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Overlord
 
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markst (4/30/2008)
Monsters should follow the brief that they are given however what sort of ref would tell monsters to attack players that were down? Before everyone starts replying to this bit only I know there are situations where it should happen but I guess we are talking about as a general rule here and not the exception.I would. I don't use the term "monster" for the games I run. IMHO it has a bit of a stigma attached to it, in that the perception of a "monster character" is that they are very two dimensional - there to entertain primarily and be a realistic character second. I don't like this type of character as I think it runs counter to NPCs having believeable agendas. As far as I am concerned the general rule should be "kill or be killed" if you are going to run any kind of encounter where there is likely to be combat and the best way to do that is to kill the players off before a healer can get to them. I hate the idea of pulling the plot characters back in any way at all. If the players can kill them, then they should have just the same options. I wouldn't want the referees involved in any kind of imprecise state with regards to death. Final death counts and moments to bleed out are great, but they need to be the same rule for everyone. We had a lovely moment at the very first Maelstrom where a member of my group bled to death in the arms of the healer who had got to him too late, but that was under a standard set of rules, with no need for a ref at all - as the player knew precisely what the drill was. As a general rule IMHO, ref intervention should be kept at a minimum to preserve the game state.
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Wag
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markst (4/30/2008)
Monsters should follow the brief that they are given however what sort of ref would tell monsters to attack players that were down? Before everyone starts replying to this bit only I know there are situations where it should happen but I guess we are talking about as a general rule here and not the exception.
I think the mistake is the (implicit?) suggestion that there ought to be a general rule - "What _ought_ fruit to taste like? Should they taste like lemons or like oranges?". It seems obvious to me that lemons should taste like lemons and sit in a box labelled "lemons" and oranges likewise. We don't need to have a vote and decide which fruit is correct - as long as there's people selling different fruit, people can buy what they like (I'm eating a Dragonfruit - disappointingly, it tastes like a rather bland kiwi fruit).
The idea that there's a "correct" choice is unhelpful because it leads organisers to think that they don't need to communicate/advertise the game because it's obvious that it'll be run the "correct" way and players to assume that's how a game will run rather than actually checking the documentation to see whether that it is or not. It's hard to see how anyone benefits from that.
Marios
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Wag
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markst (4/30/2008)
Monsters should follow the brief that they are given however what sort of ref would tell monsters to attack players that were down?
Many years ago, I used to run a local club game. We had "bad" orcs (being orcs who had signed up for the cause of evil with a capital E) and merely troublesome orcs (who were orcs who weren't bad but had merely had a bad upbringing). To differentiate evil orcs from merely troublesome orcs part of the brief was that they killed players who were down. Not in a sort of drop everything to murder someone even when your enemy is trying to kill you, but in a sort of "this PC's down, his mates are nowhere near me, I'll make sure he doesn't get up again." The orcs knew damn well the party had magical healing, they weren't meant to be stupid. I felt it would have been difficult to rationalize why they weren't briefed to coup de grace.
Beyond rationale arguments, it used to make a very effective encounter. Bad orcs had the same stats as any other orc, but they had attitude and the party feared them and took them down with all available firepower because they were scary. They weren't there to fight and lose and die, they were out to murder you. In your sleep if they got the chance.
They weren't the only thing in the system like that, it was a "forces of light vs darkness" setting and pretty much everything that was in the darkness camp was going to cut your throat if it got half a chance.
Before everyone starts replying to this bit only I know there are situations where it should happen but I guess we are talking about as a general rule here and not the exception.
I think we're definitely talking general rules here. Personally I'd agree with earlier posts that it all comes down to the style of game that you are running.
There is a tabletop game rpg called Feng Shui which has the concept of a mook - as I understand it, it's someone whose function is to die at the hands of the party to show how cool they are. I have to say I really hate mooks in LRP. Nothing spoils my sense of the heroic more than the nagging suspicion that my enemies weren't really trying to kill me. But it's all a matter of taste.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Cold Water and Brass Tacks
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| Like most battles it would be perfectly acceptable to return to downed players when the rest of the standing ones are dealt with and then kill them. Usually the immeadiate threat takes your attention. In most fantasy worlds any intelluigent monster group would check anyone who looked like a healer downed (even during combat) to ensure it actually was dead. You get caught by monsters mkoving or stuffing potions down your throat whilst being down and you deserve your death. Of course I also expect monsters to play dead IC if they are intelligent.
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Champion
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Feng shui is primarily based on action movies, a genre where if you are a plot relevant named character you are automatically more tough than a random goon, and any fights with such are mostly for flavour (of course, the good guys can have random mooks on their side too). From running feng shui the concept does work quite well in that it mirrors the genre the game is based on, but I agree, its not much fun in most LRP settings.
I think it entirely depends on the brief. At a CP event I attended we were monstering as deranged cannibals and so the brief was 'if you get a player down by himself and nobody else is around or a threat then you eat him' - quite frankly, playing cannibals that are going out to kill people in order to eat them and then proceed to ignore downed people would be rubbish.
In almost all LRP systems, going down does not mean that you have a high likely-hood of death, and so any NPC antagonist with an ounce of sense would take an opportunity to finish off an enemy rather than have them get picked up once they've wandered off. It stands to reason that if you're trying to kill somebody (which presumably they are if weapons are drawn) then you do it properly. But then many games aren't realistic (even if they try to be) and it comes down to what kind of game you want to run.
At another game I crewed the players were getting hammered so badly that at one point there was only 2 characters standing - and because of this the crew pretty much backed off - which ok it meant that there wasn't a total party wipe-out, but had I been one of the players I'd have found it really jarring and probably would rather have died.
------
PD - Machupa Kivull - Sandy coloured great-coated Gnoll
Shards/Ascendancy - Crew
FOIP is short for 'torture me for more info'
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Prodigal
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| I think the best (general) solution to this problem is to allow players to be attacked on the floor but not allow a quick and trival throat slit option. e.g. allow hit points to go to zero but not minus, and rule a coup to grace takes 30 seconds. One reason why I like this is it deters the 'play dead' tactic, which is very abusive in a setting were monsters don't attacked downed players. If hit points don't go beflore zero, it does not do extra harm if the monsters put an extra blow or two in to 'make sure.' For another variant on this: Riftworld doesn't allow an execute at all (everyone gets a death count, if they want one) but does allow people to go to massive negative hit points (making actualy saving them more expensive), and has a rule that any location below -6 halves the death count (but it's still 2 1/2 minutes).
------ <insert really amusing sig here>
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Prodigal
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At CUTT we're currently thinking of changing our death system (currently you die if your head or torso go to -3, the new proposed system is (roughly) that you can't go below -1 and you bleed out after two minutes on -1), because people aren't very fond of random deaths to monsters on linears, which has led us in the past to brief the majority of monsters not to hack people up on the ground and to hold back on using high damage calls on monsters which might instakill standing people.
However, it does have the problem that people do like PvP to be reasonably easy, and the current best way to get someone killed is to go on an adventure with them and hack them up on the ground, which currently takes not very much time at all if you have any kind of damage-dealing ability (almost everyone does). We're applying a band-aid to the problem with a 10-second execute mechanic, but again we have to restrict that to PCs and 'important NPCs' instead of monsters being able to do it, and it's still longer and more obvious than 'runs over to check if the person is alive, quietly shivs them a couple of times in the chest, announces loudly that they unfortunately died'.
(also if monsters can't randomly kill people so easily, it's less plausible that the person on the floor was dead when their assailant got to them)
I'm not really sure how to fix this, though. Possibly our social contract is just too self-contradictary to be embodied in our rules.
Maelstrom: Jessily the Wemic, previously Tourmaline of Weaver
CUTT: Kerriville the Ninth, previously Ref 07/08
EOS: Study the Venin
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Knight
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| Should they attack downed players? It all depends on the situation, If they have the time/safety to check bodies then YES they should do so. But I would love to see a move away from the "loc them" mindset that I am noticing everywhere. Just "stick" them a couple of times with your knife to make sure they are dead/unconc, dont start to butcher the corpses pointlessly to take advantage of a system mechanic that states if "every location is on XXX then the character is insta-dead" (unless you are playing something that would take part in such a brutal and bloody act). I can see why some systems have the "no hitting downed pcs" rule, it does help provide a set level of skill for the NPCs to go by. Which is quite handy if you do not have the luxury of tailoring every NPC role to a sepcific member of crew, its even more handy when you take into account that some players/crew are unable/unwilling to handicap themselves to fit a NPC role (seriously I have no idea why it is some people are unable to fight "baddly" when needed..though it does make me laugh when people are suprised that different characters/NPCs I have played have differing abilities with weapons/reasoning/speed of thought). There are few occasions I have been asked or had to use my full abilities in an NPC/monster role,saddly it seems that a lot of systems only want crew to use their full abilities when it comes down to "Hard" encounters, the type where the phrase "dont worry about killing a few" is often said...You know the type, its evening the players have managed to mince everything thats hitting them, or are hiding in a building/defended posistion, and the REF type thinks the players need to feel fear so the "death bunnies" are sent out to bring back a few scalps/character cards... I have yet to see a healing type NPC be given the brief "play to the fullest of your abilities"..MORE NINJA HEALERS SAY I! 
Maelstrom: Christian Summers. LT: Thanos Wyrmfoe Orcsbane Gereshen. Aberddu: Many...
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