thread: 2005-03-10 : Character Death
On 2005-03-10, Thor Olavsrud wrote:
Luke and I sat down over lunch and had a long talk about this last week.
The question was: given your [Vincent's] statement that PCs only get to die to make a final statement, how does that jibe with a character that dies pursuing another character's goal? For instance, your character wants to kill the duke and asks my character to come along. Then my character gets killed in the process.
Now, clearly, this is only going to come up in a "traditional, party-play" situation.
My response was that character motivations don't matter. Characters don't exist! Only player motivations matter. Assuming functional play, I'm going to get my character involved in that scenario because something going on in it is interesting to me, the player. And so, by getting my character involved, you create a reason for that character to care about the conflict at hand.
At that point, the player knows the stakes (trying to kill the duke could lead to death or imprisonment), and has a reason to get involved. The player cared enough about the conflict that he was willing to risk his character's life to tackle it. If the character dies, he has made a statement about that conflict.
Is this the sort of thing you were getting at Vincent, or am I way off base?
