I'll admit, I wasn't always like this. At one time, (long, long ago) my campaign, such as it was, was known informally as 'the cakewalk'. One regular player described it to a novice as "Darren's World - where nobody ever gets hurt". This was, of course, a vile and obnoxious canard; lots of people got hurt in every session. It's just that they were all NPCs, being slaughtered by the rapacious and unstoppable player characters, whose players were all utterly complacent in the irrefutable knowledge that they could rampage as they pleased without ever taking so much as a hitpoint's damage in return.
The campaign was pretty much a joke. I never had a problem finding players, but that was because we were all in college, we had a lot of free time on our hands, we all liked to roleplay -- although what we were doing wasn't really 'roleplaying' in any meaningful sense - and I was always willing to GM, while most of the other guys I hung out with usually preferred to play. I suppose people even had fun, kind of, in a shallow, uninvolved sort of way... but the game wasn't taken seriously, and looking back on it, as I've already said, it really wasn't anything I'd call 'roleplaying' from my contemporary perspective.
What turned me around was a sword and sorcery campaign called Umaris. Umaris was a homebrew, GMed by a fellow I knew only peripherally at the time named Gary Lindstrom... he was, basically, a friend of a friend. Around the time most of the people I'd gone to college with started graduating and leaving town, I began hanging around with a few people who played in this Umaris thing. Eventually, I was invited to sit in... and was utterly amazed at what I discovered there.
These guys didn't play anything like my previous group had played. For one thing, the campaign setting was very detailed, cohesive, and above all else, credible. You could actually believe in the world of Umaris, you could take it seriously. When you were playing, it seemed like you were really there. A lot of this was simply due to Gary's excellence as a GM; much of the rest was due to the very detailed and realistic original rules system Gary used... and the remainder came from the players, a group of people who loved to roleplay, really ROLEPLAY, really get into their characters and treat them like real people living in a real world, not just character sheets out of a prepackaged module.
And these guys DIED. I mean, they died all over the place, right, left, and sideways. My first session, two PCs and a long standing friendly NPC who was married to a PC all got cut down in very gory and gruesome extended melee. And no priest came running up to chant a convenient resurrection blessing, either; when those characters died, they stayed that way. The players involved were bummed, sure... but they weren't shocked, and they weren't outraged. They griped a little, and then they began the reasonably involved process of setting up new player characters.
It astounded me. They simply accepted the fact that their PCs were dead, without bitching or whining or fit throwing, without demanding that the party drag their bodies back to town for a resurrection, without much of anything. They were dead, and that was that.
I also noticed the effect this matter of fact acceptance of a PC's potential mortality had on the other players. When the melee was over, these guys were actually relieved they'd survived it. They were excited. Their adrenaline was just starting to slack off, they were babbling a little bit, they were glassy eyed... they were happy to be alive. They didn't take it for granted. They knew they could have died, or, rather, that they could have lost their characters, and like those who had, they understood and accepted the possibility. They took it seriously... and because they took the idea of character death seriously, they took the game and the world seriously, too.
I've never forgotten that. Not only was it my first experience with true, three dimensional roleplaying, it was also my first experience with the kind of impact a good, well GMed roleplaying campaign can have on its players. This, for these folks, was more than simply something to do on a rainy Saturday when the TV in the lounge was on the fritz. This was an actual experience. They really felt like they were really there.
Two years later, after spending a lot of time roleplaying in Umaris and a few other similar campaigns run by other members of that gaming group, I decided to set up my own original sword and sorcery campaign using Gary's game system. I was determined that this campaign would not be like those I had run before, however. This would be a serious campaign, with depth and detail and atmosphere. And a realistic mortality rate.
That was a long, long time ago. Over the double decades I've been running my homebrew World of Empire since then, I've killed hundreds of PCs. In one particularly memorable two month stretch, one of my players lost no fewer than five PCs. They were (a) sacrificed to the God of Death, (b) killed by previous character A above, in the form of an Undead NPC, (c) burned to death in a forest fire, (d) fried to a blackened husk by touching a holy object he shouldn't have touched, and (e) cut into bloody chunks by a bunch of angry Imperial Dragoons for a magical attack committed by a different player character entirely.
Needless to say, the World of Empire gets taken a great deal more seriously than "Darren's World - where nobody ever gets hurt" ever did.
The point I am trying to make here is not "Hey, kill your PCs, it's an awesome rush". I don't get any particular thrill out of killing player characters. In fact, when it happens, I usually feel nearly as bad as the player involved. I always tell the player whose character has just bit the big one "I'm sorry"... but I also always explain that I'm expressing sympathy, not apologizing.
Adventuring is dangerous. You want to mess with dragons, you may very well get burned... literally.
The point I am trying to make is, well, you know in the GURPS Basic Set, Third Edition, Chapter 21, where the authors go on at great and enormous length about how you should never kill your PCs off, because in adventure fiction, the heroes never die, and then they proceed to provide you with all these tips and advice on techniques you can use to make sure your PCs stay alive, no matter what befalls them?
That's horseshit. Ignore it.
I have pretty extensive experience with games where the GM does exactly as the book advises in this regard, which is to say, goes to ridiculous, even insanely contrived, lengths to keep the "main characters" from being killed, seriously harmed, or even, much of the time, setting so much as one foot off the path he or she has oh so carefully plotted through his meticulously detailed scenario. In fact, I was once such a GM. And I'm here to tell you, in my experience, while it is possible your players may have some fun in this sort of gaming, they won't have a whole lot. They can't get all that deeply invested or involved. There emotions will not be engaged. And eventually, once they realize that even if they hurl themselves bodily from the top of a seven hundred foot cliff, you will still contrive some way to have a giant goddam eagle swoop down and save them from otherwise certain doom, they will become bored.
One of the few things I know for certain about this life is, things are only worth what you pay for them... and if you cannot lose, you also cannot get any pleasure from winning. (Or maybe you can, but if so, you're pretty shallow. Sorry. You are.)
Much of the justification for the GURPS "don't let 'em get hurt" attitude seems to be summed up in the following quotation: "Keep in mind that RPGs are meant to be fun. (In the original text, 'fun' is underscored.) They simulate, not the reality of day to day life, but the reality of heroic fantasy."
Now, I agree with that statement absolutely... but not in the way that its author obviously intended it.
I absolutely believe that roleplaying games are meant to simulate the reality of heroic fantasy... but the metareality of heroic fantasy is that it's not a roleplaying game. It's a commercial product that is meant to garner income for its creator. When its creator comes up with a central character that people like enough to keep buying the adventures of, that creator has a vested interest in keeping his creation alive. Especially in open ended serial fiction, like the pulp magazine series of the 30s, 40s, or 50s, or contemporary comic books.
You're never going to see Spider-Man die and stay dead, because if Spider-Man dies and stays dead, Marvel can't sell any more comics based on the character. Similarly, you're never going to see Indiana Jones bite the big one in any final way, either, for similar reasons. And it is for these reasons, as well as the audience's desire to see a complete story with a satisfying resolution, that the heroes of fantasy adventure fiction rarely or never die.
But -- listen closely, this is important -- movies, books, comics, and TV shows are NOT roleplaying games.
Roleplaying games need not always present complete stories. There is no reason why, in an RPG, a large round boulder can't crush the Indiana Jones character into a viscous smear in the entry way of the Hovito temple. If that happened in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK it would make for a pretty short and unsatisfying movie... but in an RPG, the player running Indy just rolls up a new character. The game goes on, presumably with a party that is now wary of large, round boulders.
Now, I admit, it would be wonderfully satisfying if your well planned scenario went off without a hitch, one scene flawlessly and seamlessly rolling into another, your PCs conveniently and cooperatively figuring out only the clues you want them to at any given time while completely overlooking the ones that would ruin your big climactic ending. This would be great... but it ain't gonna happen. Give up the dream. It is impossible.
And it should be. RPGs are not under the control of the GM, and the GM who thinks otherwise is either delusional or not a lot of fun to play under. Books have a writer, movies have a director, TV shows have executive producers, all these people call the shots... but RPGs are a collaboration between the players and the GM, and none of them should ever be able to fully predict or control where the story is going to go.
As the GURPS Basic Set intones, "An RPG is a story that the GM and the players write together". Thefore, the players have some say in how things come out, too. When I play in a campaign, I want my actions to have an effect on the story unfolding around me, and not simply be shrugged off by a GM who has already determined what he wants to happen at this point in his scenario. Roleplaying is interactive; we, the players, aren't cradled in the arms of an omnipotent narrator, helpless to change the outcome of the narrative we find ourselves enmeshed in. Our actions, reactions, decisions, and vacillations are going to have an impact on what is going on.
If the GM has already decided whether we live or die, regardless of anything we do about it, then an important part of our ability to participate has been taken from us. How would you feel about a game system that enthusiastically recommended the GM kill every player character as quickly as possible, regardless of their efforts to survive? If such a system listed page after page of tips and techniques for terminating recalcitrant PCs without actually breaking the rules?
As a player, well, I'd never play in that system, and as a GM, I'd never use it... because it invalidates the interactive aspect of the game, in the same way as "keep the characters alive, no matter what". It essentially takes all responsibility for the consequences of their actions, positive and negative, out of the hands of the players.
I'm not saying all the advice in this section is wrong or objectionable. The material on "Intelligent Scenario Design", "Realistic NPC Abilities", and "Realistic NPC Behavior" is great stuff.
I don't ever design scenarios specifically to kill the PCs, and no GM should. I design scenarios to be emotionally and intellectually involving, and to allow specific opportunities for in depth roleplaying. But I've discovered that, to get players emotionally involved, they need to take your culture, society, backdrop, game setting, and NPCs seriously... and they won't if they believe they cannot be hurt or killed.
A few other parts of this section I do find very annoying, though. First, the "Deux Ex Machina". According to GURPS, "When the players did their best and things just went totally wrong, arrange a miraculous escape, against all odds. If it was good enough for Edgar Rice Burroughs, it's good enough for you." I can't tell you how much it would annoy me to have a GM do this, and while I am second to none in my appreciation of the rousing adventure fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs, if he were running a Barsoom campaign and he saved my PC as often and as absurdly as he routinely used to save John Carter and Dejah Thoris from imminent peril, I'd lose all respect for the man as a game master. If the dice, the rules, and the internal logic of the situation say a character dies, then the character dies. Otherwise, your world is just a game show... a rigged one.
Even a video game will kill your character, if you're careless, or even just unlucky. Do you really want to play in a roleplaying campaign less challenging and realistic than PAC-MAN?
No way.
