Until Death: Part Fourteen
Chapter: Season Four
Words no player and few GMs like to hear “I need your character sheet.”
Magic in most Call of Cthulhu games comes with a heavy cost. I’ve illustrated this with Beatrice cutting herself for blood/offering magic. It’s dangerous and Beatrice (Amy) has skirted this line for a while. Â It would seem that in her role-playing bloodlust against the Knights of Salem, she went too far.
What comes next? You’ll see on Friday.
I never play a character with powers in a system where your own powers can/will kill you.
I don’t know man, that seems like a waste of role playing potential.
Not really. I don’t like playing angst fueled characters, and waiting for a character’s own powers to kill them is exactly what that is.
If you know that doing something has lethal consequences, but still choose to do that for the greater good, I don’t see a problem. It’s no different than going out in a blaze of glory while trying to save others.
pity, cause you’re limiting your own potential. noting really gets the blood going like riding the line, balancing your godlike power against your mortality.
but hey, keep playing safe games, we won’t judge.
Wow, could you have been more passive aggressive?
I love playing a tense game where choices have serious consequences and death is just one mistake away, but I also enjoy just busting out and playing powerful characters. It’s all about having fun and enjoying yourself with your friends.
Without judgement.
not quite so much passive aggressive as disdainful, but eh.
but then as a player and a GM i always had the most fun in pushing things as far and hard as they would go. sort of.. power RP’ing.
You’ve never played a game where your own powers could kill you? – Try a mage in shadowrun or play a hunter in White Wolf game. Or better yet, play any game where sanity points are a stat.
Agreed. I prefer to sacrifice other characters for my magical power thank you very much. 😛
A sad but necessary part of the gamer’s life cycle. Though I have to say, having never played a game like this I’m intrigued by Call of Cthulhu now. Maybe I’ll check it out.
Wait, that’s a lie. I did play Elder Sign once, but while it was fun, it wasn’t anywhere this level of fun.
I own Call of Cthulhu and Elder Sign. Elder Sign is definitely a board game where Call of Cthulhu is an RPG. Generally, I think CoC beats the crap out of ES but ES is immediately accessible to most people and CoC isn’t.
Oh wow that totally sucks.
I’ve only casually played RPGS before, but i didnt know that something like that could happen. So, uh, is Amy just out of the group now? Because that would seem kinda shitty .
especially since shes wearing that really cute cthulu hat! ♥
Unlikely. At worst she’ll have to come up with a new character.
No, she’ll just need to prepare a new character, which is kinda fast in Cthulhu, is not unusual for a character to die or worst in this system.
The old one is either dead or has lost too much mental sanity to be played by her (basically she’s gone totally crazy).
it happens all the time in my games.
well, with new players. and sometimes with old players when stuff really starts going to hell, mostly because in my games, death is a one-way door. there’s no chance to come back.
it’d happen less if i pulled punches i suppose.
No, not Elfstar!
Heh.
This CoC of cthulhu arc is really making me want to start a new one with my group!
What system are you using? I always used CoC but recently a friend of mine suggested a slightly modded savage worlds.
“Noooo! Blackleaf!”
Thank you. I was waiting for that.
i always try to not say it without having given them a chance to make it worthwhile. death in my games is permanent and can come with breathtaking swiftness.
when the regular group brings in a guest or a newbie, they complain about how brutal the system is, but those who stay wind up enjoying it.
and sometimes, they get to have a glorious TPK, which is a ton of fun.
I have TPK’d once in all my time gaming (in front of and behind ‘the screen’), and it was because the GM was fed up with how stupid things were getting and reset the campaign.
To each their own, but I like story, and TPKs are shit for continuity. Sure, a good GM can fix it, but in the end, you lose a ton of good build-up and connections between the PCs and NPCs.
A player death is a good turning point, a total loss of the party is a failure of the GM or the players as far as I’m concerned.
It depends. It can be an interesting point for a new party to step in and give the whole group a chance to try something new. The DM can either set them on the tracks of the evil the old party died facing (if it was in fact evil and not party stupidity. “We’re all level one, let’s go in that cave the guy said the Platinum Dragon was in and try to kill it.”), or come up with a new storyline. It’s interesting to have a new party face the villain that killed the last one after he’s gained more power and progressed further with his plan.
And there are some bloodthirsty DMs like the commenter above who takes the ‘Player vs. GM’ mentality very seriously, it would seem. But I don’t think they’re a waste, as much as anything. Out of character it can teach a lesson (ex., tone down the difficulty a little bit) and such. I dunno. Maybe it’s because I’ve never had a campaign for more than a couple of months, and was forced to change character every time I started a new campaign, so it doesn’t bother me as much.
It can be a failure of one or the other (Players being stupid, or a DM being overzealous), or it might be a combination of good and dumb luck. I almost TPK’d a group of 5 level one heroes in the first mission of a module I bought. I scaled it back and had them be a little more stupid otherwise it would’ve been an interesting first session… and we’d have had a need for another one.
see, it’s NEVER ‘me vs them’ in my games. thinking i think that way, by not pulling punches on my players is one hell of a leap, but i guess it’s one that can be made.
if the entire party dies, it’s because of the party’s decisions right up to the point they all die. there is ALWAYS another choice. there is often the course of prudence/discretion/cowardice. there are different tactical and strategic courses they can take. they could choose to not try to assassinate some necromantic lord in the seat of his power(without maybe dpsing the adds down, say), they could choose to NOT be the rear-guard protecting the king/country from the invading horde(the hot gate scene. god that was fun. ) but instead either let someone else volunteer, or instead of making a last stand, fight a retreating action.
if they die, it’s either that they didn’t see those choices or they did and made their decisions because it’s what their characters would have done.
call it ‘roleplay hardcore.’ i do. my players give it up to me in spades, and i do it justice by not going for the bunt when it’s time to stand at bat. they don’t do anything but swing for the fence, and so i do the same.
sometimes, dying and failing, or even dying and succeeding are the direction the story goes. i don’t shoehorn my players through the arc i plan, i let them influence the world i build.
the party dying isn’t a failure nor a success on anyone’s part. it’s simply an outcome, an end-sum of the decisions they’ve made up to that point.
and it doesn’t matter one whit for continuity if my party wipes. that story is over, time for a new one. maybe that new story will intertwine with the old, maybe not.
and it’s too late in the session to break out an extra character. Poor thing. :-/ I’ve been there, although not with Cthulhu. …yet.
the best cthulhu games i’ve played ended with all of us playing the ‘drink till it stops hurting’ game.
Not gonna lie, the second I saw Amy’s face in that last panel, all I could think of was this:
It seems a great way to run magic, IMHO. You have to ask yourself, is this *really* worth it?
I think the story reasons behind it is that you’re actually bringing ‘the truth’ of the universe into your pocket of reality. Which, of course, affects your sanity since that’s just not ‘how things really work’, and yet it does. Understanding the truth is dangerous in this game.
I keep important characters I’ve made in a binder, my first character I ever roleplayed is in there, and i just recently added my first actually killed character. Sometimes it happens, that’s why I enjoy systems like this there are prices for everything, and sometimes you make a debt you can’t repay. Since I feel Sam is about to go the same way I’m sure they’ll have plenty to talk about.
In a Ravenloft game where I was actually a player one of our friends tempted fate one too many times with Necromantic magic. Now, I was a Caliban Barbarian and this guy had befriended my character when obviously few would so despite his sketchy magic usage our PC’s were close.
The Necromancer died in a fight but had amassed some fairly heavy, in game, taint due to his usage of dark magics so chances were the Dark Powers would have soon had him anyway. My barbarian led the charge to try and raise his dead friend from the dead, he had heard it was possible and became a leader for the group in the absence of our recently dead one.
When we had finally gathered the necessary items and found the right person to assist his ‘raising’ became one of my favorite Role-playing experiences ever. Black tentacles sprouted from the body pulling it into some form of void while my character attempted to rage and strike them with his axe to no effect. Now he had witnessed one of his closest friends not only killed but defiled. It changed him.
I can’t speak for everyone but I love what can be brought into a story when power comes at a cost. I wouldn’t go for it every time but it adds some sweet flavor sometimes. 😀
Wonderful arc thus far Brian.
Blackleaf, no!!!!!
…as we discover that in fact d20Monkey thus far has been an elaborate years-in-the-making bait-and-switch for the first of his many infamous Patterson Tracts.
Even the hat looks sad.
Marc I totally agree! Hat looks shocked and sad. Makes me think of the hat I recently got from a kickstarter…
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1878730846/reincarnation-demon-snow-cap
But the hat… Should give her a bonus or something.
Lol.
Ive never played the cthulu game (thought i did once but was just a scene from Eternal Darkness someone d20ed out) tho it looks like id like it and i do did the health for magic thing, seems to bring good flavor. I often wanted to do extra magic in enchange for pushing yourself too hard. I think the Dresden Files rpg had a mechanic for that too but i forget.
Also character death is fine. Ive had so many games fizzle that for a long time i welcomed and encouraged death for my character so id have closure.
Maybe Sam can help console her ooooooooo
the dresden files stamina/casting mechanic was a pretty good implementation. i found it close enough to what i’d run in the past(‘mana’ pool, stamina checks for really high-power stuff) that i went and dug into the credits to see if any of my old players were in there.
nope, independant parallel development.
My Dm’s never take my sheet, I usually just keep it and tuck it to the side, make a new character. Oddly though, we don’t get many player deaths in our games, save for one guy who literally had to reroll about 4 times in on session. It was bad choice after bad choice, one being “Lets throw my chain between my team members legs, and try to hit the guy over there, oh I missed.. oh why am I being beaten to death by the beserker because I missed with my chain”
i remember playing with someone like that. i liked to joke that his characters were getting caught in the gene pool’s filter.
Glad to see there more people with that kind of gaming luck. Years ago we had a guy whoafter going thru 4 characters in 3 hours we tried coming up with plans for a dry erase character sheet. The best part of it was when he died once specifially because his own real life brother wouldnt throw him a rope (it was a gobinoid reverse dungeon campaign n he was playing his alignment). Hilarious.
What alignment refuses to throw someone a rope? Chaotic Asshole?
the final chapter is yet to be written there will be a sacrifice but it won’t be reckless use of power. I can feel it with every fiber of my Gamer’s soul
I take my PC’s dead sheets. You never know when an old friend will come back from the dead, or appear in a flashback.
I committed stupid player death on my first play through Eberron. My DM was kind enough to give me an awesome death, taking my sheet saying the Big Bad Vampire collected my body and teleported away, alluding this may not be the last I saw of him. I hope to live up to that standard.
Cue sad/appropriate music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ae9m_WT6xM
As for this arc, I would love to play a game of CoC with you as a Keeper. I feel anything I attempted to do as a Keeper would fall very short. Though of course, I’m still learning.
To clarify, with you as the Keeper, not me as a Keeper lol.
That’s only funny as long as your own parents are not that level of stupid.-_-
Nah, I’m kidding, it still made me smile. 😀
Hm, strange, this post was supposed to be an answer to Graham’s “Noooo! Blackleaf!â€
O_o
As a player I have suffered 2 player deaths, one of them intentional and one of them because I was about to undergo an extended leave of absence from the group and didn’t wish to hold up the campaign. The first one was a switch hitting ranger (lvl 7) build (in D&D 3.5) which had run its course and wasn’t really adding anything to the group. I discussed my options with the DM and he suggested that I merely play to the next time I approached death. I was a little reckless and was first through a doorway where I was caught flatfooted in between two trolls. Dead and I denied all forms of bringing my character back. He came back later as a zombie with my original pet as his zombie pet. Not only was it the first player death in a group of mostly people new to tabletop RPG’s, it was raw emotional shocker when that character came back to kill them. Great setup for some awesome roleplaying.
The second death (different campaign) wasn’t as dramatic but the effects of the death are lasting and yet to be fully realized. The DM, with help from me created a unique and harrowing backstory for the character, including some “different” items found in the characters belonging (some of the critical components for a certain ritual of undeath) which washed up on shore (but the body never did…dun dun duuuuuun!!!). This in turn led another character in the group to pursue becoming a baelnorn or “good” lich (this is a pathfinder campaign but the DM allowed it provided the player did his homework and provided some good rp for undergoing the process. Like I said the full effects have yet to come to fruition. Very dramatic.
From a DM’s perspective, I try to avoid player death and TPK with a lot of energy. Will I allow a player or party to suffer the consequences of stupid mistakes? Only if I have felt that I have thoroughly illustrated the point. To me, the DM creates (or presents) the setting and players bring it to life. If characters keep dying and a player has to start from scratch in the rp sense, then there is no investment in the setting from the players, which projects a kind of flatness on the expression of the setting from the DM and the interaction from the players. Although I think I wouldn’t take the character sheet from the player (I keep my own copies!) right in the middle of the session, that gesture brings an eschatological tone to the consequences of the player. Well played, Patterson, well played.
Heh, the only game more lethal to characters than CoC is PARANOIA!
Still, going out in a blaze of glory like that isn’t bad. Had a paladin once who threw himself at three succubi so the rest of the party could escape. one of my favorite sessions, the GM was really good at setting the mood. Everyone felt kinda sad after that one. But, all us thought it was the best session in a long time..
That Hall of the Dead folder is actually a pretty cool idea. I might take it as inspiration.
Hey, it’s Friday already! I can haz comic, please?
It’s a BIG comic and I am at my day job right now. It will go up this afternoon. Sorry for the delay!
In 25 years as GM and Player I’ve never played in a game where the players keep their sheets between sessions. They ate always gathered up by the GM and stored. As a GM Taft meansI can make sure the adventure I’m writing/adapting fits the players and as a player it means there is one less this I have to worry about bringing (dice, a pencil and food) are enough of a responsibility.
When a character dies or retired they still stay with the GM. That is especially handy if the player also moves on from the gaming group.
I haven’t played CoC since way back .. D100 anyone? .
I have played the Ravenloft inspired campaign called Living Death. It was 3.5 but with guns and magic casting was time bumped and had the added bonus of possibly getting noticed by the Big Bad. Get too much attention and REALLY bad things would happen. Also mentioning the name of a certain long dead Egyptian High Priest could also result in the same issues. Having tables of players physically cringe when their characters came across that name. oh my. ^_^
I now play its mutant offspring … Fellowship of the White Star … aka .. Fellowship. It is still 3.5 but we have cross pollination with the CoC campaign people resulting in scary good fun for all.
Yeah – I just discovered this strip and love it so far 🙂
Guys? Clarification time. Since this is CoC and since the Keeper asked for her sheet instead of just telling her to draw up a new one, I’m thinking insanity or possession rather than death: losing those last few SAN points can be so much fun, but the hangover really sucks…
I likey! Maybe a possession by an old one sucking on her skull…kinda like IRL.
So that hat IS lucky!
Just not GOOD luck… 😉