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Knight
 
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| Well this topic has come up on a number of occasions so I thought I would start a thread. I am willing to admit that I may be out of date with my opinions and people dont have a problem with this anymore. What are the pros and cons? Early on in my career in LRP I was killed by other players and killed some in return. At the time I used the excuse that I was an evil character and that made it ok. But did it really? How much time money and effort did those i killed put into their characters? There are loads of benefits to not having players kill other players - at least not permanently anyway. I will wait to see what people say then add my thoughts afterwards. I will say this - almost every club/organization in LRP/LARP, since it began, has stated that the most important thing is to have fun. How much fun really is it to be killed by another player. If you are on opposing sides and both have equal opportunities and you know in advance that it could happen then maybe thats ok. But even then when it actually happens and you have to start a new character and/or wait for hours before you can join in again, is that fun? Is that what you wanted out of your weekend? Everyone has a favorite character, how would you feel if 5 people got together on your next event and murdered you? ok lets see what everyone has to say. Mark/SFB
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I do talk a good fight
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There's a concept in modern RPG design of "spotlight time". That is, it's fun when your character is the centre of attention. These days, most of us enjoy getting "spotlight time" by something other than being the only character in the game who can pull the arm off a Balrog and beat it to death with the smouldering end -- mostly 'cos we've long since realised that "hardest fighter" or "most powerful wizard" only have limited places (1 per game!) and we'd ALL like to feel special.
Having a spectacular death is one of my favourite ways of getting spotlight time. This is especially the case if my enemies have gone to a great deal of time & trouble over several events to cause my death (e.g. when I was caught, given a sham trial, sentenced to death by guillotining, legged it, got caught again, got guillotined, and then got eaten by Gnolls; the funeral was quite neat too, afterwards, and the arguments with messengers of the Gods and various priests over who was going to get my soul), and if I've done everything within my power to avoid it, although there is a huge amount of satisfaction in getting a spectacular death in which I was basically just in the wrong place at the wrong time, too (kicked to death by a mob? I win, again!). I've also enjoyed dying when it was just really funny (there was this time at Shards when... oh, never mind, it'd take too long to explain). Plus the "sacrifice yourself to save the rest of your group" death is good.
BTW, Mark, I'll be replying to your PM shortly... had a bit of a mad week at work, so not had much time to think, let alone reply.
http://www.hyboriantales.com
PD: Ghostdance ("The most irritating curse I've ever encountered" -- NPC played by H.)
Riftworld: Rossar Kuug ("Clearly mad, because he thinks he's a Com-Trow Skirmisher" - Aela)
Hyborian Tales: Crew, cook, dogsbody, general labourer, toilet cleaner ("Dangerously overoptimistic ref" -- Tom Nowell)
Otherwise usually crew ("Quite spry & fit, & willing to wear a big costume & run around a lot" -- various event organisers)
"My other oversized foam weapon is THE LORD" -- Questionable Content
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Heroic Knight
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| I've ye tot be killed by another PC, its verry rare inteh system I've played most and other systems i've played/playign it hasnt happened yet, althought i expect it will. Having said that i wouldnt mind being killed IC by a PC without that danager in the game it removes some of the oo got to be carful of X person or group. It also is risk vs reward, you'll tend to find if you after somthign valuable your putting yourself in contention with outers and so theres a higher change of getting killed. So for me if everyone knows the stakes and it comes to it killing somone would be on the cards, however if i thought somone really didnt know the stakes or and it was an iffy IC situation i would probally hold back or leave them in a state where theres a change they could be saved.
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Eos: Sornasian: Gregory Patell Club Secretary Heroes and Heroines
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Overlord
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| Speaking as the architect of Ian's death in the guillotine case, it being a couple of years ago now, I can add a little to that. As I see it its the responsibility of anyone who decides to kill characters to a) do it absolutely right by the rules (you owe it to every other person who ever died) and b) entertain them in the best possible way as their consent is essential to the spirit of the game. The last character I lost I was very annoyed about for a combination of circumstances, I look back on the situation now and realise I was wrong to feel that way. I had flu at the time, a high temperature and had bust a gut to achieve something which I had just got agreed. I then made a bad choice of route back to my tent and got jumped. The guys who got me are good friends and there are no hard feelings whatsoever. Murder and theft are part of all roleplaying experiences. To make a good fest I think its essential to have players competing with each other and one of the tools of this competition is assassination. Maelstrom has managed to engender an excellent atmosphere amongst its players in relation to character death as most people see being killed as a high compliment (which it is) and an opportunity to play something else in a really rich gameworld.
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Wag
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Generally speaking, I think the style and rule system of the game play a large part in how much fun killing other characters is or isn't. My impression of the older LRP clubs (I only started LRPing in '96) is that they tended to display two main features.
1) Advancements systems allowed the creation of characters who were effectively unkillable by less powerful characters.
2) The majority of significant interactions were between players and NPCs.
I've never played any significant number of games in a system where advancement eventually rendered you unkillable by less powerful characters, but I've heard of it in a number of "club" systems. The table top heritage of roleplaying gives a strong bias towards systems where "high level" characters are virtual super-heroes. While I prefer PvP games by preference I believe it would be significantly less enjoyable to be killed by a character who was simply so much more powerful than I was that any form of resistance was effectively meaningless. I think a lot of the sentiment that "PKing is bad" is derived from systems in which more powerful characters have or could kill less powerful characters with minimal risk or come back. That tends to lead to a strong perception of unfairness and lack of game balance in addition, I suspect, to detracting from the enjoyment of having your character killed.
In most club LRP the significant interactions are between the PCs and the NPCs. It's nice if the PCs roleplay with each other, but the plot of the game unfolds through the interaction between the PCs and the "encounters" - the NPCs. Killing other PCs simply disrupts the exciting story that has been created. By killing another character in these kind of games, you generally achieve nothing except stealing any items they have, and you disrupt the story for everyone.
I think Fest LRP tend to turn both these issues around. Most "larger" events that I have been involved with or played have either not used any advancement system or else have opted for systems that gave small edges over time, or improved offensive powers over defensive powers, with the net result that a couple of characters can generally kill anyone in the system if they get the drop. That tends to mitigate or remove the "unfairness" issues about killing or being killed, so much so, that in my experience the complaints tend to be biased towards how unfair it is that experienced characters can be so easily killed by "random muggers" which is another way of saying "powerful characters" can be too easily killed by "powerless characters".
Critically however, the larger the player base the less often you are going to interact with an NPC and the more often you are going to interact with other PCs. I think the tipping point comes somewhere between 100 and 200 players personally. Below that level you can throw so much plot at an event that a player can almost still spend their time interacting with "plot". Above that point, this becomes impossible and overwhelmingly the most common form of interaction is one between PCs. This leads to major problems for larger events, with one of two possible solutions.
1) Make the plot so large and visible, that everyone can see it from miles away - the 9 o'clock news plot, the camp attacks. This kind of solution is quite common for large events but tends to lead to people being frustrated that the plot is visible and you can be affected by it, but you can't affect it. It becomes like watching the 9 o'clock news on your television.
2) Make the interaction between the players the significant and exciting part of the game. Since this is the interaction that will be happening all the time in your game, and filling up the majority of the event, you design the system to make this interaction competitive and interesting - the PvP solution.
Personally I overwhelmingly prefer to play (and hence to run) games that pursue the second option. I find it extraordinarily rare for an NPC to have as good a grasp of his own background as a PC, NPC kit is occasionally as good as PC kit, but usually not and the motivations of NPCs are simply never as complex, convincing or challenging as those of PCs. For me, the interaction with NPCs is like watching panto, whereas the interaction with PCs is like watching real theatre. Of course there are ways to mitigate these problems to a degree, giving NPCs greater flexibility and autonomy, all of which boil down to the simple self-defeating solution - the more like PCs you make your NPCs the more enjoyable it becomes to interact with them. When expressed in that form, the logical conclusion of the approach is rather obvious, just get rid of the NPCs altogether and replace them with PCs...
There are countless disadvantages to PvP, it most certainly isn't a perfect approach to LRP, but in my experience it produces a richer and more deep experience in large games (hundreds upwards) than other approaches. Is it fun to be killed - you bet your bottom dollar it is - getting killed by another character is the big finale, the show-down, the last chapter in your very own personal story and it's an epic experience. The key here is to appreciate that in a system where the meaningful interactions are between you and other PCs, where the story is completely emergent and comes out of the interactions between PCs, then the plot is the conflict between you and those other PCs. Getting killed by one (or killing another PC) is a tense, adrenalin filled, emotionally charged experience that often has massive repercussions.
I've been killed half a dozen times in fest LRP games and it's usually been a pretty cool experience. Some better than others and a few were only mediocre, but generally the ones that didn't rock were the ones that involved NPCs in some way... I've never been taken out by PCs as a result of something my PC did and not had the resulting death be enjoyable enough to be in my top ten best moments from LRP ever.
In the end I think it's very important to be clear about what kind of game you are running. Running a good "club" game takes a lot of skill and experience. Likewise running a good PvP event involves a lot more than just "not putting in any camp attacks at 9 oclock". In practice I think this goes for all aspects of an LRP game, style and genre and so forth. A clear mental picture of how the game will work, what parts of the game will be enjoyable and why. LRP is a sort of holistic thing and I think a game needs to have a "soul" which is the experience it's selling. If the soul of the game is built around a PvP experience than having your character killed is going to be a hell of a high for those players who like that kind of game. If you like to slay monsters, rescue damsels and recover lost treasures then I suspect you'll hate it, but if your game is one of rescuing monsters, slaying damsels and ensuring treasures stay lost you'll probably love getting killed.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Initiate
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Last Login: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 7:20 PM
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| Killing someone else’s character is perfectly acceptable to me in the grim reality (kind of) of most game worlds people will die constantly. If your were fiercely anti-undead and a player in your group became a vampire could you honestly say your character would not kill them. If you can't die in a system, what’s the point in playing it? At this point it stops being role-playing and starts being a bunch of people hitting each other and shouting there is no point upgrading your character because you won't die no matter what. You can't loot people without killing them (without some form of skill) and isn't that half the fun. I like the idea in some systems if you try to make your character more powerful than others there’s always a risk. For example rituals in LT. At least that’s my opinion.
Semper Fidelis - you'll learn what it means.
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Heroic Knight
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to be honest i think as I've gone though my LARP carear my attitued has changed. When i started it was much more about gaining advantages, skill and items becomming more powerful and dying would have effected me more and so being killed by a PC would have probally been alot worse. However as my attitueds have changed and its more about the experiences and so dying is another experience PC or NPC
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Eos: Sornasian: Gregory PatellClub Secretary Heroes and Heroines
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Apprentice
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| I like the chance to kill and be killed by other players. It adds the element of fear and danger to the world that makes it seem that much more real, and this in turn causes players to strive for something to help kill others and/or stay alive. It might be allies, magic weapons, divine intervention or whatever but all of this causes players to have a reason to interact with one another and so increase the amount of roleplay at an event. If you can effectively become safe from death simply by hanging around with other players and avoiding the 2 o'clock gribblies then I think the world seems less real, to me at least. The ever present threat of death from other players keeps people on their to | | | |