How do you feel about characters who, say, can regenerate, or are robots and can be rebuilt, or are technically immortal but can still get their legs cut off and need to stitch them back on, or just have like 60 clones in the clone bank, and the like?
I feel like it would be quite convenient to make death kind of a rarity in most game systems.
australia, you're drunk.
It would actually be interesting to run a game where "death" is merely an inconvenience rather than the end of a character.
I've never really gotten to play a game that experiments with this. The closest I got was a single one-shot of paranoia, which was pretty fun.
I am toying with the idea of a game where all the players have different types of death avoidance. One guy might have a pile of clones, and another might be a highly specific immortal that only dies if you cut his head off in a swordfight.
Or maybe just run it like a fallen london scenario and just make death kind of unreliable. You can stiff upper lip your way through that missing torso.
I think the former would be better, each immortality quirk can be a way to further specialise or differentiate characters.
Not dieing due to stubbornness is a good one to use. You could also have someone who bested Death in a game for his soul the first time he died and now can't die, but is kinda mates with the grim reaper now and can ococcasionally get info out of him while he waits to resurrect.
Yeah, that seems like it would be pretty fun.
You'd have to come up with some rules for each of these immortality styles with the player. I think it would be an almost impossible task to sit down and actually write out all the ways someone can be technically immortal on a piece of paper for them to pick from.
Theres probably a few common tropes you could pick. But leave it open for a player to come up with something else.
Being undead is a straight forward one. As well as OPs regeneration.
Dorian Grays portrait thing is always cool.
Maybe some kind of open ended template system, which players can add onto if they don't see an option they like.
Like, say, a cowboy who is cursed to stay alive until he finds someone who can outdrink his zombie ass, a pirate who has a gold dubloon from a cursed treasure, and a highlander, would all be under the "conditional immortal" category, and someone who has a deal with death, or someone just too holy to stay dead, or a zombie, would be a resurrector type.
I hate the "tons of clones" variety, but I love the "are immortal because they can be put back together" ones.
I think that the best way to do it is to make it so that despite being virtually immortal, there are still important things to be lost if you die or get torn apart. Maybe your parts can get taken away and you'll need to find new ones; maybe you get less and less efficient at combat and can't afford to lose to this enemy or someone not-immortal may get harmed or killed.
Perhaps it's still painful to get torn apart and it takes a toll at your sanity. Some might get simply insanely reckless, to the point they simply don't bother dodging or blocking anymore, until they screw up big time because of that approach to combat (i.e. getting crippled early on against a tough enemy, then just watching helplessly while it destroys a town you were trying to protect, etc).
So I think that I'd play around with two things, the first being that it's undesirable to get "killed" due to a minor problem/inconvenience (losing parts, crippling, etc), but raise the stakes when I want the party to feel like they have a lot to lose even if they don't die after a lost fight.
My favorites have got to be the conditional immortals, though those guys also have some re-assembly elements in there. Nothing says they can't lose an arm.
Making resurrection simply take a decent bit of time would also be a good obstacle. You don't want to risk dieing when chasing the BBEG because it takes you saya day to come back and that gives him a huge lead to escape.
Instead of death being the "punishment" for failure, things that can cause you to fail your mission are consequences of death.
I cant remeber what it was called but i read a short story a while aho about a guy who could only be killed in some convoluted way. So anyntime he "died" or was injured some otherway head just immediately be back to normal as soon as you stopped paying attention. Like you could nevee witness his "regeneration", you'd just cut him i half and he'd be this corps. But as soon as you blinked or got distracted he'd just be back on his feet completely fine the next time you payed him attention.
I probably haven't explained it well but it was cool to read about.
One kind of not quite rezz I did once was that the character was not quite in time the same way other people were.
So the rezz style for that would be them taking the hit, breaking apart and vanishing, then a couple moments later they're back; a rezz style of |"yeah no, that's not how things are going to go" as they shunt the instance where they died out of time so it never actually happened.
I've always wanted to run a zombie apocalypse game where all the characters are 'ghouls', AKA people who the source of the apocalypse interacts with in a weird way. They die, they rise again, and they don't lose their minds. They lose bits and pieces of their memories, always something important, and this might even change their personality entirely, but they can think, speak, and act of their own free will. Zombies ignore them, until the ghouls do something loud or flashy, which attracts their attention, or attacks one of the brainless undead, which makes any zombie in the area hostile. While technically immortal, they aren't immune to death. They're rotting, because they're dead, and they have to find ways to keep their bodies intact. Preserving it is the first big problem, but there's also the issue of having no way to naturally heal, so if they lose a big chunk of themselves, they'll need skin grafts or the like to patch up. A character 'dies' when they rot away or lose so much body mass that they can't really be reconstituted, otherwise they need none of their organs to keep going, not even the brain.
The point of the game was more that these people were supposed to find out who they were before all this, and do whatever they want with undeath, whether it would be helping people, taking over the area and ruling a post-apocalyptic gang, or trying to find and stop the source of the end before it's too late.
In the end, though, I never really got it off the ground because I had no idea how to handle damage.
>I feel like it would be quite convenient to make death kind of a rarity in most game systems.
Honestly there isn't too many systems where final death isn't a rarity. Even the 40k RPGs give you several shots (With fate point burning) before definitively fatal things actually count. Those that do actually kill people off pretty easily with a bad roll generally have some mitigating factor (Rez spells, clones etc)
There's a manga that does this fairly well. Uq Holder.
A form of immortality that does not regenerate your limbs unless they are fully destroyed, cybernetics, someone "untouchable", etc.
This. I've only risked death in two systems: Savage Worlds and Saga Edition.
I played an entire campaign of paranoia where we had infinite clones. The other players tended to solve every problem by killing my character or using him as a guinea pig (which was usually deadly). Once they decided to climb an elevator shaft by killing my character so many times they were able to use his blood to swim to the top.
What's to stop players always charging in, guns blazing? What's preventing them from trying to storm the castle single-handedly because the guards inside are all mortal?
There doesn't need to be death, but there does need to be consequences for jumping into the spike pit.
That's a really cool idea user.
>In the end, though, I never really got it off the ground because I had no idea how to handle damage.
Could you not just do damage and healing as normal, but replenishing hit dice require skin grafts etc? Maybe make said skin grafts be more effective if taken fresh from humans, thereby giving a moral dilemma?
So how easily this game can become magical realm?
Or should I say how hard is it to not go magical realm?
>What's to stop players always charging in, guns blazing? What's preventing them from trying to storm the castle single-handedly because the guards inside are all mortal
perhaps the guards are innocent and the characters aren't sociopathic murder hobos. Or attack that way would just alert tge bad guy that your onto him and he'll have plenty of time to escape before you can murder your way through all the guards.
yeah that sounds good. It can probably be boiled down to 3 broad types. Invincible, Regenerating and Respawing. With conditional being a subtype of all 3.
Probably couple it with a point but or priority system so that the more convenient your immortality mechanic the worse your stats are. So oir victorian gentleman who just grins and bears it through total organ failure is an Unconditional-Invincible, and so has the stats of a completely ordinary human. But a conditional-regen vampire that needs to feed on blood and avoid sunlight can go around lifting cars and such.
I like the way you think, user.
That middle girl looks familiar
I don't really count fate points and edge towards this stuff, but the theory is there, sure. People dying all the time kind of fucks with campaigns.
I think we're just working at it from a different angle- instead of using narrative resources to explain why someone isn't dying, we're working it into the system.
similarly, someone who is just too holy to stay dead and revives in perfect condition after a time period would also have near human stats.
Have you considered mech-style locational damage, with degrees of injury and disablement from it
Fuck yeah. Lustrous-bro. Cool part about that is when characters are somewhat immortal you can fuck with them in crazy ways. Characters in land of lustrous get ripped apart in ways that would be guro if they had flesh and blood.
>no no no, that's not how the story went
Immortality by retroactive storytelling when, PRINCE OF PERSIA?