On Tue, Mar 07, 2017 at 09:47:48AM +0000, Timothy Collinson wrote:
> We had an interesting discussion in the car on the way home about
> the merits and demerits of games where there was a high chance of
> dying and games with much less chance.  It was generally agreed that
> the former were a bit depressing and some referees known for that
> were avoided.  But at the same time there needed to be some threat
> or the tension wasn't there.

Tension doesn't have to come from threat of death.  The most tense
moments I've had in games were mostly from situations where death was
not a remotely likely outcome.

Even when there is a threat of death, it doesn't take a high
probability of dying to create a lot of tension.  Just knowing that
it's possible at all is usually enough.

In fact, I often find sessions where death lies behind every roll of
the dice to be a bit dull and unsatisfying.  If I know that every
decision leads to a life-or-death roll anyway, that removes tension
rather than creating it.  My stupid emotional response doesn't care
whether the chance of character death is 5% or 40%, it just sees both
as ridiculously high, so from an emotional point of view it becomes a
constant that fairly quickly fades out into detachment.

It doesn't help that in most game systems, that sort of situation is
where the rules become much more intrusive and the real:gameworld
timescale stretches to worse than 10:1, sometimes even beyond 100:1.
They become something like a poorly designed boardgame instead of a
role playing game.

> So given that in six years of TravCon - and 8 adventures, none of
> them military admittedly - I've not yet killed a PC - am I setting
> the bar too low?  How do folk weight such things?

I don't think there is a bar, but if there is then that certainly
isn't "too low".  The real measure is whether players came away from
the table thinking that it was a good game.  From all accounts, they
did.

- Tim