thread: 2013-10-11 : Games have Objects: My Conclusion
On 2013-10-13, anon. wrote:
I'm wandering into this conversation at a time when I'm contemplating how to "fix" combat in old-school RPGs.
Here's the thing:
1. As the GM I want to be adversarial towards the players during combat. I want them to be stressed out, worried, feel unsafe.
2. However, my tendency is to try to protect them during combat (i'm talking about relatively old-school RPGs e.g. 2nd ed ADD or Dragon Warriors). Otherwise I'm worried they will die on me and their death will be abrupt and lead to an unsatisfactory narrative. I would never admit this to the players, so I take steps to hide it. (Which is counter-productive.)
3. The OP said:
"When we want to let our characters off the hook, we need rules to threaten them; when we want to kill our characters, we need rules to protect them."
So in my case, I have two separate things:
A. my instinct about how combat should be played out (i.e. it should feel stressful)
B. and my natural tendency to protect them, which gets in the way of A.
To overcome my natural tendency/fear I need rules that force(?) me or encourage me to escalate things and threaten them. But if I really threaten them, to the extent that they get killed, then the narrative might break.
In the past, the only conclusion I was able to reach was that the rules I'm looking for have to perform a sort of magic trick. They have to do both: Create the impression of real threat. While at the same time, they secretly protect from death. What do people reckon? Is this viable? Or a can't-have-the-cake-and-eat-it situation?
