The Campaign Builder's Guild

QuoteSide Note: Expanding on it not being fun to eliminate characters from games- I've been a GM and played DnD for a number of years with a number of different groups. I never killed any characters until the most recent group I ran through. As an experiment, I told them to make several characters because some might die. It was heartwrenching at times because 1 player quit the game because their favorite character died; another sulked for 3-4 sessions until his main character was finally successfully reincarnated. The other two who lost characters were a bit disappointed, but they carried on. It's been my experience that people really dislike their characters dying. In previous groups I had to 'save' characters at the last minute because people have been on the verge of crying, or in some cases they have screamed at me in anger and completely disrupted everything...This has been the case even with throw-away characters.

I handle this in my game (Planescape) by running side-adventures with the spirits of the dead PCs in their afterlives, and allowing for easy access to resurrection (albeit expensive resurrection, usually).

I like to think that people will be able to embrace character death as part of the roleplaying experience.  Like In Game of Thrones or something... major characters die, and it's part of the fun that they do.

But that's straying a bit off-topic.

EDIT: I've also gone the Ghost route, and allowed players to float around as incorporeal spirits (with ghost powers too) until they get resurrected, though only if they had major unfinished business in the mortal life.  This not only makes death more acceptable, it's positively fun.  I had one player with a Dwarf character who died with a matter of honour unresolved, and allowed her to return as a ghost till she was raised.  When the PCs got a temple with resurrection capabilities, several players commented that they wouldn't mind if the character stayed a ghost :P.

Quote from: Light Dragon
The roleplaying justification for not immediately invading the Watchers below is that the Kobolds are too ignorant to realize that the Watchers are essentially NastyDreams, Kobolds' mortal enemies.

Hm. Interesting perspective.

I agree with most of what Polycarp said, though I do have a few disagreements. It might be because I approached the Underdeep game from the perspective that it wasn't just a wargame, but I assumed that every player would, to a certain extent, at "roleplay" their faction. Not to the extent that it totally violated strategy, of course, but enough that every decision wasn't based entirely on what would have the best chance of mechanical success. Like, say, if the orcs hunkered down and started turtling, that'd probably earn a raised eyebrow from me. An excellent example would be Dolmar not spamming Abominations every turn because they were disproportionately-badass units, even though it would make no sense in-universe. The Watcher's main goal is to not die because, being immortal, they can easily outlive any of the other factions; as a player, I'm much less interested in knocking out potential rivals than I am in, well, watching.

Of course, I did pick a race characterized by cold detachment, bottomless patience, and a hatred of everyone else, so that may be too easy of an answer.

Quote from: SuperbrightI agree with most of what Polycarp said, though I do have a few disagreements. It might be because I approached the Underdeep game from the perspective that it wasn't just a wargame, but I assumed that every player would, to a certain extent, at "roleplay" their faction. Not to the extent that it totally violated strategy, of course, but enough that every decision wasn't based entirely on what would have the best chance of mechanical success.

Well, just because I admit that such a thing as pure strategy is possible without roleplaying doesn't mean I practice it in this game or believe that it is advisable; as Steerpike pointed out, it was, from the beginning, described as a roleplay game.  I think the nature of the Glow's character is more conducive to pure strategy than, say, the nature of Lothe and his Dwerim - the Glow generally thinks in objective terms of threats and non-threats, rather than friends, enemies, honor, dishonor, and so on - but I don't pursue pure strategic aims independently of what I interpret the character's motivations to be.

I have placed some similar limits on myself - TMG pointed out in chat that I probably could have eliminated his faction by turn 2 or 3, and I don't doubt that this is true (it had occurred independently to me at the time).  I didn't do this because it wasn't consistent with my character's motivations, as well as for the reason that I value the mutual experience of a game and don't want to eliminate people before they've really even started playing (that's a "meta" motivation, of course, but not metagaming strictly defined, which to me means using information that a character would not know to affect the player's actions).

I am fairly sure that even had you attacked TMG's mansion early on, he might have still sneaked into NJuln/Balagrod.  He'd be hurting bad, but I doubt he'd be out for the count.  However your points are all very good ones Polycarp, and have yielded some extremely interesting results, as this week has proven.

Quote from: PolycarpI didn't do this because it wasn't consistent with my character's motivations, as well as for the reason that I value the mutual experience of a game and don't want to eliminate people before they've really even started playing (that's a "meta" motivation, of course, but not metagaming strictly defined, which to me means using information that a character would not know to affect the player's actions).

Sorry if I insinuated that you only focused on pure strategy or anything! I do completely agree with your definition of a meta motivation, I just thought it was a lot more verboten than some other players do.

QuoteAn excellent example would be Dolmar not spamming Abominations every turn because they were disproportionately-badass units, even though it would make no sense in-universe

That's actually why I requested the nerf they recently got: as it stood, it made too much sense both in and out of character to keep spamming abominations: Dolmar has 'protect his people' as a primary motivation, and the best way to do this was to get as many abominations on the field as he could. (I have lost about 60 units so far. About 6 of those were Abominations. It meant the lowest casualties to the Nocae were abominations all the time.) now Dolmar cannot afford enough Abominations for that to be viable, so has to train other warriors. ^_^

Quote from: SuperbrightSorry if I insinuated that you only focused on pure strategy or anything! I do completely agree with your definition of a meta motivation, I just thought it was a lot more verboten than some other players do.

Nah, I didn't interpret anything as an insinuation - I just wanted to make sure my description of pure strategy as divisible from roleplaying wasn't taken to mean that I endorse one over the other, or that I personally have been pursuing one to the exclusion of the other.

I don't find meta-motivations to be problematic in general, though they could be problematic in some situations - for instance, if another player was my friend and I decided that my goal in the game would be to help him achieve his goals, or if a player was someone I didn't like and I decided to remove him from the game posthaste.  It's not always possible to totally dissociate how we feel about players from how our characters feel about their characters, of course, because we're human beings.  I think the important thing is to try and differentiate between "benevolent" meta-motivations ("I want everyone to enjoy this game and have a good time") and more self-serving meta-motivations.

It's entirely reasonable to temper roleplaying with a desire to improve the experience generally, which is one reason I don't like using the term "metagaming" to describe this behavior - as I said in the earlier thread about metagaming, I prefer to keep the term limited to a purely negative connotation, like "cheating."  That way, I can say in my game rules "no metagaming" and presumably we don't need to have a whole discussion about whether wanting to have fun counts as a prohibited activity.

Another game system previously used for forum games: http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/19918194/Lords_of_Creation:_the_OOC