>From: "Ian Cooper" <ian_hammond_cooper_at_...>
>
>Simon among others raises the 'issue' of making players afraid for
>their characters/increasing ther failure factor.
There are several issues at play here, the cross-products of which will confound this discussion for certain.
One issue is that, at a guess, what I think Simon is talking about is not fear for the character, really, but fear for oneself, and the possibility of losing a character. To be sure, this is far more visceral and real than any fear you can have for a fictional character. I mean, you put perhaps hundreds of hours into a character, only then to lose the ability to play the character. Worse, it may well happen at a time and place where that death is pretty meaningless?
Yeah, I fear that, too.
Now, for some, this sort of fear is neccessary to feel that the player is accomplishing something. If there is no real risk to the player, then they feel that they're not being challenged. I don't play to be challenged in terms of character survival, so it's not really important to me. And I fear character loss so much that I make it an impossibility in play.
But, that said, characters in my game fail constantly. And it's not because I take away their HP - they have scads of em. There's a much simpler way to ensure that there's a real chance of failure. And that's to put them up against relatively high resistances. It's that simple. If you're not getting enough character failure in play, you're not putting the characters up against high enough resistances.
I allow my players to augment all they like. A typical character in my IRC game right now may have abilities in the mid two masteries range, and with augments may end up with high three masteries. But they still fail. Because their opposition is similarly tough, or tougher.
Or, in other cases, they are up against something that they don't have the particular skills to deal with so well. Like fighting, for many of my PCs. Several couldn't tell one end of a sword from another.
Without trying to insult anyone, I'd propose that we've all been taught the kobold lesson. Which is that it's more interesting to have weak opponents, because losing your character every other combat is really tiresome. So we ensure that the opposition aren't as strong as the character to start with. So no surprise by the time we're done with augments and HP that they're easy prey... they ought to be.
Now, if your objection is that putting characters up against high resistances means that players will lose their characters too often, then you've discovered the D&D heroism paradox. We can't both have an actual risk of character death, and really heroic behavior. Typically this devolves into "fudging" where it appears that there is real risk, but where there actually is little, because the system is not consulted. In other words, it's an impossible thing to get from a system.
HQ does what I feel is the best solution. It says that you can put other things on the table as stakes for a contest other than character death, even in a "combat." All while never actually explicitly taking death off the table. If you will, it's legitimized fudging. The narrator could say that a complete defeat means that the PC dies, or he could say that it means that they've had an arm hacked off, and have been sent to the slave mines. The player has to worry that the narrator might kill of the character - it's within his rights. But the actuality is something more fun.
At least that's how I see it.
Mike
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