Post by geoffrey on Mar 7, 2009 15:02:49 GMT -6
I can do no better than quote Mike's post from dragonsfoot:
While looking for something else, I stumbled across an article in Dragon #20: "It's A Good Day To Die"
This article compiles death statistics from a campaign. The thing that's interesting is that this campaign had approximately 1000 PC deaths in four years from 1975 to 1978. That's approximate 250 deaths per year, or nearly 5 deaths per week! They kept records for around 600 of the deaths.
A far cry from modern "kinder/gentler" gaming theory and practice, where games are designed to keep characters alive and a PC death is seen as bad GMing.
Types of death recorded are interesting. There is of course the mundane stuff: 61 PCs slain by goblinoids, 45 by dragons, 18 by rocs, 14 by gnolls, etc. But some of the deaths are of the type you rarely hear about anymore (outside of Carcosa)...
23 PCs were killed by execution, torture, or sacrifice!! 8O It's not just that this occurred at all, but it was the sixth largest killer of PCs in the game, higher than undead or trolls.
18 were assassinated or treacherously slain by rival PCs. Wow. That was tenth on the list.
An interesting excerpt: "Typically, you will come across up to 300 or 400 orcs or goblins, who will proceed to pepper your group with a huge cloud of arrows, wiping out all the low level players and hirelings. Very few higher level players ever get done in by these creatures, however." I have to say that's an order of magnitude larger than my usual encounters. No wonder goblins were responsible for 1 in 10 deaths!
Finally I found this excerpt amusing: "Other interesting deaths are from Martians, mutants, poisons, acids, plagues, dying of thirst, dying in a river of boiling blood, run over by a coach (yes we do have traffic fatalities), done in by a sleeper with a hat pin, having a castle dropped on one’s person, and accidentally killing one’s self in an epileptic fit."
Anyway, it's interesting to see how gaming was different 30 years ago. I sometimes hear that folk on DF are weird, but most of us are quite normal compared to the real old school.
While looking for something else, I stumbled across an article in Dragon #20: "It's A Good Day To Die"
This article compiles death statistics from a campaign. The thing that's interesting is that this campaign had approximately 1000 PC deaths in four years from 1975 to 1978. That's approximate 250 deaths per year, or nearly 5 deaths per week! They kept records for around 600 of the deaths.
A far cry from modern "kinder/gentler" gaming theory and practice, where games are designed to keep characters alive and a PC death is seen as bad GMing.
Types of death recorded are interesting. There is of course the mundane stuff: 61 PCs slain by goblinoids, 45 by dragons, 18 by rocs, 14 by gnolls, etc. But some of the deaths are of the type you rarely hear about anymore (outside of Carcosa)...
23 PCs were killed by execution, torture, or sacrifice!! 8O It's not just that this occurred at all, but it was the sixth largest killer of PCs in the game, higher than undead or trolls.
18 were assassinated or treacherously slain by rival PCs. Wow. That was tenth on the list.
An interesting excerpt: "Typically, you will come across up to 300 or 400 orcs or goblins, who will proceed to pepper your group with a huge cloud of arrows, wiping out all the low level players and hirelings. Very few higher level players ever get done in by these creatures, however." I have to say that's an order of magnitude larger than my usual encounters. No wonder goblins were responsible for 1 in 10 deaths!
Finally I found this excerpt amusing: "Other interesting deaths are from Martians, mutants, poisons, acids, plagues, dying of thirst, dying in a river of boiling blood, run over by a coach (yes we do have traffic fatalities), done in by a sleeper with a hat pin, having a castle dropped on one’s person, and accidentally killing one’s self in an epileptic fit."
Anyway, it's interesting to see how gaming was different 30 years ago. I sometimes hear that folk on DF are weird, but most of us are quite normal compared to the real old school.
