Speaking of role playing I am still in mourning for a playing character I lost this week in a Traveller game. I am not going to mention the name of the referee but I will say that I will never be involved in a game with this guy ever again. :-)
My main gripe is that most of the damage was done that killed me came from one of three shots. This shot was at the end of a six second turn in which the npc had decided to jump, jumped, moved 150m (which was a difficult second action in a system that only allows one significant action), landed, acquired a target which would theoretically be prone with some cover, in the dark, firing an ACR, in microgravity, shot and hit. The NPC doing the shooting had a low level of skill. If the referee had thrown a twelve and not a six and not specifically prohibited me from doing the same thing two or three combat rounds previously.
This was of course all done when the referee had made a scenario for 12 PCs/NPCs harder that it was in the book and when two of the players had already dropped out.
As you describe it, that seems a pretty ... unusual, shall we say ... outcome that led to your character's demise. Did your character's death make the party's success more poignant - bitter-sweat victory?
ReplyDeleteIf you were running the game at that point, how would you have handled the situation to ratchet up the tension, yet avoid the chance that things might go sideways into a TPK?
I'm curious as I'm running two parties through Traveller at the moment and while I'm usually adverse to gunning players down for no larger reason, I've managed to give them a couple of scares when ACRs have actually hit Combat Armour! The players seem to find this frisson of fear of their mortality more exciting and tension inducing than a high party body count, so I'm beginning to think I might have the "danger" factor about right for a fun game.