"I want to go home."

Community Larp discussion
#21

[quote=“Ryan Paddy”][quote=“NickPitt”]PVP and PvE are very different things. I don’t go to a weekend game for a skirmish, I go because it’s ‘Live-Action RolePlaying’.

Dying happens, mostly at the hands of greeblies. If players kill each other, I only hope that it involves some majorly awesome rping. Can’t say I even vaguely agree with your ‘not often enough’ statement.[/quote]

Each larp is different, some are more PvE and some are more PvP. The original suggestion was in broad terms, not just about Teonn which happens to be the big fantasy larp at the moment.

I dunno if Teonn has set any specific expectations about this, but there is a culture in the Auckland fantasy larp community that PvP killings happen sometimes, and while it’s unlikely to be a random mugging (at least, not at any fantasy larp that’s run in Auckland to date) it won’t necessarily be a big moment that fits into your character’s dramatic arc either and you’ve just got to deal with any disappointment that brings. The players are not always assumed to always be one big team, even though that is sometimes the case as at St Wolfgangs.[/quote]

Absolutely, that’s perfectly reasonable. I was merely responding to an apparent request for more player casualties. Death happens when it happens in any game, we don’t need any more, or any less then what we already have from game to game.

My frustration regarding this came from a throw-away, pointed comment about GMs and the plots they weave. You’ve got it lucky in Auckland, so many awesome games happening all the time. If you don’t like the game, don’t play it. Just don’t whine about it.

#22

Well, saying things out while being very close certainly sounds ok :smiley: I thought you meant roleplaying stabbing in theatrical manner originally.

I like the idea of “as long as you have such a weapon on your person”, I think the ability to do stuff if you have skills or props for it (otherwise - no) is cool. That refers to stuff above as well, the discussion on different types of killing blows. Not sure though if this can be done as a “skill”. There was mention of cool healing, so you see, in St Wolfgang there WAS a skill to allow healer to grow people’s missing limbs again, but it was super high level and I am not actually sure if anyone ever took it at all. Maybe there can be a skill “assassin” and then “advanced assassin”, so that determines ability to kill quicker, e.g. without the skill if you kill someone they have 5 minutes to die, with the “assassin” skill it’s 30 seconds, and with “advanced assassin” it’s 5 seconds. :laughing:

#23

I love this idea, I’m sure it can’t ben too hard to make some rules around it.

I must say when you start dealing with undead, you do get into a habit of slicing throats. I did this at Teonn, any ‘dead’ foe that was lying their, it would i just lightly run my sword across their throat. I didn’t get any complaits that this was dangerous. Stabbing can be sometimes, so I tend to stick with slitting of throats. I think we can leave it up to players whether they think they can speak after this (shouldn’t be able to, but we already trust that people obey the spirit of the game).

#24

[quote=“NickPitt”][quote=“Ryan Paddy”][quote=“NickPitt”]PVP and PvE are very different things. I don’t go to a weekend game for a skirmish, I go because it’s ‘Live-Action RolePlaying’.

Dying happens, mostly at the hands of greeblies. If players kill each other, I only hope that it involves some majorly awesome rping. Can’t say I even vaguely agree with your ‘not often enough’ statement.[/quote]

Each larp is different, some are more PvE and some are more PvP. The original suggestion was in broad terms, not just about Teonn which happens to be the big fantasy larp at the moment.

I dunno if Teonn has set any specific expectations about this, but there is a culture in the Auckland fantasy larp community that PvP killings happen sometimes, and while it’s unlikely to be a random mugging (at least, not at any fantasy larp that’s run in Auckland to date) it won’t necessarily be a big moment that fits into your character’s dramatic arc either and you’ve just got to deal with any disappointment that brings. The players are not always assumed to always be one big team, even though that is sometimes the case as at St Wolfgangs.[/quote]

Absolutely, that’s perfectly reasonable. I was merely responding to an apparent request for more player casualties. Death happens when it happens in any game, we don’t need any more, or any less then what we already have from game to game.

My frustration regarding this came from a throw-away, pointed comment about GMs and the plots they weave. You’ve got it lucky in Auckland, so many awesome games happening all the time. If you don’t like the game, don’t play it. Just don’t whine about it.[/quote]

Whats that - ‘You don’t like the exact way the only fantasy larp currently running in Auckland is managed and you happen to not agree with my point of view? Well ain’t that just tough luck - better go pretend to be a vampire in a modern day soceity instead because thats exactly the same thing’

OR

I could post feedback and still go to things I want to go to and expect a grown up responce not “go and play somwhere else”

Thats almost a personal attack mate - any reason you are sugesting people should play elsewhere?

#25

And another thing.

My comment was not a throw away comment directed at a specific group of GM’s - This problem occurs alot in larps run in new zealand.

A larp I attended actually offered to resurect a dead character with plot because he was popular - I declined.

#26

Player character death can be a sensitive business.

For one thing, PCs are usually among the most important, memorable, and well developed aspects of a larp, and when they disappear the richness of the fictional world may seem diminished to other players and crew. This is especially true of well-established characters. The GMs may also have made plans around a PC that have to be dropped.

There is also a chance the player won’t continue playing your larp. This isn’t necessarily petulance. It may be that their character’s death presents them with a convenient time to try a different larp, or to take a break from larp. Or that they invested a lot into that character, and haven’t got the time/energy/money to do it again but don’t want to play an easier character. Regardless of the reasons, this can make a high mortality rate unattractive to GMs who want to grow their player base.

I think I agree with Adam on this one. Bringing back dead PCs as a GM fait accompli would damage the believability of a setting for me and feel meta-gamey. A better approach, as I reckon it, is for GMs to decide how much fatality they want in their larp, and then to design the setting, rules & briefings of players and crew with that in mind. That doesn’t give any fine control over exactly who and how many die, but I like it better that way. It feels more real and responsive to what’s happening in the game.

I like to think I never shied away from letting PCs die at Mordavia, and PvP killings were not uncommon. However, the high risk of character death at the game was well-advertised, the game had shades of horror about it and some greyish morality so it suited the theme. I can recall one or two times where a PC death was immediately overruled because the NPCs had failed to react to PC abilities or something, but even that kind of ret-conning generally only happened if there was a GM on hand able to give an instant ruling.

#27

My first larp ever was Reckonings, and is was bloody awesome. Bloody - quite literally 8) I died too, but it didn’t avert me from larping.

That’s a very one-off thing, methinks, sometimes just needs to be done. I had it in Pirates game, when the only healer didn’t turn up and I was made a healer instead, and two minutes into the game we ran into zombies and they killed me. GM’s “YOU KILLED THE ONLY HEALER!!!” yell totally broke the immersion because both crew and players fell out laughing. I was resurrected and we went on playing, for the rest of the game captain was keeping me behind the fighters. So that was a sort of adjustment made to keep the game going, but you wouldn’t have to do something like this is bigger games with several healers.

I agree deaths need to happen, but not too often.

#28

I love the idea of a short period of time to splutter out your last words, say 10 seconds from when you lose your final hit point.

If during that time you are being continually hacked to pieces your last words will probably be screams of pain, rather than pithy or poignant words and would serve as a way of silencing someone.

I think the idea however it gets implemented is a fantastic one.

#29

[quote=“Xcerus”]
I could post feedback and still go to things I want to go to and expect a grown up responce not "go and play somwhere else"
Thats almost a personal attack mate - any reason you are sugesting people should play elsewhere?[/quote]

I was trying to illustrate a point, but I don’t think that I did it in a very mature way. Allow me to explain.

You should be supportive of your GMs. You may have issues with the way they run things, but bottom line, if these awesome people don’t give up their precious time to organise huge events like this, you don’t have a game.

Don’t take what you have for granted in Auckland, because it’s pretty damn unique in this country.

#30

[quote=“Ryan Paddy”]Player character death can be a sensitive business.

For one thing, PCs are usually among the most important, memorable, and well developed aspects of a larp, and when they disappear the richness of the fictional world may seem diminished to other players and crew. This is especially true of well-established characters. The GMs may also have made plans around a PC that have to be dropped.

There is also a chance the player won’t continue playing your larp. This isn’t necessarily petulance. It may be that their character’s death presents them with a convenient time to try a different larp, or to take a break from larp. Or that they invested a lot into that character, and haven’t got the time/energy/money to do it again but don’t want to play an easier character. Regardless of the reasons, this can make a high mortality rate unattractive to GMs who want to grow their player base.
[/quote]

It most certainly is. I for one did not have the greatest experience with mortality in my first big weekend LARP because my character died. It was the final of Wolfgangs and I was a starting character. Not unexpected that I died, but it was the way that I died. It wasn’t even that I got killed by random minion number 2, it was that I died off-screen, because of a time-out and being told where my unconscious body needed to lie. I was not given a choice, I was just told to go and lie behind enemy lines, and thus, I got killing blowed.

My dead body was then a ‘hazard’ so I had to get out of the combat zone. I was new to this sort of thing and it felt wrong for me to insert my dead body back on the scene after the fighting had stopped (I regret that). So I missed out on a death scene after putting a lot of effort into writing and equipping that character.

Overall, I really loved the game, so many amazing moments, but it also means that I’m very aware of how much character death means to PC. Talking about it flippantly is offensive to me, hence my reaction to previous posts.

#31

Death by safety protocol, that’s a new one. A good example of the hazards of GMing, and of being a new player and just doing what you’re told without question.

My favourite stupid death is when a PC finishes off a friend, mistaking them for an enemy. This is sometimes retconned by the players themselves, but I think that’s a bit unfortunate. Why shouldn’t characters sometimes be outrageously incompetent, if their players are? I think that situation has awesome roleplaying opportunities: ostracism, revenge, trial.

#32

[quote=“Ryan Paddy”][quote=“NickPitt”]PVP and PvE are very different things. I don’t go to a weekend game for a skirmish, I go because it’s ‘Live-Action RolePlaying’.

Dying happens, mostly at the hands of greeblies. If players kill each other, I only hope that it involves some majorly awesome rping. Can’t say I even vaguely agree with your ‘not often enough’ statement.[/quote]

Each larp is different, some are more PvE and some are more PvP. The original suggestion was in broad terms, not just about Teonn which happens to be the big fantasy larp at the moment.

I dunno if Teonn has set any specific expectations about this, but there is a culture in the Auckland fantasy larp community that PvP killings happen sometimes, and while it’s unlikely to be a random mugging (at least, not at any fantasy larp that’s run in Auckland to date) it won’t necessarily be a big moment that fits into your character’s dramatic arc either and you’ve just got to deal with any disappointment that brings. The players are not always assumed to always be one big team, even though that is sometimes the case as at St Wolfgangs.[/quote]
It’s actually really dependent on the campaign. In hindsight, Mordavia had a real wild west feel to it - you could die just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there were some notable PvP deaths, including one guy who did get mugged by a couple of munchkins on the first night, was ‘killed’ so he wouldn’t finger them to the Guard, and in dramatic irony, had deliberately turned up without any money because it suited his character concept. I thought the player in question took it all with astonishingly good grace. At Teonn, in contrast, the GMs made a decision that they wanted a low death rate, and instructed the crew repeatedly and at length that we were supposed to be scary, but that no-one was allowed to make a killing blow without explicit permission, and the result was two character deaths in the whole weekend. The players didn’t seem to be much interested in topping each other, either, although having said that, you can pretty much expect things to change over time - the first game in a series is likely to get some tweaking as people get used to it.

#33

Personally I’m all for last gasp quotes. But I agree with the problems that things like this pose for assassins etc. I do think that there are ways around it, with some good suggestions from people.

I think there’s a solution, but it may lie in roleplaying, or possibly in rules.

Personally, I MIGHT have liked a few last words as Duncan, but I didn’t get it because I got finishing blowed in the big second to last battle. BUT, I had left some notes behind which did as well, if not better… But that was a character thing.

Definately some kind of last words as an option would be great… It allows for some form of dramatic completeness.

#34

I accidentally shot another player in nightmare circle and he decided to die because of it. It was cool :slight_smile: I’d had blue-on-blue situations before, just never chalked up a kill.

Fortunately, Tigger was able to put a new brain in his body, so he was all okay…

I think that undoing something like that is pretty tragic really.

#35

I accidentally shot another player in nightmare circle and he decided to die because of it. It was cool :slight_smile: I’d had blue-on-blue situations before, just never chalked up a kill.

Fortunately, Tigger was able to put a new brain in his body, so he was all okay…

I think that undoing something like that is pretty tragic really.[/quote]

I agree mate - not often than you ryan and I all agree… (ducks incase the universe collapses)

#36

Many years ago in Mordavia I was crewing as “Sir Nigel of Hovan”. I killed one of the player characters, but I gave him the whole James Bond Villain moment where, after beating him up, I stood over him and explained to his almost dead body WHY I was killing him (he knew too much and if he’d lived he would have blown my cover). Eventually I leaned over and cut his throat, moments before another player arrived on the scene.

At this moment, it would have been entirely inappropriate for him to gasp out a few last words.

I talked to the newly arrived player and explained how I’d just come across the body and how we needed to look around… Eventually, I attacked him (was it Russell?) but he managed to get away. That was the beginning of the end for Sir Nigel.

But there are certainly moments where I think it would be appropriate for it to happen. And I think this, like most rule interpretation, is best left up to player discretion.

#37

True enough - but clearly (to me at least) that clearly is a situation where you have spent the 30 seconds making sure the guy you’re killing is dead, even if you’re not actually stabbing them with a knife.

Viperion

#38

You know, it takes a lot less than 30 seconds to make sure someone is going to going to die, and can’t talk as they expire. A good cut throat will do that.

#39

You know, it takes a lot less than 30 seconds to make sure someone is going to going to die, and can’t talk as they expire. A good cut throat will do that.[/quote]
True, but we’re not dealing in reality; we’re dealing with Dramatic Death Scenes, in which the dying person holds on just long enough to get that one vital piece of information to those who so desperately need it… and then the (IMO corner) case where someone is being killed specifically to stop them from uttering their dying breath… In which case my proposal is that if the person doing the killing can stand over the person being killed for 30 seconds without being interrupted (a “solo” kill, or one where everyone else is too busy to notice the sinister man with the knife over in the corner) then the dead guy doesn’t get to utter their deathsong :wink:

Viperion

#40

You know, it takes a lot less than 30 seconds to make sure someone is going to going to die, and can’t talk as they expire. A good cut throat will do that.[/quote]
True, but we’re not dealing in reality; we’re dealing with Dramatic Death Scenes, in which the dying person holds on just long enough to get that one vital piece of information to those who so desperately need it… and then the (IMO corner) case where someone is being killed specifically to stop them from uttering their dying breath… In which case my proposal is that if the person doing the killing can stand over the person being killed for 30 seconds without being interrupted (a “solo” kill, or one where everyone else is too busy to notice the sinister man with the knife over in the corner) then the dead guy doesn’t get to utter their deathsong :wink:[/quote]

I would remove the timing aspect and replace it with BDE Roleplaying.

If people want a few last dying gasps then they can go for it unless the killer or associate has taken specific and appropriate steps to stop it occurring.