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.
6 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.