I noticed that after that night, the rest of the group felt more relaxed and engaged far less in over-careful play. It established an understanding that I dont think many of the d20-era players had experienced. The kid still came week to week, just as enthusiastically, too.
I know my Dad and that other Dad had that implicit understanding from the early days of the hobby. It was not a flippant response or lack of care, but just another feature of play for them. It was an invaluable lesson for me.