Dogs in the Vineyard was revelatory, in linking the potential for danger to the strategy you wanted (or were willing) to try.

I remember the players investigating the murder because, I think, they didn’t believe their ally was gone. I think it was pretty effective.

So, a character can only die if the player is complicit in his demise- presumably because he really wanted the extra dice in a dramatically appropriate situation.

I like your death time-shifting mechanics a lot.

Thinking about it, I suppose this is why I put hit points into my Lady Blackbird mod for the ALIENS game, but what dwindling health does is set up the player and the GM for the possibility that death is coming, giving them time to make it meaningful dramatically. They don’t make the death meaningful, necessarily; the players (GM included) do that by investing in the moment and reading some meaning out of the act. Hit points simply facilitate.

That said, I’ve had some luck with mechanisms in which the utter loss of Health simply means “Your character is going to die [this session/end of this fight/sometime soon],” which is another case of a hit-point mechanic setting up the dramatic moment but not necessarily asserting it. It provides good fuel, but the players need to ignite it.

The result is something like a Boromir-type situation, in which, if you will, Boromir runs out of hit points halfway through the fight and then, fight done, gets his death scene. Or, as in the case of a fighter-pilots-in-space game I ran for years and years, a pilot who depletes his Health in mid dogfight and then decides to crash his ship into an enemy star-base, giving the players a chance to take it out for real. He “died” from some random missile, but we only took that as the cue to set up a dramatic death for this long-running character.

Anyway.

@Stacey — The parallel definitely breaks down with NPCs. Moviemakers can play with the fact that they can blur the lines between A-listers and supporting actors, but a GM can’t really blur the line between a PC and an NPC. There’s either a player or there isn’t.

@Will — I have the sense that there must be some way for design to influence the meaning or meaningless of a character’s death. Imagine, for example, some kind of resource or currency that allows a player to cheat an otherwise certain death. Doling out these resources over time gives you something that’s like the peril of death. It even gives a kind of dramatic build-up, because each resources that’s spent brings the character one step closer to real death.

@JD — We can definitely agree that there are meaningful perils for PCs other than their death, and I am solidly for embracing and employing them in play. The thing that I think can turn a no-death game sour is when everyone collaborates (explicitly or not) to create a fake aura of mortal danger for PCs that simply isn’t real. If everyone agrees that the PCs are not in mortal danger, and no one pretends that they are, I suppose that’s a different case. But a pretend aura of moral danger is particularly annoying, in my opinion, when the GM winds up being saddled with the burden of making sure PCs who are played bone-stupidly aren’t killed in circumstances of supposedly mortal peril. That GM typically has to fudge his dice, alter his scenario, or deploy his NPCs with equal stupidity in order to even the odds. I’ve GMed from that position and don’t find it fun.

As an entirely separate line of discussion, if you hate the second character you create, isn’t that kind of your own fault? Why is that a greater peril than if you hate the first character you create?

I want to run a more narrative game, in which characters are vulnerable but death is not necessarily so cheap as to be meaningless. And I think the only way to do that is in the telling, not the design. The individual scenario determines whether death is meaningless, while the mechanics can influence the cost (i.e., the cheapness) of death.

Most irksome is that I used to have a decent grip on how to make danger feel real in RPGs, and I think my grip has loosened as I put more emphasis on the campaign over the adventure. So maybe I need to play each session like it’s the last. Or something.

I’m just reacting out loud here.

It seems to me that this is where the parallel to the RPG might break down. We don’t mistake NPCs for actual characters in an RPG; but in a movie, at least at the beginning, we can do this. Thoughts?