Player Character Death Avoidance 101
Posted by: Ruel Knudson in Developer Blog, Personal PostSometimes I like to break away from development posts and just get back to good old fashioned gaming thoughts. While a couple days late on the post, I really had very little to report. The CRM is still getting some problems fixed, and with no real news breakers on when it can be finished. So in this post, I want to talk about combat in E-RPG. Most to the point, I want to talk about damage and death, and mortality of player characters.One of the things that is hard to impress on new players is how mortal your characters are. E-RPG was not designed to simply be one good hit can kill you kind of game. Actually, that’s not true. It is more true to say that we designed a combat system that is dramatic because of the mortality involved. While you can get killed in a good hit, or at the least incapacitate, it is not built that way simply to make things hard, or even more realistic (which it is). It is designed to add some drama to combat encounters.
Unlike most RPGs there is no gamist mechanic that grants your PC some magical or otherwise convoluted reason why your character suddenly becomes able to absorb more damage in the game. Your hit points are fixed to your toughness, which doesn’t change simply due to experience (you can raise toughness but that is seldom done). Instead, your characters advance in skill, and you as a player advance tactically in the game. You learn to fight better in the game, much like your character. As you play longer your character survives more because of what you do as a player in a combat encounter rather than simply stats becoming stronger.
However, there is still a serious risk of character death. This is not because one attack can kill. More exactly, a single attack can mortally wound your character, who then will likely die because of bleeding out, rather than a single all powerful attack. This is the fatal flaw to the players. They typically let their characters, or characters in the party, die for no reason other than they just seem to play it like they do any other game.
The truth is, combat is dangerous, but not necessarily deadly. It becomes deadly through player action. In a sample scenario you can imagine a party of characters in a battle where one party member takes a serious hit. Lets say this hit causes a wound and the character is knocked unconscious and is bleeding out. That is usually the line in the sand and most players simply give up and let the player die. This is unnecessary and not really what I, as a designer, was going for. Instead, a single mortally wounded character doesn’t just die off. Instead, the entire party’s combat encounter just changed dramatically.
In a real world scenario when a comrade is wounded badly one or two members of the party (squad/unit/whatever) breaks off to administer aid to that fallen person. If it is really bad one of two things happen. Number one, aid is called for and the group gets to a defendable position where the fallen person can be helped and only a single person or a small part of the group has to defend. When aid comes the group is evacuated and the fallen soldier is given aid. In another scenario, where one or more characters is mortally wounded, the entire group is likely to surrender the encounter. This may mean throwing down arms and being taken captive. It is not ideal, but one usually expects the captors to help mortally wounded captives. There is a hundred reasons why one can expect this, and they usually can. I won’t get into to those reasons though, as we are not discussing that yet.
The point is that the character is always given a chance to live. Sometimes the wounds or too severe. However, in all expectation a single wounded soldier can mean the failure of that combat encounter. This is because no one wants to see their comrades simply die in order to finish trading a few blows with an enemy. Ideally, in a tactical sense, the party is stronger, even in captivity, than they would be continuing the fight with a comrade dying.
When it comes right down to it, there is rarely ever a conflict that absolutely must be a life and death situation. Total party kills should be exceedingly rare as well. A story should not be derailed because a simple encounter went horribly wrong and the party had to escape. For these reasons and more one should not simply let a character die in the middle of combat when it can usually be avoided.
So why do we? Well, part of it is gaming habit. We usually play in the same fashion as the first game we ever played. So if that game had escalating hit points, such as in D&D and other games, we tend to fall back on the idea that our characters can survive 3-4 hits before getting killed. In truth, some E-RPG characters can, but most cannot. Secondly is the idea that the story was already written. This means that an encounter is likely just some quick point of action until you get to the real battle later. Therefore, that small encounter shouldn’t be lethal or too dangerous, and it most certainly is not something you can flee from. Some of us Game Masters, don’t even know how to write an adventure where the characters don’t win in a minor encounter. This is all because of other games we played. You know the kind. These are the games where you battle through a room of goblins, then move to the very next room to kill an ogre, then move on to the next, and so on. Combat has no meaning other than to be a quick commercial break for the game while you are playing it.
This is the ultimate problem. Combat has little real meaning in most situations, and is a fundamental flaw in most gaming habits. The reason is simple, when combat has no point, why is there a point to having combat? Is it really fun when you have to squash one group after another over and over again? While the answer could be yes, my preferred answer is that one single dramatic combat event with potential for death, disaster, or failure is much more appealing than a whole gaggle of the former simply because it offers so much more to all of the players.
But does it have to be this way with E-RPG? No, not really. I have run dungeon running variants of the game where characters have a skill called Endurance, or Vitality or some such that is added to their toughness value to determine life points. In this, the game plays much more like a standard RPG and you get the kick in the door gaming experience. E-RPG is versatile like that. But in original and default design combat is something your group should fear. This is because at the end of the encounter there is victory in just surviving and true triumph in winning the encounter.
I mean, truly, how many games do you play where your character ends the combat encounter barely holding onto consciousness, bleeding from a wound, and clutching their weapon in a limp hand after a simple bandit ambush? When that character killed 2 or more and you feel a sense of real accomplishment? How many game systems let you take the credit for it over a simple use of a die roll and a combination of skills or feats? How many game systems give you a sense of really surviving a fight in the game?
Many may do it, but I know E-RPG does. I know because I have lost characters over the smallest of encounters, and I have had characters that never should have survived do so because we as a party found one tactical advantage that turned the entire tide. I was there when one of the players in my group had a character leaning against the wall slipping into death from a bullet wound while I held back the attackers, frantically calling for the others to come and get us out. I was there when we got out. I was there when we went back, all of us, and enacted a heavy revenge on those attackers.
And I remember each and every time my character survived an encounter and how that felt. I remember talking about for hours afterwards with my wife. They were, and still are, among the most dramatic and energizing moments in my gaming history. We lost some battles in trying to survive, but the game was just as fun. We lost some characters because winning the battle was to important at the time, and those characters were a willing sacrifice to the overall victory. Not a single one was taken lightly, but every survival, and every death, added more to the game.
