D&D 5e is right by me - I'm one of those players who think character's death is a Bad Thing and should only ever happen as a result of unique stupidity on party's part, or when there is a consent from both DM and player. I guess it's because I started from CRPGs where there is always save/load - I never ever play Ironman mode, and I never will. Then again, it depends on the kind of campaign you're running: if it's a simple dungeon crawl, then character's death isn't a big matter, because character are disposable dummies with barely any personality. But if I wasted hours thinking about this character and role-playing him? I certainly don't want to lose him to a bad roll or two.
At least you get to play the character. Try Classic Traveller, where you can spend a couple of hours generating a character and they can die before the adventure even starts.
Oh, I remember that system from my attempts to play Twilight 2000. I kind of liked the idea of choosing your career path, but the fact that you can die during character generation is plain stupid.
On the other hand, I heard an interesting approach to chargen from my colleagues: session 0 drops you into some dangerous situation with a bunch of disposable one-liner 0th-level characters and you go through them as you play, and one that survived is your character for the rest of the adventure.
The nice thing about Elden Ring compared to past souls games is that you generally always have options. If you're stuck on a boss, just go explore. Dive into some caves, look for upgrade materials in the overworld, find another boss instead. Because of this you can generally get overleveled pretty easily, which reduces the boss difficulty from extremely hard to just plain hard in most cases. Also, if you really get frustrated, invest in some spirit ashes. They're a huge help with most bosses.
Dating back to Demon's Souls, you've always had options. Sekiro is the flatest, and Bloodborne takes the longest to open into numerous accessible areas.
This is something FromSoftware has been really good at fostering in the Souls games.
When I die in Elden Ring (which I really suck at and thus am also ridiculously overleveled in), the reaction isn't so much rage as just a slack-jawed "how did that just happen?" even after the nth time on the same obstacle or opponent. Today's, which is too obscure to be a spoiler: Caelid ghost painter ledge.
These moments are balanced by many of reaching a vista and thinking "this is too beautiful not to screenshot."
It might be the most surprising game I've ever played.
Is it really true? I barely can find games I'd like to play. Sure, I prefer RPGs that are not QUITE mainstream (e.g. not JRPGs or action RPGs), but I feel I can buy a few more games per year than I'm already buying.
The real question is how big is that unmet demand, and how can you get to those people. The real problem is that we don't have a good algorithms for matching games to people. There are still quite a few unfilled or under-served niches, but it's hard to discover them, and if you make a game in one of them, it's hard to make people notice, because maybe they're not expecting anyone to make a game for them.
I'd like to point out the recently released Knight of Chalice II. It's an unique game. It's a turn-based CRPG with visuals even more simplistic than Spiderweb games and a story that's barely there. But it sure serves a niche - a niche of absolutely crazy build-porn-loving munchkins who need something to challenge their game-breaking builds. It's brutally hard even on normal difficulty, and even though I'm playing it, I feel like I'm not the primary audience, because I find it way, way too frustrating. It's Dark Souls of turn-based RPGs!
But that audience - it's there. In our own Pathfinder games, we see those people on Discord, min-maxing characters and seeking the way to defeat our optional bosses on Unfair difficulty (which even most of our game designers and QA find "a bit too much"). Are there any more games for them? Well... I guess Dungeon Rats. But it came out a few years ago, and really, the amount of build porno is much smaller there. Since then? Nothing. Once these people finish KotC2 a few times, I'm sure they would appreciate another such game, but who will make it? Nobody, most probably - for a few more years.
Yeah. I like point-and-click puzzle/mystery games like the Nancy Drew games and Broken Sword, but point-and-click alone is a rare breed these days. Add in "actually has a story and not just an excuse plot" and "puzzles that aren't boring or unnecessarily frustrating" and you've got something akin to a unicorn. Like, I tried playing OG Myst and it was such an annoying time-waster to repeatedly have to open and then run to the stupid effing tree to go back and forth that I ended up just pulling up a walkthrough and following it step-by-step so that I didn't have to keep going back to the main island to look stuff up. Which absolutely takes all the fun out of it. If a game's been remastered TWICE you expect that somewhere along the line someone would have gone "hey this is kind of stupid" and changed it so that the door stayed open after the puzzle was solved the first time.
D&D preferences depend on a few things, but if we pretend that they have the same vibe/setting/etc which edition you prefer will mostly depend on how much boardgame you want in your RPG. Some p&pers are happy with combat being determined by the roll of one (or even zero) dice, others want combats resolved by a 2-hour game of minis.
I've seen player characters die in D&D 5e. I think you can kill them off in any system if you really want to - it all depends on how you set up and run the fights.
As for whether that's a good thing, I figure there are advantages and disadvantages, and it all depends on what you want. Frequent character death discourages investment in background and development - because why put a lot of work into a character who probably won't last? (Possible exception if you really love the character creation process, but I don't.) It can abruptly cut off interesting plot lines or relationships. And this one might be particular to me, but I find that it often takes a while before a new character really clicks and "turns into a person." If they typically died before that happened, I'd be missing a whole dimension of the game.
And lastly, in a game where death is uncommon, if a PC *does* die it's more meaningful. Because they were part of that campaign's identity and got both time and emotions invested in them.
You cited Game of Thrones, and I've heard from people who don't find GoT to their taste for basically these very reasons. Random, unfulfilling character deaths may be realistic, but they're not enjoyable to read about. The constant churn makes it hard to maintain sympathy and identification with who's on the page; if every character you liked has died, you might as well be reading a whole different book.
But I've also played high-fatality scenarios and had a good time. Again, it all really comes down to what flavor you want on a given day.
"I used to be 'with it' but know what I'm with isn't 'it' any more and what 'it' is is strange and confusing" - Abe Simpson
Totally with you on OD&D/AD&D... Maybe it's a little bit of rose colored glasses, but I do think I enjoyed those games a lot more than the 4e and 5e I've dabbled in lately. The legit fear of death adds a respectable spice to things, and lends more weight to epic sacrifices.
D&D 5e is right by me - I'm one of those players who think character's death is a Bad Thing and should only ever happen as a result of unique stupidity on party's part, or when there is a consent from both DM and player. I guess it's because I started from CRPGs where there is always save/load - I never ever play Ironman mode, and I never will. Then again, it depends on the kind of campaign you're running: if it's a simple dungeon crawl, then character's death isn't a big matter, because character are disposable dummies with barely any personality. But if I wasted hours thinking about this character and role-playing him? I certainly don't want to lose him to a bad roll or two.
At least you get to play the character. Try Classic Traveller, where you can spend a couple of hours generating a character and they can die before the adventure even starts.
Oh, I remember that system from my attempts to play Twilight 2000. I kind of liked the idea of choosing your career path, but the fact that you can die during character generation is plain stupid.
On the other hand, I heard an interesting approach to chargen from my colleagues: session 0 drops you into some dangerous situation with a bunch of disposable one-liner 0th-level characters and you go through them as you play, and one that survived is your character for the rest of the adventure.
Ok, ok I give in. I'm going to look into Elden Ring. I don't think I like rage inducing games though.
Inscryption is WONDERFUL.
Completely agree with you on everything you said about D&D and its editions. You almost literally cannot die in 5th Ed.
The nice thing about Elden Ring compared to past souls games is that you generally always have options. If you're stuck on a boss, just go explore. Dive into some caves, look for upgrade materials in the overworld, find another boss instead. Because of this you can generally get overleveled pretty easily, which reduces the boss difficulty from extremely hard to just plain hard in most cases. Also, if you really get frustrated, invest in some spirit ashes. They're a huge help with most bosses.
Dating back to Demon's Souls, you've always had options. Sekiro is the flatest, and Bloodborne takes the longest to open into numerous accessible areas.
This is something FromSoftware has been really good at fostering in the Souls games.
https://preview.redd.it/f8aoibdefau21.jpg?width=6000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=88375f2949f02aac420151b0cf22299fcf4208a4
When I die in Elden Ring (which I really suck at and thus am also ridiculously overleveled in), the reaction isn't so much rage as just a slack-jawed "how did that just happen?" even after the nth time on the same obstacle or opponent. Today's, which is too obscure to be a spoiler: Caelid ghost painter ledge.
These moments are balanced by many of reaching a vista and thinking "this is too beautiful not to screenshot."
It might be the most surprising game I've ever played.
> but don't pretend there's unmet demand
Is it really true? I barely can find games I'd like to play. Sure, I prefer RPGs that are not QUITE mainstream (e.g. not JRPGs or action RPGs), but I feel I can buy a few more games per year than I'm already buying.
The real question is how big is that unmet demand, and how can you get to those people. The real problem is that we don't have a good algorithms for matching games to people. There are still quite a few unfilled or under-served niches, but it's hard to discover them, and if you make a game in one of them, it's hard to make people notice, because maybe they're not expecting anyone to make a game for them.
I'd like to point out the recently released Knight of Chalice II. It's an unique game. It's a turn-based CRPG with visuals even more simplistic than Spiderweb games and a story that's barely there. But it sure serves a niche - a niche of absolutely crazy build-porn-loving munchkins who need something to challenge their game-breaking builds. It's brutally hard even on normal difficulty, and even though I'm playing it, I feel like I'm not the primary audience, because I find it way, way too frustrating. It's Dark Souls of turn-based RPGs!
But that audience - it's there. In our own Pathfinder games, we see those people on Discord, min-maxing characters and seeking the way to defeat our optional bosses on Unfair difficulty (which even most of our game designers and QA find "a bit too much"). Are there any more games for them? Well... I guess Dungeon Rats. But it came out a few years ago, and really, the amount of build porno is much smaller there. Since then? Nothing. Once these people finish KotC2 a few times, I'm sure they would appreciate another such game, but who will make it? Nobody, most probably - for a few more years.
Yeah. I like point-and-click puzzle/mystery games like the Nancy Drew games and Broken Sword, but point-and-click alone is a rare breed these days. Add in "actually has a story and not just an excuse plot" and "puzzles that aren't boring or unnecessarily frustrating" and you've got something akin to a unicorn. Like, I tried playing OG Myst and it was such an annoying time-waster to repeatedly have to open and then run to the stupid effing tree to go back and forth that I ended up just pulling up a walkthrough and following it step-by-step so that I didn't have to keep going back to the main island to look stuff up. Which absolutely takes all the fun out of it. If a game's been remastered TWICE you expect that somewhere along the line someone would have gone "hey this is kind of stupid" and changed it so that the door stayed open after the puzzle was solved the first time.
Have you played the Wadjet Eye games? Seems like what you might be looking for if you don’t mind low fi graphics.
D&D preferences depend on a few things, but if we pretend that they have the same vibe/setting/etc which edition you prefer will mostly depend on how much boardgame you want in your RPG. Some p&pers are happy with combat being determined by the roll of one (or even zero) dice, others want combats resolved by a 2-hour game of minis.
I've seen player characters die in D&D 5e. I think you can kill them off in any system if you really want to - it all depends on how you set up and run the fights.
As for whether that's a good thing, I figure there are advantages and disadvantages, and it all depends on what you want. Frequent character death discourages investment in background and development - because why put a lot of work into a character who probably won't last? (Possible exception if you really love the character creation process, but I don't.) It can abruptly cut off interesting plot lines or relationships. And this one might be particular to me, but I find that it often takes a while before a new character really clicks and "turns into a person." If they typically died before that happened, I'd be missing a whole dimension of the game.
And lastly, in a game where death is uncommon, if a PC *does* die it's more meaningful. Because they were part of that campaign's identity and got both time and emotions invested in them.
You cited Game of Thrones, and I've heard from people who don't find GoT to their taste for basically these very reasons. Random, unfulfilling character deaths may be realistic, but they're not enjoyable to read about. The constant churn makes it hard to maintain sympathy and identification with who's on the page; if every character you liked has died, you might as well be reading a whole different book.
But I've also played high-fatality scenarios and had a good time. Again, it all really comes down to what flavor you want on a given day.
"I used to be 'with it' but know what I'm with isn't 'it' any more and what 'it' is is strange and confusing" - Abe Simpson
Totally with you on OD&D/AD&D... Maybe it's a little bit of rose colored glasses, but I do think I enjoyed those games a lot more than the 4e and 5e I've dabbled in lately. The legit fear of death adds a respectable spice to things, and lends more weight to epic sacrifices.