How To Avoid Permadeath?

I think the problem with that is that it doesn't deprogram from the save-reload mindset. Unless GM is perfectly fine with that sort of campaign, but I think the reason this was posted was because that's not the case.

Do you want to survive 700,000 years to a million years without dying of an accident or being murdered? This is how you do it.

Spread your self all over the planet. The signals running around your brain generally move slower than sound, often a lot slower, and it's only a millionth of the speed of light. If you copy the human brain exactly, but spaced out to run at light speed but at the human rate of consciousness, that brain can be the size of a planet. Install a lot of redundant nodes, and there we go.

If you don't mind going slower, with your though taking years to finish, spread yourself over other solar systems or even multiple light-years. Enjoy immortality.

Inform them the game is not suited for heroes and is instead a grimdark game in where death is the norm and nobody gets a happy ending.

>Will likely just give up if their game ends.
Ok.
>How can I keep the party alive, at least long enough for them to get hooked in?
Bring in an experienced player to your group who can steer them away from certain death situations.
If they choose to die anyway and give up you can be pretty confident that they were never going to enjoy tabletop.
But sure, you can go ahead and play pretend instead of actually playing a game, so death is never a real possibility, if it's either that or vidya.

Define (You). All of the copying and redundancy is irrelevant if an accident takes your brain.
Now if you only care about what is then your 'idea' of self surviving and carrying on for the (You) that exists now, that's cool. Like reproduction but with with the forces necessary for evolution removed so it's basically your child that is all of your genes and also has your memories.
But reducing something like that down to "You survive" sounds disingenuous.

You die everyday that you go to sleep, user. At this point, the difference between (you), the (you) that wakes up after sleeping and the you in the hard-drive is academic.

>Falling for the I die when I go to sleep meme
>Not checking even once the life expectancy of human neurons and the function of neural nets
>Being so goddamn underage you just take "I die every night" at face value as truth instead of even trying to collaborate it with neural science
Take your retardation, go and stay go.

There's nothing magical about neuroscience. Souls are not real. The one in the hard-disk is still you.

The (You) that wakes up in the hard-drive is many more steps away from the (You) that wakes up in the same head every day. In the frame of reference we're talking about, one is debatable, the other? Only within the frame I referenced before.
You could also go a step further the other way and say (You) die every single moment awake too. Also debatable, though.

To add onto that, if you really want to look at things so pragmatically, why have you created such a terrifically terrible handicap for yourself?
Just bring out all of the clones now, don't limit yourself to one (You) at a time.

Souls are quite real. Otherwise there would be no identity pronouns such as 'you', 'I', 'he', or 'she'. It would only be WE and US.

Create an afterlife that allows people to come back to life after passing a gauntlet of trials.
May or may not differ if you die more than once.

>thread

>There's nothing magical about neuroscience.
And there's nothing magical about individual consciousness surviving as long as the brain survives. This is in fact, because neuroscience isn't magic. Just because something that happens every day 7 billion times is so simple but is still too advanced for you to comprehend doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It just means you're fucking stupid.

Really fucking stupid. I didn't want to be the first to say it, I've got an unhealthy kindness in me, but think about the hard-drive line of reasoning for a second.

First he's managed to over-engineer his solution to the problem to an incredible degree, assuming it's his own solution in the first place.
That's not all though, because it's a problem he didn't hesitate to turn around and basically say doesn't really exist if you think about it.

???

If you were to interchange every single neuron with another person, one at a time, would you still be you by the end of the process?

Define you.

Actual answer: It depends on how much your consciousness is changed by the process.

>if you swapped every air particle in the atmosphere with another planet would you still be listening to the same song

Cheat. Tweak numbers in their favor so they don't quite go down.

Alternately, divine favor. In mythology, the gods often directly or indirectly intervene to save heroes. The hero doesn't even know about it a lot of the time. Give the party 3 points of divine favor (or simple "fate", if you wish to go with destiny over the favor of the gods). They can spend a point to get their asses out of a no-win, or already-lost situation. That way, while they are getting saved, they can still see that a resource is being depleted in the process. Hell, make it 6 points of divine favor, and have it cost 1-3 points to get "saved", depending on how contrived that rescue would be. If everybody's already dead and you have to rewind time, resurrect people, or go "lol, you weren't really dead after all", that's 3 points. If nobody's dead and they're still up and fighting, but it's pretty clear that there's no chance they'll win if this keeps up, that's 1 point. At that point, all you have to do is give the PCs some bonuses, and maybe heal them some (second wind, the party rallies!), or something.

The necromancer raises them as undead.

Is it a live performance or a recording?

How much is too much, then? You brain is rearranging itself all the time. Contrary to popular belief, Neurogenesis happens in at least in certain portions of the brain even during adulthood (according to current evidence). How is it different from having nanomachines that follows the instructions saved in a hard-drive to rebuild your brain?

It depends on how that happens.
If your brain is destroyed or at least damaged too much, too quickly, I'm confident saying there's no coming back.
If there is any chance for something like this to work, then I think the gradual and continuous replacement, ideally while conscious, IS the best bet. The only issue is that I can't see it ever being possible to be SURE it would work, so taking that jump is still a risk.

nice
Player characters being robots/cyborgs would be pretty fun too, I think

I'm an old time player, and my characters also have a tendancy for no self-preservation.
But My GM's are too fucking soft, and I never died because of it. Shit's frustrating as hell.

go full OSR-dungeon-crawl and give them situations with no clear solutions. If you tell a player theyre likely to fall off a sheer cliff , they try to scale it anyway and they fall and die... Well tough shit, you warned them then and there. Or, don't kill them, then. Basically, if you dont think the players can get any common sense and you don't want to serve them their asses on the platter, change the themes, methods and focus of the campaign. Have them fail and miss events that were on a timer. Have the failures translate to their surroundings. They do something stupid, they irrevocably screw themselves over in a painful way, i.e. a local shopkeeper gets murdered and they have no source of dry rations and other basic equipment because no one else cares enough to import the products or specifically to sell to PCs. Try giving them challenges like this, where other, useful people or items depend on their success.

What the space fuck are you talking about

I use "no one dies unless everyone dies" by way of people going unconcious if they get dropped. Also makes getting captured less railroadish.

If the whole party dies I wipe them and allow them to choose whether to play a similar group nearby or start fresh somewhere else.

Yes if the source is the same but you would be hearing it differently because the medium of transference has changed. Like listening to a song underwater.

I like what they do in Giest, have it where if they die, some strange force brings them back, but it eats away at their sanity each times it happens.

All my players are avid crpg and arpg Diablo gamers. They are reasonable humans and will listen to you explaining that the game is lethal and death is a big deal. Talk to them irl and don't be a sperg gm user, they can heed warnings and will apply themselves. If their characters die, that's it, death is a part of story.

There's nothing wrong with running a game where the PC's can't die. A lot of bad GM's use death as a crutch, but if you set it aside as an option you can find a lot of interesting space to explore and make use of that the old default denies you.

Switch to an OSR system. Rolling a new character takes 40 seconds.

So if you're listening to It Ain't Me and some wind blows new air between you and the speakers, the song is no longer It Ain't Me?

If you're looking at the Mississippi River, leave, and come back an hour later, it's not the Mississippi River anymore?

^

In my games, I have a house rule.
Should you hit 0 hit points or whatever depending on the system, instead of dying, you may choose to take a random severe malice to one of their stats (a d10+4 in d20 systems, in percentile, d%60). In game this is represented by them losing a limb or something similar. Eventually the character will become so crippled they'll either retire them or allow them to die of their own choosing and start fresh.

> mfw Im musophobic

Jesus christ OP, post cute anime girls next time

They just come back alive at the start of the next session. Fuck it.

way to kill all tension.

Only if you're a shit GM.

OP's game doesn't sound like it has a whole lot of tension in the first place. Besides, there's plenty of other ways to create tension that doesn't involve killing off PCs.

I guess,like maybe they all comeback but the villains have done whatever the PCs were trying to stop.
Still, at least have a sort of journey through the underworld encounter, remove some items or something so that the PCs dont just resort to suicidal tactics all the time because death is meaningless

All you have to do is set up conflicts where 'you die' isn't the failure state.

Set objectives, things that they're trying to achieve or things that their opponents are. Give them goals other than 'kill all the bad guys'.

You can even do it with fights that aren't really dangerous. Sure, the PC's might be guaranteed to win, but the point isn't to kill them- It's to slow them down. And if they get bogged down in the fight, what they find when they do catch up won't be pretty.

Adventures in the underworld are another cool way of doing it. Taking away magic items less so, since it's shitty for the players and often fucks with systemic assumptions about PC equipment.

I'm just gonna dump my system's health and defeat system.

Health

By default, each character has a maximum health of 4.
The main way to put your health back to it’s maximum is sleeping.
Normally a successful attack does 1 damage.

Sleeping has a difficulty of 3. If it’s a success you are healed for 2 health, if it’s a fail you aren’t healed. You fall asleep whether you succeed or fail.
Sleeping is also what lets you spend whatever exp (experience points) you’ve gotten.
Your recover skill affects this attempt.
This attempt is a task instead of an action. A task takes 6ish hours, ¼ of a normal day.

Defeat

1: Delayed Death: You’ll definitely be dead at the end of the scene, but not yet.
2: Illness: Long-term illness or injury. More minor problems are more permanent.
3: Break: One or more pieces of items or an npc follower are damaged or destroyed.
4: Separate: Forced to retreat in an inconvenient direction/captured/mind-controlled.
5: Unconscious: Like a sleep that lasts until this quarter of the day is over. Doesn’t have any of the benefits of sleeping.
6: Death with Benefit: You die, but somehow something good happens for your allies

The player rolls 2 d6s, and chooses which of the 2 possible results they want.
If both of the numbers are the same, then the result is an even worse version of the result.
Every time your health goes down to 0 or lower you must do this at the end of the turn of whatever did the damage to you.
Having this happen once doesn‘t mean you’re immune to it happening again.

If an enemy or ally that is sensed is incapacitated then the most relevant player gets to do the rolling and decision for them.

Your characters are regular or semi-regular people, so do not expect to be able to bring someone back from the dead. If something offers to revive you or an ally; do not expect them to be doing it for free, and do not expect them to be honest with you.

Use games without (random) death as an option.

No it wouldn't be (You). You would not simultaneously experience both consciousnesses, it would be like having a perfectly identical sibling with all of your memories. The you that you are, in your head, won't jump bodies.

No, what he's saying is that changes in air composition can alter the waves of sound.

For all the people arguing about identity, it helps to define how you interpret it, since there are different schools of thought. The two I most commonly see are-

Pattern Identity- Anything with the same pattern as me is me. A perfect copy of my thoughts is as much me as I am, because we are indistinguishable. This gets more complex if multiple iterations were to exist simultaneously, with at some point each of those becoming a distinct identity, no longer hard to distinguish from the other.

Iteration identity- I am the current version of my existence. How similar I am to another is irrelevant, because I define my existence as my complete context in this moment. A copy, no matter how complete, would always be a distinctly different person.

I don't think either is right or wrong, it's simply a matter of how we perceive ourselves. I tend towards the pattern view, although in my experience it's the least common of the two.

It's the least common of the two views because, as far as we are able to know you would not experience both consciousnesses simultaneously. That is to say, if you had a perfect clone, but then the you that you are inside of dies, your consciousness would cease to exist, you wouldn't hop bodies over to the other you. Thus it doesn't matter if the other iteration carries on your life and no one is the wiser, because your specific iteration, consciousness, ended.

Being able to experience it is irrelevant to me, it's never something I assumed would occur.

Well that's the hang up for people who disagree with you. It doesn't matter how similar something is to you it isn't you if you aren't it. It's like why does the question even matter if you don't experience it's life? All making this clone would do is complicate every facet of life as there is now a person exactly like you in every way running around.

Yeah, I understand why people hold the opposing view, I just don't really care. If there's multiple me's around, eventually they'll stop being multiple me's and they'll be someone else I'll probably get along with.

It's more in terms of life extension, teleportation or upload that it becomes interesting, I think.

The way I think of it is that, if in this moment I was killed and replaced with a perfect clone, nothing else in the universe would tell any difference. This iteration would end, another would begin, and as far as the only me in existence knows, nothing has changed. If all reality, and even the perception of the only existence that could be thought of as 'me' perceives no difference, then is there really any difference at all?

From a Descartian perspective yes, essentially your universe has ended without you there to perceive it. It wouldn't matter than another consciousness completely similar to you, but not you, exists.

Sounds like you've got issues in terms of the kinf of game you'd like to play and the players you have.

You're saying that a TPK is a possibility but you think that if one happens then the players will quit.

If that's the case, play a game where it isn't possible. Do diplomacy quests or something, or have a wizard who can tp everyone back to base upon them becoming seriously injured, or something similar.

If you really reckon that death will stop the players playing and you don't want that to be a possibility, just remove it from the game.

But my point is that if it could have happened, and my current experience would not have changed a single bit, I find it hard to care. If there is no soul or permanent remnant, then that iteration ending is basically irrelevant while an equivalent iteration still exists. For me, anyway. Not trying to say it's the right way to think, just saying it's how my personal philosophy and perception of it works.

For games with carefully-crafted pc's that were not easy to replace, I would inflict a permanent injury of characters that should have died. Lost eye or hand, something like that.
I also told the players that they would still die if they did something stupid.

As someone who also doesn't believe in a soul I find your view even more difficult to reconcile. Especially with, as you admit, the almost certainty of existing as two different bodies with different experiences, the two yous will inevitably become different people. How could the second you, which arguably is a different person from the instant it exists, be the exact same and have the exact same influence you would? If it ever found out it was a clone that'd pretty much guarantee it didn't act as you would.

Sure it would. It would react exactly as I would if I found out I was a clone. And it's impossible for me to absolutely know I'm not one, so I don't really see how it makes much of a difference.

It makes a difference because the argument is that a perfect clone is not you in any meaningful sense of the word. It would develop as a completely different entity than you. If one of you developed a phobia from trauma the other would not and thus you would react differently. If one of you fell in love then both watched the lover die you would have different reactions.

And arguing if a clone would know is pointless as there is no mechanism to clone so how it happens is just speculation

I'll be specific here- When I say a perfect clone, with regards to questions of identity, I assume one which has a perfect copy of my neurological patterns to date, every pathway in the same place, literally indistinguishable.

If multiple exist at one time, they'll be different people pretty soon. If one exists after I cease to exist, they're still my pattern, so I consider them me. Any actions they take, choices they make or ways they change their pattern are indistinguishable from what this iteration of me would have done if I'd been in the same situation, so I don't really see the difference as significant.

>you wouldn't hop bodies over to the other you
For a counterpoint to this, the atoms in your body are constantly being replaced. The you from 10 years ago was made of mostly completely different material. Is the you from ten years ago gone?

>putting a hard drive in the part of your body most prone to jarring stops
It's like you want a head crash (a phrase which takes a whole new meaning with this)

Who the fuck sincerely subscribes to Pattern Identity? Shitposters on Veeky Forums don't count.

I do, and I've met a few others who do. It's not common, but it's not unknown.

Well gee, user. Have you considered that from where "the rest of the world" stands, you and the next fuckwit are already indistinguishable?

Because:
>nothing else in the universe would tell any difference
doesn't need
>if in this moment I was killed and replaced with a perfect clone
You and the people who know you, the entire society around you, even the population of the Earth can be replaced and nothing else in the universe would need to tell the differance, because the universe doesn't care.

The only one who can attest to you being you with sufficient precision is YOU, and if you can't even do that then the rest of the world - up to an arbitrary qualifier of rest - doesn't need to try.

>can be replaced
means
>can be replaced with arbitrarily low similarity
The people whom you pay rent and the people that pay your wages don't care if you're you or someone else to a significant degree.

But that's irrelevant. I'm talking about physics, you stupid motherfucker.

>physics
>the study of matter and its motion through space and time

>schools of thought regarding identity
>physics
Did you hurt your head when you were a baby or are you confusing yourself with someone else?

'identity' is a byproduct of matter. Nothing more.

Your posts are a waste of time. Nothing more.

So you don't actually have a point? Good to know, thanks.

>start a d&d campaign with rookie players
>start off simple
>hand hold them until they get the hang of things
>they feel confident and they decide they wanna play serious now
>fast forward an hour and they've found there's a fork in the river up ahead
>interrogate a prisoner from earlier
>pass an intimidation check
>"don't go left or you die, go right until you find the village"
>cut off his finger and intimidate again to make sure
>"our group is to the right, left is cursed and full of dangers"
>two more intimidates and a deception later and they keep getting the same answer
>on the way to fork find a suspicious half elf
>tell them they should go left then disappears
>get to fork
>"lets go left, I didn't trust that prisoner guy"
>unanimously decide to go left
>what the actual fuck guys.
>teach them a lesson and push them to the brink of dying
>end up at this enchanted waterfall that was surrounded by nerfed displacer beasts
>manage to luck their way through it
>wizard rolls arcana check on waterfall and detects magic
>make sure to point out that it doesn't seem like it's safe
>for some reason decides that swimming in it might cure his wounds
>I highly advise against the idea since I know for a fact it won't
>if he's dumb enough he's gonna have learn sooner or later that his character can die
>but try and prevent this
>somehow convinces all other party members to link arms and dive in with him
>tell them not to
>they insist
>all throw a hissy fit
>beg me to change the waterfall to a portal or something
>end the session there
I hate these people

You could hit them with long lasting penalties instead, to remind them that there are consequences to getting knocked around and rushing into situations recklessly. I dunno, stat penalties, roll penalties, something which will make them hesitate before taking risks.

>Not having blockchain encryption used as DRM to prevent people from cloning the shit out of themselves

There is a magical maguffin curse on the land. Cursing the party to rise as undead. The more they die, they more evil and monstrous they become.

You're in the wrong thread, man

>these are new players and have the patience of modern computer gamers and will likely just give up if their game ends
Roguelikes/-lites are a thing, you know? Pretty popular one, too.