Does it feel different in IAWA when characters just don’t make it on the We Owe list and never reoccur in the game? When they just walk off, without a sunset, just because they weren’t important enough to matter, does it still sometimes hurt or feel weird? Or do you not grow attached to them enough to need a real ending?

I’ll admit that I differ from you; I feel the complete power over the end of my character’s story TSoY gives me is, as they say, radical to the max. My perspective is that there is no character story whose ending cannot be narrated according to that rule. If the character had some Deal that they needed to eventually accomplish (become king, take revenge, rescue true love), then they do it (or we agree that they will very soon). If they didn’t have some deal, then they do whatever you want, whether it’s retiring in comfort or continuing to patrol the streets of Gotham. You can determine as much of their life as you can, including anything you like, except for yourself. I can certainly understand wanting to feel in control of when you stop being a part of your characters life: it’s almost like a close friend suddenly leaving. But isn’t that what the Secret I mentioned is for? Just play until that perfect moment arrives, when you say “This, for certain, I want to be the last roll my character makes.”

The presumption already is that I will play more than one RPG in my life, and therefore that this particular character will not be played forever. Setting some kind of end for that character, and making me roll with it, control it, use it to create something amazing, is a mechanic I like.

In Houses of the Blooded, characters age! As long as you keep playing, every single one will inevitably die (or something similar)! I love the idea of facing/overcoming/being changed by the difficulties that come with a ticking clock and aging body, but I’m interested in your opinion. The game is designed such that when I “tell the story of my character or tell the story my character is part of,” I include the issues of coming of age, marriage, and producing an heir, just as the stories of the dangerously sexy ancient barbarian-aristocrats of Houses necessarily require. Isn’t the same thing at work with the pulp sword-and-sorcery aesthetic of IaWA, TSoY, and others? Don’t those stories necessarily include characters eventually wandering off-stage and others wandering on?

That’s an open question. That is, I could be very wrong, since (a) I haven’t played or even read In a Wicked Age, (b) I’ve read very little of the original S&S fiction, and (c) you might not think so!

Part of the reason for the (minor) hack on the TSOY thing is that TSOYs rule exists for a reason as part of the setting and tone the game wants to set. The Secret of the Bodhisattva does let individual characters opt out of that, at a price. (You have to take Harm to roll dice to reduce your level of success.) That works well for TSOY.

But when I was porting the system to the 7th Sea game Mo talks about, I wanted something different out of the system and for the setting. One of the things we deal with a lot in the game is fate and being, quite literally, “Fortune’s Fool.” So we made a new rule that, instead of ending the character’s story for a level 7 success, instead complicates and (perhaps) redirects it. You don’t hit level 7 and end your story, you hit level 7 and have some whack crazy shit happen because Fate has boned you.

This applies, btw, to both PCs and NPCs. It also has a secret that lets you opt out of it if you like. (No one has taken it.) The rule was redesigned not just to keep PCs from being removed from game, but to invoke a different effect. That it kept PCs from being removed was a secondary concern.

The other issue, with ending a character, is that certainly we all end characters eventually. No character lasts forever (save Batman). But there is a difference between crafting an end to a character and having a character ended by a random roll. Sometimes, and for some players, you can do both. For others you can’t. Or sometimes you could, but really might not want to.

Mo, as it happens, can — but really doesn’t want to have to make up stuff to justify why her character is now done because of random rolls. She’d rather tell that part of the story with the other people at the table in a more gestalt manner.

The object on the table, I think, is less “I don’t want characters to end” and more “I don’t want random dice to make my character end before I am ready for it to happen.”

I totally identify with what you’re talking about. Though sometimes I can just “fall into” a character really quickly, sometimes it takes a session or two to really get a handle on them.

Aside from the “what would -really- happen” factor of gaming, as an argument for random character death, there’s also this funny backward thinking that sometimes is applied…

“Well, in fiction, movies, tv shows, etc. sometimes characters are killed off without you getting to really know them”, which tends to ignore the factor that the writer(s) haven’t spent hours upon hours on this -one character- to have them pulled- they have a cast of characters they’re working with, and for the most part, know which characters will be focal and which ones will be supporting cast. Creators of fiction have multiple avenues of input, which are not cut off on random, like many game mechanics do.

I think games like Primetime Adventures hits closest to the mark- there are no rules for character death. It is simply assumed that a primary protagonist is part of the story until the author (the player) decides they no longer want them there. The core conflict isn’t about survival, survival is a prerequisite to actually having the chance -to- explore the core conflict.

For me, this kind of thinking was a big part of how I’m designing Emperor’s Heart. Character death is really hard to get if you really don’t want it. Though, it exists as sort of a temptation- risking your character for death makes you more effective in conflicts, which is classic to the genre- heroes burn brightest before dying.

I think there’s lots of unexplored options to making character death, or removal, serves stories better, but it’s going to require a lot of shift in thinking about what rpgs are about, and how stories are structured.

What Brand says, below.

I think that I don’t need TSoY to let me feel that complete power over my character’s death because I’m empowered with that feeling already. Now that said, the games I’m specifically referencing are solo games, so I’m not having to mitigate other PC’s desires as I play. I think in that case, I might like to *buy* a “Secret of Transcendence” to invoke that story when the time was right but still wouldn’t want it occurring “randomly” out of a dice roll.

I just thought of another way to illustrate: I’m not fond of these mechanics because they feel like the game is asserting that it knows what makes a better (or “more correct”) kind of story than I do, even though Brand and I are the story’s (fully competent) co-authors. The mechanical system has no ability to actually evaluate the state of the fiction and no humanity to gauge how fulfilled a drama it is while Brand and I totally do.

Good point about the intent-full quality of “random” or “premature” character death in media. Your core conflict observations too.

Now, what you suggest, the system pulling you, tempting you to shove your character down the road towards death is also a very different thing for me. It underlines genre conventions or shapes the quality of the story without making that same assumption that it it knows better than you do when the time is right for that to happen.

It can also serve excitingly the opposite way as a gating system, helping to calibrate the quality and depth of a dramatic situation before the road is taken.

I think there’s lots of unexplored options to making character death, or removal, serves stories better, but it’s going to require a lot of shift in thinking about what rpgs are about, and how stories are structured.

Absolutely.

Random death is tagential to that- it can completely rip away the good/meaningful stuff the group was building.

A backdoor trick to EH is that players often play multiple characters- if you find that you’re not as invested in your Hero as a supporting character- risk your Hero ASAP, get them killed, then take the supporting character as your Hero in the next scene… In other words, if you find your emotional investment lies elsewhere, character death is a step towards fulfilling that.

I know exactly what Mo is talking about here, but I don’t always feel the same. Sometimes, in well designed games (say, Dogs) I find that the “random character death” isn’t actually random at all. Its an issue that comes as a result of choices with known risks, and shows something about the character in a very real way.

However, it also often works best for shorter run games and games in which there is a story or theme, rather than character, focus. Its an emergent vs. gestalt thing as well, and Mo and I often split over that one.

From curiosity - in the context of this stuff, how do you feel about mechanical mandates of *serious transformation*, as opposed to removal? As couple examples:

1) Imagine if upon character death, you always became a ghost, but were not out of play.

2) Imagine if, in DitV, all the fallout conditions were ways to radically *reverse* the meanings of traits.

How would those hit you?

From my read of the rules, 2 zero dice to mean out definitively dead or out of the story - just out of the chapter (too injured, too exhausted, or too humiliated to continue). Where the rules are slippery, IMO, is who gets to say which outcome happened. It’s either the winner or the loser of the final conflict, or an agreement between them. If you interpret it as the agreement, which is what we do, you get to decide when your character really goes down for the count.

Would that help?

Nope. I totally feel empowered in IAWA to describe how the down for the count goes down, but what I’m addressing here is more that I am forced out of play (for this game and possibly forever if I’m not on the WOL) due to an arbitrary mechanical process.

It’s the unpleasant thing Vincent’s intentionally trying to impose. It makes it interesting to me from a design perspective and undesirable for me as a player. Where characters go out in my games, it’s via vigorous creative agreement.

It’s really context dependant depending on the fit of the solution and the scope of it relative to the fiction. It might be better, but still, the mechanical mandate of it is not likely to be desirable for me. I’ve never met a mechanic that did emotional calibration in a game better than my group’s own skills do. This isn’t too surprising considering how delicate a nd personal thing emotional calibration is and how intimate our home group is. I’d be shocked (and delighted!) to come across one that did.

There’s a TON of voluntary and spontaneous stuff like you’re talking about that goes on in our games. While we don’t play ghost stuff much, that situation in Dogs has happened in our games. Traits go dormant (or conflicted!) as new contradictory fallout traits are earned, and sometimes we’ll actually change a trait in reflection to do that (though the rules don’t support that, I know).

I’m wondering about what Vincent said about the rules providing the thing no one wants. Is there any other game where the game provides pressure on you without that pressure ultimately relating to removal from play?