@Ominous said in Eliminating social stats:
@WTFE I disagree.
You have that right.
I think that what the professor did was the better story option.
You are, however, 100% wrong in doing so in this case.
A story consists of one or more plots. A plot is the resolution (one way or another ) of one or more conflicts (or as Polti would put it, "dramatic situations").
There was a plot in play. It resolved around several dramatic situations. (Aside from the obvious military angle there were plots buzzing around politics, public relations, and a shady bit of clandestine research that could have gone really badly pear-shaped had everybody involved in investigating/propagating it been suddenly terminated out of the blue.) ZERO of those dramatic situations got resolved with the sudden TPK. Thankfully before this cycle we'd done a full plot with a suitable ending so the sour taste from this fiasco wasn't as bad as it could have been, but only an idiot would think that a TPK mid-story is good narrative technique.
You are free to disagree, but ... here's a thought: find me three books (that aren't academic wankery that five English majors in the world have read, I mean -- something that was actually read by actual people) that "resolve" a plot by killing all the protagonists suddenly out of the blue while (important bit here!) none of the current conflicts have even begun to get resolved.
Some stories don't have happy or even meaningful endings, which makes them even more poignant.
This "story" didn't have an ending of any kind. It had the kind of "ending" you'd get from a novel that was 3/4 complete when the author suddenly died of a heart attack. It didn't end so much as get truncated. I mean he TRIED to continue it, but without the IC history, connections, motivations, etc. there was no reason for the new characters to keep going into the proven-deadly killing field. If even ONE of the original characters had survived there might have been a way (although more than one would have been much nicer), but we didn't have that. What we had instead would be like if, say, Colin & Jonny Greenwood, Ed O'Brien, Philip Selway, and Thom Yorke all simultaneously got killed in an air crash but Nigel Godrich decided to just take five other people, call them Radiohead, and kept them making albums.
One of the inspiring texts for D&D (It was in Appendix N) was Seven Geases where spoilers the main character survives a whole host of adventures only to die by slipping and falling from a cliff at the end. end spoilers
And the whole host of adventures were a set of plots with beginnings and ends, right? He wasn't on his way to the site of the first of those adventures and fell off the cliff before he even got to it?
Then again, I am a strong gamist rather than a narrativist, unless I am playing something like Mystic Empyrean or Microscope.
And from the gamist perspective he was right. It's just that as a narrative it fucking sucked. So right here you're contradicting what you opened with. You're saying "from a gamist perspective it was a good narrative". There's a reason why "gamist" and "narrativist" are on opposing ends of a spectrum: they're not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.
You can read all about the founding ideas behind old-school D&D in this series where a blogger played with Mike Mornard, one of the early players in Gygax's group: http://blogofholding.com/?series=mornard I think everyone should read the whole series, as D&D set the stage for our entire hobby. It's sort of a Federalist Papers of RPGs.
I really don't give a shit. All the "Federalist Papers of RPGs" in the world doesn't change what literally thousands of years of literature has deemed to be a narrative. There is merit as a game to the "let the dice lie where they may" stance. But that merit is not a merit for narrative. Good narratives can emerge from that only by accident in the same way that getting a coherent and decent character out of a character generation system that will kill characters off part-way through can: blind luck.
And note, again, I'm not saying you're wrong for liking the "gamist" approach (as much as I fucking hate that clunky neologism). I'm saying you're wrong for thinking that the "gamist" approach made for a good narrative here. You're not doing wrongfun. You're just factually incorrect about the narrative structure.