thread: 2005-03-10 : Character Death
On 2005-03-10, Eric wrote:
Hear, hear, Meg. I am reminded of an interview with Neil Gaiman about how he needed to bring the Sandman to a close. He says there was an initial incident - the imprisonment and loss of Morpheus' "stuff" - and when that, plus its attendant ramifications, was done... so was the series.
Vincent, personally I kind of like the Band of Brothers trick with mortality being (in essence) inversely proportional to spotlight. Make all twelve Marines as PCs, play troupe-style to swap some in and out; encourage changeover between stories. And then explicitly have two kinds of death; NPC-marine deaths (which serve to illuminate the brutality of it) and PC-marine deaths (which fit your diagnosis in the head post here). I'm envisioning a system where the primary advancement engine for an "onscreen" Marine is to have an "offscreen" Marine who you have played die a secondary-character's death. This gives you the resource juju to use the current one at his full value... including making him worth more points for if he bites it later. Make this your choice, not others'.
Mind you that might work as well with "onscreen death" substituted where you see "offscreen death" in the idea. It's just teasing at me right now.
I think it has to do with the players, as a group, being able to treat the original twelve as a nonreplenishable resource, one which is somehow necessary for peak performance (like Trust in tMW).
