Came across this blog post and thought I'd give a quick comment here. Quick because life is busy and I have to plan and arrange for kittens that will arrive in five weeks...
The basic point that Carl is attempting to make is that system is very important in deciding if the characters live or not. The debate is with Faustusnotes who claims that play style is more important.
My comment, Faustusnotes is correct. Carl is wrong.
All the crunching of systems numbers means nothing in the comparisons Carl attempts, for the simple reason that for such crunching to be decisive- the play style must be held constant.
However Faustusnotes' entire point is that play styles aren't constant.
Carl point thusly fail to even address the question put before him, and are instead misdirection (intended or not).
Carl can claim that a given play style may require more... let's call it bias... to produce given level of deaths. But no more.
How people choose to the play the game is always more important than the game.
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In my experience it's not as simple as one or the other. Both system and play style affect character death rates.
But to Carl's point, system does affect death rates. Any system where it's relatively easy to die due to random circumstance (die roll) will kill characters faster than a system which limits how much randomness determines outcomes. Rolemaster comes to mind...a group of friends and I tried it years ago and quit after one character fell out of a tree, rolled a critical, and died. That's system not style. Even more obvious is the old Traveller system - your character could die during character generation. Again, system not style.
Style certainly has an affect but neither is in a vacuum.
I had a full massive post written then I realized that the thing we have to agree on is does play style mean just the players or the game master as well? Because if we are talking about the game master then of course his style trumps all:
Any system can get very deadly if he throws powerful foes at the PCs and any system can be harmless with a few fudged die rolls.
However if we are talking about the players style then I agree with Shawn.
The two games I play right now are Call of Cthulhu and 4th edition D&D:
In CoC a character can *usually* survive 1 hit from a gun. 2 hits if you are lucky. Every time you go into combat you risk your character. Heck in my game last night a burly man with a chair leg took one of my strongest PCs down to half HP in one hit.
Once you are hit it can take several weeks to get back to full HP, which of course massively raises the risk of further combat.
Now cross that with 4e where you almost never go down from one hit, and fighters often take multiple hits before even asking for the cleric, and there is ready access to in-battle healing. After the battle you almost always can use healing surges to top up your HP, and in 4 hours you can max out all your resources once again.
I think regardless of the parties play style CoC is a more lethal game. You can be as cautious as you want, when the guns come out someone could die. You attack with stealth, when they are unready, only when you are at your peak, etc. If even one opponent gets a shot off then there is a chance someone could die.
In 4e playing with the same play style and smart players I would be stunned if you lost anyone, ever. There are more chances to correct and it is almost impossible to die from one hit, and the designers have stated that this is deliberate.
Now I agree play style is a huge factor: if the CoC party plays like they are playing 4e they are going to die, and if the 4e party plays recklessly then you can easily get yourself into a TPK.
So what I'm saying is that I think style is very important, but the system can amplify or negate the effects of a certain play style.
Are you not the one that wrote about Pace of Decision? Why am I explaining all this to you? You know this stuff better then I do! *heads off to work on articles for my own blog*
--Canageek
canageek: I'm was very much including the GM in the concept of Style, which is why I called it "play style" and not player style.
Maybe calling it Group Style would have been a better choice.
In traditional gaming, the GM is the person who makes the decision to invoke the rules, and in what way. His ability to make a game in just about anything is the reason we have the terms "Killer GM" and "Monty Hall GM" in the first place.
Rules are passive things and control only that which the people using them allow them to control. Nothing more, nothing less.
Yes. PCs may die when their players and/or the GM place them in risky situations. All the rules can tell you is what path is risky. You are the one who has to walk it.
How people choose to the play the game is always more important than the game.
Nice distillation!
Whether this is good for the game or not, it's an important point, as it reflects the group's relationship to the game. If you want to think about system from there, that's okay, and maybe even essential*, but style comes first. It one of those meta-game things that a group informally figures out amongst themselves before they get to the table.
*i.e. If a group plays a game, and they spend all of their time fudging and ignoring its rules, maybe it's time to find a different game.
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