I got involved with (what was) (a year ago) the (poorly named) York D&D Meetup. Now it’s called Toronto Area Gamers (”TAG”), and we absorbed the active members of TRMA and a boardgame meetup. We have a monthly social (20ish people) at the Yellow Griffin pub to try to break the ice and keep in touch with the people who are on different schedules or live in different areas of the city.

Toronto…. rolplaying… m> Association?

Your group sounds a lot like ours, although better at getting games running, and less accidental expansionism.

Were you guys ever involved in the recently-ended TRMA?

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?

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).

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.