On 8 March 2017 at 01:16, Tim <xxxxxx@little-possums.net> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 07, 2017 at 09:47:48AM +0000, Timothy Collinson wrote:
> We had an interesting discussion in the car on the way home about
> the merits and demerits of games where there was a high chance of
> dying and games with much less chance.  It was generally agreed that
> the former were a bit depressing and some referees known for that
> were avoided.  But at the same time there needed to be some threat
> or the tension wasn't there.

Tension doesn't have to come from threat of death.  The most tense
moments I've had in games were mostly from situations where death was
not a remotely likely outcome.

I quite agree - although I'm not good at designing such!
 

Even when there is a threat of death, it doesn't take a high
probability of dying to create a lot of tension.  Just knowing that
it's possible at all is usually enough.

Although having said that, I finished my adventure this year with a rescue from a Far Trader who's 'drive coils' (or some such) had failed and couldn't get out of the gravity well.  I had a time guesstimate from the Engineer about total failure and then various tasks that required doing (from matching course and attempting fixes or evacuating passengers etc), not helped by failed piloting tasks adding to the 'buffeting' and the risk of injury.  The pressure on the PCs seemed to work as a climax - although of course death was a possibility if they didn't evacuate the stricken ship in time.


In fact, I often find sessions where death lies behind every roll of
the dice to be a bit dull and unsatisfying.  If I know that every
decision leads to a life-or-death roll anyway, that removes tension
rather than creating it.  My stupid emotional response doesn't care
whether the chance of character death is 5% or 40%, it just sees both
as ridiculously high, so from an emotional point of view it becomes a
constant that fairly quickly fades out into detachment.

I see what you mean.  I wasn't planning on adding it everywhere... ;-)
 

It doesn't help that in most game systems, that sort of situation is
where the rules become much more intrusive and the real:gameworld
timescale stretches to worse than 10:1, sometimes even beyond 100:1.
They become something like a poorly designed boardgame instead of a
role playing game.

Now that's interesting, as I often feel even a short combat session can come to dominate a four hour convention game out of all proportion to anything else.  Especially for those of us who aren't overly fussed.  I was hearing about one system that essentially reduced combat to *one* task type role and resolved it just like any other task the players might face.  Apparently it worked well.  I must follow up on asking what the system was and whether I might introduce it to my Traveller games.
 


> So given that in six years of TravCon - and 8 adventures, none of
> them military admittedly - I've not yet killed a PC - am I setting
> the bar too low?  How do folk weight such things?

I don't think there is a bar, but if there is then that certainly
isn't "too low".  The real measure is whether players came away from
the table thinking that it was a good game.  From all accounts, they
did.


I think so - always a little hard to judge but the second slot (on the Sunday) seemed to fill about as quickly as the first on Friday so it can't have been too bad!  I appreciate there's probably not an algorithm for such things but many thanks to everyone who have contributed thoughts as it's been helpful and got me thinking.


David wrote:
>Thank you for the TravCon after-action report, Tim!!! <*dead jealous again*>

I do know how you feel - I get that in October when the US one runs...

tc