Mourning a character, how do you do it?
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@arkandel It's frustrating that folks would do that, especially given that killing a PC is the most boring thing a person can do. There's a lot more mileage out of making lives complicated. The thug just...proves his dice are badass? Yay for him? The mindset of people who do this has never made sense to me.
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@tooters said in Mourning a character, how do you do it?:
> Not only that, I don't understand why the vast majority of players [get emotionally attached to characters]. It's a game. It's not real. These aren't real people. Their lives are fantasy lives. I can make a different character in a day, and I did. If this one dies, I also won't care.I don't think anybody is confusing a game character with a real life blooded flesh person.
They're mourning their interactions, their ability to interact with others, and the fun/interacting/socializing they are going to miss out. While this is very close to mourning a dead person, it isn't the same thing.Imagine, instead, you were a model train collector. You can only hang out in the model train club if you have model trains. But then you lose all your trains and can't go to model train club. You won't be upset because you are unable to differentiate between a model train and a living human being; you're upset because you are going to miss out on Track Day and meeting up with friends.
To really push the analogy home, imagine if instead of losing a train on your own terms, such as during Train Accident Simulation Day, but instead you lose all your trains because an absolute jerk came in and smashed your trains with a hammer.
Nobody is confusing trains for people.
They're upset because they are going to have a harder time interacting with other people and having fun with them like they did before, and very likely, they invested weeks, months, or even years in these characters/trains.
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@alicat A+ analogy!
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@devrex said in Mourning a character, how do you do it?:
@arkandel It's frustrating that folks would do that, especially given that killing a PC is the most boring thing a person can do. There's a lot more mileage out of making lives complicated.
In a perfect world with all awesome MU* players yeah, this would be the thing. But that's not the case. There are plenty of horrible people who get their own excitement by ruining other people's fun and people who escalate to eleventy billion as soon as a character looks at them the wrong way.
In my experience (or at least my perception), if it comes down to beating another character in combat and you don't kill them for whatever reason, that other person then makes it their mission to come back with all-the-things/powers/friends/weapons to kill you instead in retaliation.
So the only way to protect your character is to make sure they're dead and they stay dead.
Now, I've never PKed anyone. But I've been the target of IC retaliation and it wasn't fun. It wasn't good story. It was just annoying and petty and draped in far more OOC drama than ever occurred ICly. And just two days after initial incident I was wishing I had just PKed the character in the first place.
I ended up leaving the game after another couple of weeks because it just became so unpleasant. So they won. Not because of the characters or the stats, but because they had more OOC friends that were able to make things unpleasant. No one wanted to hear about how she attacked me and I ended up wining the fight. No one seemed to care that I made the OOC choice to let her live despite being attacked. All anyone cared about was 'rar you almost killed my friend now we're all gonna kill you'.
It comes down to 'I'm going to get my way, somehow'. Could be IC. Could be OOC. Could be dice. Could be a house rule. Could be just flat out lies and gaslighting. But those are the kinds of people we engage with in the hobby. I've never been to a place where that mentality wasn't prevalent somewhere. Usually its players. Most recently for me it was my sphere staffer. But that pettiness and negativity is always present in this hobby and I've found it to be unavoidable. This is why I quit. I have forgotten and come back twice cause I tell myself that maybe, if I do things on my end differently it might have a better outcome.
But no, but it always ends the same way.
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I'd suggest that having death in the stakes should require a social contract of make it interesting, or don't do it.
It may not be "realistic", but as these games are never a simulation, verisimilitude is the best you can aim for. As in, it feels right for the genre. Players characters are the cylinders that the story engine fires on, having someone taking those out is costly, and should be done in a way to mitigate that cost, or even transform it into a gain.
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Gosh, yes. I can think of nothing more lame than losing a character to completely mundane threats. My example has always been 'bandits'.
Very real risk of this happening in an armed robbery in real life? Definitely. But having it happen in a story is quite the anticlimax unless handled with absolute precision.
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I inadvertantly mischanned/mavved/xchanned (all the same deal) about contrived/meaningless death and about how it would probably kill my future muse to carry on. More so, though, it is the emotional connection through that specific character that I would miss (even though I would be really upset about having lost a dear part of my own self, too).
I have not lost many of my own PCs (a rare few who were mostly jokes and had not yet made meaningful connections), but what I have lost are those amazing people like my own muses like Famous Outlaw (about whom @hobos recently wrote).
Way back in the ye olden days (MUD/RPI times), I used to generally cop a badass/hardcore attitude and totally deny my personal feelings -- and sometimes do whenever I am covering up and just being 'too macho' -- about these things, but deep down and when being more self aware: it all really hurts.
Right now, I am -- after more than a season's time -- still grieving the unexpected disappearance of a PC's SO after 8 years of being RP pardners. Cannot go a full week without a sudden cry at least every other day or so.
We were building up to eventually tackle background/family matters, but one day, they were suddenly gone. Right after their PC's birthday.
Although I still play my own PC, it is emotionally difficult for me because their other half is currently missing in an OOC sense (but still together in an IC one because I do not really move on very quickly, and it is highly unlikely that this one ever will due to the sheer longevity of that IC pardnership).
Anyway, the main point is that it is seriously painful to lose characters (worse than reading Old Yeller or Where The Red Fern Grows) after the strong bonding to both your own character as well as Famous Outlaw(s).
