Our group only lost 1 PC over 6 sessions of play. I'm not seeing the "grim" part of all this. How's it been for your group?

jh

I'd say you need to add stronger enemies to fight, or more deadly situations. Any game can be made to have fewer or more character deaths depending on how you play it.

Honestly, it's in how you design the pressure. In my most recent demo game, I killed 3 party members our of 6. It's all in how you gauge the party to the relative attack/damage strength and how you deal wounds. I also play based on the RAW, which does not have a base difficulty for any attack, and though I typically use 1 challenge, I often jump to 2 and sometimes 3 to reflect circumstances and conditions. I know the errata/faq states otherwise, but I honestly don't believe that's 100% the intention. It's the "default" which does not mean it's always the case. In one fight, the Troll Slayer against big chaos knight got away with 2 purple (to reflect how great of a warrior the chaos knight was) where as the rat catcher, in the same fight...because they weren't super experienced great fighters, I gave 3 challenge. Some players won't be down with that, but it strengthens the narrative/system tie in my opinion and my players, who feared the idea at first (with not fairs) understood quickly when I pointed out combat experience vs. combat experience. It was also a scene about running away and surviving and killing the Knight wasn't the focus, though he nearly did 2 of them (with only 1 crit before dead). It's all a matter of play style.

Honestly, I don't know what your real play experience so I can't really comment, but so far as GM I've wracked up 10 kills. I play a lot so it isn't a huge number, but if I want kill ratio, I can get it. If I don't, I back off. It's up to me, as always, to set that pace.

I find this the same as any other RPG. Then again, I generally don't like killing PC because of various narrative/social contract reasons. Players don't show up to die, they show up to play and have a good time. If they really want to die and that improves fun for them (as my last group were huge Cthulhu fans) then I boost it up for them. I honestly set the tone off of players.

I came one combat round from wiping out my entire party of 4 in the graveyard scene. I nearly wiped them again during a playtest. Some of the combats are pretty tough. My party has one non-combat character in it though (if that matters), he's all social skill and no combat skills.

My single 'wade in and fight' type typically goes down each combat encounter. The others wind up suffering a random amount of damage, but he has yet to succumb to his wounds. I've always thought "grim" was a setting affectation rather than the outlook for character survival rates.

If I want PC deaths I'll go play CoC.

I think there's no need to kill everyone for Warhammer to be a grim setting. I only killed one PC in three groups and several sessions, but there were a lot of grim parts...

Last session, four PCs entered a room and there was a demon. It was a very weak demon, and they could have disposed of him easily, but they didn't even attempted to fight. There was a zealot in the group, but he didn't do anything against the demon, 'cause everyone were rooted to the spot in fear. Their first action was simply to ran away.

I once ran a session of Sebastian Hickey's scenario That way madness lies. There was no combat at the session, but the PCs were very nervous, and one of them told me that it was one of the best gaming sessions of his life, 'cause he simply didn't knew what was going on and was expecting something VERY bad to happen every time. At the end, there was a great sense of achievement when they aborted the cult's plans. And no one had a single wound.

One of my groups is very combat-centered and they can handle most of the fights without a lot of trouble. They finished Eye for an Eye with few wounds, but all of them had a lot of stress and a few insanities. They didn't found Grunewald Lodge an easy or happy place.

PS: I just remenbered. Someone recently posted a thread with the suggestion to substitute henchmen for regular foes. It worked on their game and there're lots of deaths. Maybe you could try it...

Death does not need to be a part of "grim and perilous"...the THREAT of death is what makes "grim and peril".

In my game serveral characters have come close to dying. As a GM, that is more valuable (and in my opinion more fun) than killing all the characters. Constant character death frustrates players and at some point they just don't invest in a character because they know it's hopeless and boring. So I believe as long as the treat is there its good.

In this game you can lose a character by death, insanity, corruption, and soon to be disease (from the priest box). Its all grim and perilous.

Emirikol said:

I think you must be using the word "grim" to mean "deadly," but that's not what grim means. Grim is the expectation of tragedy, of having little or no hope of a situation improving. Things are grim when you sit in the expectation of tragedy for long periods of time, and maybe even get out of one grim situation only to find yourself in another.

You seem to be unsatisfied with how frequently your game is delivering tragedy, which is not grim.

If you want the game to be deadly, just increase the threat level of the encounters. It's possible that your gaming group is larger than the ones the encounters are written for, and you should be adjusting things accordingly if you want more PCs die.

If you want your game to be grim, you have to give your players enough time to get invested in their characters, long enough to develop a sense of dread about losing them. That's grim.

Dave that sounds about right. My players typically do expect it from me (especially after Conan campaign's), but they weren't seeing it in 3e. I think it's probably because we were still figuring out the rules..and no, nobody had really gotten into their characters that much yet.

jh

I could easily see how a character death so early in the campaign might make things seem less grim and desperate. I play PARANOIA too, and I think that's possibly the grimmest game setting I've ever played in. But characters die all the time, and it's usually hilarious when they do. You don't get invested in your character at all because you're probably not going to be using them for more than a couple of sessions.

My first session of V3 did seem too easy for the PCs and didn't seem very grim. It took a little while to find the right threat levels, and I always try to push things right to that edge where the players think they're at risk of getting killed off. I try not to cross over that threshhold, even if it means having a backup plan in case the baddies are doing too well.

I think that the overall tone is where the grimness sets in. The weather is foul, people are poor and dirty and in the end chaos is going to engulf the whole land. The best you can hope for is a pint of watery beer and a warm wench for the night in a relatively bug free and dry bed.

If you want grim check out a movie called "The Road" with Viggo Mortensen. That is GRIM. Now take that overall feeling of hopelessness over to your game and you're set.

limelight said:

This. Honestly, I think it's more grim to keep the PCs on the edge of wounds and fatigue/stress rather than racking up the body count. Keep things seem hopeless and worrisome by delivering insanities and conditions on the PCs, Stress and Fatigue. Don't worry about killing them, try to keep them at low wounds. Make healing difficult in the best of times, especially in the field. Make them aware of the fact that they're all stressed, fatigued, and one hit away from dying constantly. *That's* grim, my friend.

It can be grim. It all up to the GM and how good the players are. In this game your about 2-3 hits and your dead. If the group dont strike fast and hard or dont know when to run they will end up dead real fast.

We've played 4 sessions so far, not counting demo game sessions, and no one has died (albeit 2 sessions were entirely investigation/roleplay etc. during part of 3 Feathers and early part of Gathering Storm).

However, madness has threatened and critical wounds been incurred, one still smarting. This has delivered on "grim" I think and in eyes of players. That they often labour under these difficulties is expected and that is mostly what I see as "grim" and "perilous". Other aspects come more from setting tone etc.

Our table accepts character death must be real threat for tension to be present in combat, and with this system the fact that even a combat "you know you can handle" can still deliver a critical wound that lasts makes that tension more present.

That said, I admit I'm finding balance of difficulty for threat hard to anticipate (just ran a test combat to ensure a run-in with a band of beastmen would be bloody but not overwhelming for example).

Mechanically, if playing Gathering Storm one thing I seem to see in reports is many groups are more than the 3 Players it was designed to be for and that can change difficulty of encounters (just having a 4th roll well on Guarded Position while other 3 attack can really change the dice pool for example). Then there is a wide variance in the combat effectiveness of groups based on careers etc.. How to adjust groups of foes appropriately is something I expect to learn as I go and that most will have to - you can't have that much flexibility in character/group design and not have some variability to have to work out.

I was happy to see in the Winds of Magic supplement a category of monsters where all actions of any sort against them add a purple challenge dice to pool 'cause they're just that bad-ass. That sort of thing is needed to keep foes effective as groups get more powerful and I'm almost tempted to make that the real component of a foe being a "nemesis".

Rob