What say we start the day with a bit of internet etymology? On October 16th, 2015, Twitter user @cavalorn tweeted, “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.” It would appear that Fighter has voted along the same party lines. And once upon a time, so did I.
This particular sense of dread and remorse stole upon me in a recent Death in Space campaign. If you’re unfamiliar, this space-scavengers-scraping-to-get-by RPG owes a general vibe debt to MÖRK BORG. And if you’re unfamiliar with that title, let’s just say that high lethality is baked into the design. That shouldn’t have been a problem for me.
You see, it was last year’s Gen Con when I sat down to play this hot little number. It was supposed to be a convention one-shot, so I had no problem trotting out a beloved retired Firefly PC for the occasion.
“What’s the harm if he dies?” I said to myself. “It’ll just be good to do the Danny DeVito impression again. But you know… as a space punk this time.”
The worst possible thing happened though. The game was freaking fantastic. The players got on well, the story was all edge-of-your-seat excitement, and the general air of enthusiasm ensured that we would keep the story going long after the con ended. You can imagine a suddenly-frightened space punk Danny DeVito sweating bullets.
I won’t go into the gory details, but trust me: they were as gory as the lesson is simple. If you vote for a game with serious consequences, be sure that you’re on board for serious consequences. Because random tables have no remorse, and DeVito deserved better than exsanguination by teleporting brain leeches.
Question of the day, then! Have you ever seen some poor, unfortunate player encounter SUDDEN CONSEQUENCES? Have you ever been that player? And if so, what the crap did you think would happen? Tell us your sad tale down in the comments!
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I once had the opposite problem. So no shit, there I was, signing up for a Mortal; the Fucked (regular unaware humans, not Hunters) campaign in nWoD. It was pitched to us as a slasher-movie style campaign, with our plucky idiots trying to survive against an unknown supernatural threat (turns out it was actually a Changeling campaign and the threat was our real selves). So, I thought I’d game the system and lean into the slasher genre and make the “asshole” archetype, the character who rubs the other characters up the wrong way (in character only, of course), survives most of the story against all sense of justice, and the audience cheers when he gets his richly deserved comeuppance. And then I only went and survived the entire campaign. Truely, only the good die young.
Heh. I rolled that guy once. It was a Cthulhu meets Narnia campaign. I was playing Draco Malfoy as hard as I possibly could. Man I was hoping that little shit would get eaten by a gug.
Hey, I did a Draco Malfoy as well. Except mine was also a Tory (british conservative political party, like american republicans)
So… is this Fighter’s outfit now?
And there’s gritty realism, and then there’s bad medicine. I’ve seen goblins do better! Just grab a flat rock and smack that arrow all the way through, then snap it and pull out the pieces. Plenty of grit, moderate chance of survival and walking again. :p
maybe don’t do that if it’s hit the bone, or it’s near a major blood vessel.
Yeah, but reaching right for Mr. Bonesaw isn’t the best answer in those cases, either.
Or at least not without something for the patient to bite down on…
Poor Oracle! She’s just out here trying to heal with restricted magical healing rules in place. She’s doing her best!
Fighter wears a shirt under his armor! Can you imagine if he didn’t? Yikes
I figured he’d wear leather armour or padding underneath the plate…
That too!
WFRP 2nd edition Bretonnian Tryffel hounds and no, I do not want to go in details, just remembering it makes me wince. But I’ll say this, good thing the next hit was lethal so I didn’t have tio spend too long practicing my high pitch.
And that’s why the first command you teach them is “drop it”. Whether it’s to stop them eating the truffles, or so you can get what you lost to a surgeon to get it sewn back on, is a matter of timing.
Hounds found the tryffels. 🙁
How good is Oracle’s eyesight when it comes to performing surgery?
“WRONG LEG!!!”
“Wait. I was supposed to take off a leg? Then this is the wrong size tool. Hold on, let me check my pockets…” *extracts jewellery case* “Aaah, there you are, Mister Nippy.”
That’s one way to get FemFighter into the none HoEF continuity.
Somewhat.
C’mon Fighter, don’t start now. The spell Regeneration exists for a reason. Just be a big boy and you will get a lollypop later.
“But what about an infection?”
That’s what Cure Disease is for. Stop complaining and bite this stick.
Is it at least not a lemon lollypop?
What are you saying? Lemon lollipops are super tasty!
In general, I think that what “gritty realism” actually means is “I don’t want to see how the rules and scenario design advantage my character, so I can pretend that they don’t.” To a certain degree, I think that the rise of storygames drives this. In fiction, it’s vanishingly rare for protagonists to simply meet their end before reaching their goals, and that can remove the sense that the setting is actually challenging or dangerous. But a good author can maintain the illusion of genuine threat to a character, which make their apparent overcoming of long odds seem more impressive. So it makes sense for players to want that in their game, while never really wanting to buy into the idea that they’re really putting their characters at risk as part of the table stakes.
I have a habit of viewing characters like Doritos (“Crunch all you want, we’ll make more!), so I have no problems with a constant revolving door. It’s like a neverending DCC funnel. But that lack of emotional investment has been known to rub other players the wrong way.
Oh man… I’ve always wanted to try a DCC funnel. Never had the opportunity. But I think it’s all about expectations, you know? Are we telling the story of an epic hero seeking destiny, or a nerd in a loincloth wiedling a poo stick and running from the monsters?
I ran into this a few times, mainly back in Arizona now that I think about it. Specifically, my group at the time was fond of using dice to “fairly” determine some things, like where the ogre attacks when he can’t see in the Darkness spell, or how many Scions the Fenrous Wolves had eaten.
As you might have guessed from the specificity of those examples, both turned out rather poorly. The ogre picked the square with my roommate’s special magic hound (which frankly already should have had some non-RAW help because it wasn’t attached to a class feature and thus was doomed to fall even further behind the party as we leveled up) and smashed its HP pool as flat as a pancake. The Fenrous Wolves had eaten enough Scions to instantly kill the party with nothing but their *howls*, should we be foolish enough to let them notice us (though it is worth noting this may not have been accurate, since we didn’t realize at the time that armor also granted Aggravated Soak).
I don’t think the added verisimilitude was worth it. Both outcomes took situations that had the potential to be cool and interesting, and went “here’s a kick in the teeth for trying to interact with them”.
I think part of the issue is that, as character increase in mechanical complexity, it becomes harder and harder to introduce frequent newcomers to replace the dead. I mean, there’s a reason that Dread characters can fit on a 3 x 5 card.
I haven’t had it happen to me, but I have had two cases where I had a character straight up get arrested. One of which was last night, as a way of giving a player an out.
I kind of wish their last words were something more dignified than “[character] just [logs] out and books it, I think.”
Dude got swatted? Tough break.
If you ever wondered how to fix an arrow to the knee…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu1QKbILDAI
or other spots…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LYeyO3Oa8o
Who is Fighter? His name is Guard now 😛
Wait… Wait a second! You might be into something!
We know that Figther is not his full name. From Send in the Clones (https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/send-in-the-clones) we know that Figther’s name is a variation of Fighter #37, so his full name is Fighter #(Number), also that along with Jeremy (https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/jeremy-the-dragon-part-12), his death parents (https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-handbook-of-heroes-13) and Jeremy’s mother (https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/moms-making-tollhouse) he has a very large family with strong family resemblance who go adventuring with the party when one Fighter dies, and that they are extremely similar, same face, hair, voice, temperament…
Now. From Forever DM (https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/forever-dm) we see two guards talking with each other, with their face concealed, talking how one wants to go on a adventure with the party and what does he wants to do? Kill people indisciminately and seduce barmaids. I don’t know about you, but that seems like something Fighter would do. Also, from the subtext of that comic we know that all the guards sound kinda similar and the name of one of the guards: Guard #3.
In the Handbook world the characters have the name of their class, and that name can change when the character change’s classes as we can see when Paladin passes to be called Herald (https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/hellraiser) after reaching godhood.
So what if… What if Fighter’s family normally work as guards, while Fighter goes on adventures and when he dies the one that takes his place change’s his name from Guard #X to Fighter #X to reflect his new role?
I am very intrigued by this theory…
Inspector XD
Oh yeah! I always run gritty or equivalent (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is a favourite game) so I have quite a few stories like this. The worst example from D&D would be a PC trying to jump off a moving cart whilst fleeing a traumatic but relatively minor encounter and ending up landing right in front, whereupon it ran over and broke both his legs. He was in a wheelchair for the rest of the campaign.
I had the itch for some D&D, but the group I usually ran with had gotten into a Basic Edition kick. 5e is my jam, but I had enough experience with tables from 2e playing Baldur’s Gate that it was still within reach. The whole time, I’m basically going “this feels way too unforgiving, every little thing completely drags you down, and NPC monster encounters never seem to be anything other than perfectly optimized.”
They all assured me multiple times that it would be completely fine.
Cue first encounter of the session, 3 spiders. Oh, poison. My character got bit, but hey, it’s only instant death if I fail all 3 saves, what are the odds of that?
So anyway, that’s how I ended up playing Glint, son of Flint, who set off on a quest to avenge his father, who fallen to the 3 spiders among many summoned by the evil witch throughout the land.
To be fair, he did get the final shot needed to take down the witch, (getting carried just barely into range by a party member who could do short teleports) destroying her summons which were set to dish out a full party wipe within another round.
It made for some excellent cinema, but it felt more like it was in spite of the system rather than because of it.
I think I’ll just stick with 5e.
A simple 6x time modifier (short rests require 6 hours, long rests require 2 days, 10day week = 3 days active, 2 days long rest as the standard, spell durations of 1 minute or more have their effects raised to the next highest duration, 1 minute duration spells end early after 10 rounds of combat) and suddenly the game becomes much more grounded/”gritty realism” without really having to change anything other than the encounter rate and what conveniences are available.
Much easier to justify a single encounter every 1-3 days than it is to justify every 1-3 hours. Even a basic CR encounter is much more impactful when at the end of the day you only recover a few hit dice instead of everything.
My poor character climbed through a window in order to attack an enemy. That was the day I learned what an Attack of Opportunity was.
One of my players was a Wizard, who went off by himself during a drugs bust, leaving behind the Arcanist, Fighter, and squad of NPCs. Two cultists with a pocketful each of inflict wounds later, he was down and not doing so hot on the death saves. In comes the rest of the party, Fighter drawing away the cultists and Arcanist settling down to do ‘medicine’.
‘Wizard,’ says the Arcanist’s player, ‘My character is very arrogant and believes in her work more than the shop-bought potion. Would it be OK to use the Random Potion she made today instead of this standard Potion of Healing?’ The other player agreed, and the Arcanist duly fed her struggling comrade an experimental Potion of Barkskin just in time for the third failed death save to carry him away into the Great Beyond.
They donated his body to the local hospital.