Ho perso per la strada il senso e il filo del thread, però, quando si parla di queste cose, non fa mai male ripostare un brano tratto da
questo...
(Scritto nel 2004. Ahh... quando Vincent era duro, cattivo e incazzato... oggi è troppo buono e comprensivo... :roll: )
[size=18]A Small Thing About Character Death[/size] plus a mini-manifestoAlong the precise same lines:
When a character dies in a novel or a movie, it's a) to establish what's at stake, b) to escalate the conflict, or c) to make a final statement. Or perhaps some combination. It's never by accident or for no good reason, unlike in real life.
I've been thinking about examples. Obi-wan Kenobi in Star Wars? This, his death says, is worth fighting for. Boromir in the Fellowship of the Ring? The right death redeems betrayal. Brad and wha'sname at the beginning of Pulp Fiction? The cop in Reservoir Dogs? All those random people in Total Recall? Tara in Buffy? To escalate conflict, plain and easy. Leon and Gary Oldman's character in the Professional? Final statementville, but Matilda's family? Escalation plus some stakes.
So that seems pretty solid to me.
Before I go on (I'm sure you've already figured out what I'm going to say anyway) but before I go on, my mini-manifesto.
First: if what you get out of roleplaying is a) the accomplishment you get from rising to the challenge, not letting yourself or your friends down, learning the rules and just frickin' owning them, or else b) the satisfaction of peer-appreciated wish-fulfillment, you're off the hook. None of what I say applies to you, you're happy.
If, on the other hand, what you want out of roleplaying is suspense, resolution, story, theme, character, meaning - listen up.
Second: conventional RPGs can't give it to you. I'm sorry.
So, third: that stuff you want? You get that by approaching roleplaying as though it were a form of fiction, a form of literature. All that stuff is well known to fiction writers and they can tell us how to do it. Roleplaying isn't like writing, just like singing pub songs in a pub isn't like composing songs, so the skills themselves are different. But the same structure underlies both. You can't ignore the structure and still get consistenly good results.
So that's my mini-manifesto and here's character death in RPGs:
PCs, like protagonists in fiction, don't get to die to show what's at stake or to escalate conflict. They only get to die to make final statements.
Character death can never be a possible outcome moment-to-moment. Having your character's survival be uncertain doesn't contribute to suspense, as above, just like we don't actually ever believe that Bruce Willis' character in Die Hard will die. Instead, character death should fit into what it will cost. This thing, is it worth dying for? Obi-wan Kenobi and Leon say yes.
Here's a piece of text from Dogs in the Vineyard: "Also, occasionally, your character will get killed. The conflict resolution rules will keep it from being pointless or arbitrary: it'll happen only when you've chosen to stake your character's life on something. Staking your character's life means risking it, is all"
In fiction, You never die for something you haven't staked your life on.[/i]
