George RR Martin moment

[Lloyd Dupont]

I was thinking idly of my newly started capaign... and possible future directions.

And then was thinking to kill one of the central characters. It's not something I usually do. But for some reason I was entertaining it. Really, should I kill possibly my and player's favorite NPC, I was asking myself?

And then it hit me!

That's exactly what I should do!

I already set him up to be a fixture of the world. The day he died, I am 100% sure the players are gonna be shocked. And moved to action! Genius! 😄
Now I just have to make it a "meaningful death", mmm... model idle thinking...

[Ali the Helering]

ST: TNG killed Tasha in a meaningless death.  That meaninglessness saved the series from mediocrity. 

[Lloyd Dupont]

I am not sure what you mean? 

like what is TNG? (I guess ST is star trek). Also is that a typo or you said meaninglessness is good?

Anyway, that also raise an additional question. What does "meaningful" (or "meaningless") death even means?

For the sake of the argument, when I try to distill the essence of it. I think meaningful death is a death where an enemy kill them (as opposed to an accident, such as falling or something). Or perhaps I could add the force of nature to the killer list if there is magic or god behind. I.e. a death where the hero or readers can get angry at something.

[tobarstep]

13 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

I am not sure what you mean? 

like what is TNG? (I guess ST is star trek). Also is that a typo or you said meaninglessness is good?

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Tasha was a character in the original episodes of the series but they killed her off just kind of offhandedly. The actress had posed nude for a magazine and it seems like the TV show producers didn't care for that.

 

Also, when you said you had a GRRM moment, I assumed you meant that you had started an epic new campaign but never intended to finish it.

[Atgxtg]

On 11/4/2024 at 11:01 AM, Ali the Helering said:

ST: TNG killed Tasha in a meaningless death.  That meaninglessness saved the series from mediocrity. 

No I didn't. TNG didn't suddenly turn good after that. Most of the first season was pretty weak, and that had nothing to do wit Tasha Yar. It had a lot more to do with recycling medicore ideas ideas from the cancelled Phase II series and having character that the writters didn't like and didn't know how to write for (Wesly Cruhser and Dianna Troy).

Killing Yar off didn't change anything expect that it gave them one les character to write for. The rest of season one is still pretty weak, and second season didn't start off much better.

It was the got better in writing the characters and stories, and  how the writers found a way to have conflict among the main characters that Gene Roddenbery would accept that improved the show..

But killing off Tasha did nothing. 

 

Getting rid of Doctor Cusher had a much greater impact. It got a strong negative response from the fans, as she was on of the three charactersfrom the first season that the the fans liked (Crusher, Riker and Data). 

2 hours ago, tobarstep said:

The actress had posed nude for a magazine and it seems like the TV show producers didn't care for that.

They did't fire her, she quit. Denise Crosby felt that there were too many characters on the show and decided to leave. She wasn't fired. Gate McFadden got fired. 

 

[Atgxtg]

On 11/4/2024 at 5:59 AM, Lloyd Dupont said:

I was thinking idly of my newly started campaign... and possible future directions.

And then was thinking to kill one of the central characters. It's not something I usually do. But for some reason I was entertaining it. Really, should I kill possibly my and player's favorite NPC, I was asking myself?

And then it hit me!

That's exactly what I should do!

I already set him up to be a fixture of the world. The day he died, I am 100% sure the players are gonna be shocked. And moved to action! Genius! 😄
Now I just have to make it a "meaningful death", mmm... model idle thinking...

Just a couple of cautions before you do that:

1) Are you sure this is going to have the effect you are expecting from your players? Is that the effect you really want?

2) What are you going to follow that up with? Once the shock wears off you have to fill the void with something, and that will probably include building up another NPC to interact with the players, and is that going to be a step up or step down from the previous NPC for your game? Remember you are losing a favorite NPC, so you need something good (campaign wise) to take up the slack. Otherwise your game just got worse. It's like when a TV show kills off your favorite character. 

3) What is going to make this death significant to the PCs? Becuase if it's not significant then the players won't care and this will just be a dud. 

 

I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't kill off a major NPC, it's  just that you should consider the long term repercussions of such actions. I've seen more than one campaign killed off by some "cool idea" that the GM had that seemed great when they thought of it, but had disastrous unforeseen consequences because they didn't think it through beforehand.Was in one game where the GM thought it was a neat idea to have us teleported across the continent and come back home through enemy territory. He cooled on the idea when the main PC (the knight of the manor whom everyone else  was a vassal too) got killed in the process and derailed the whole campaign.

Once you kill off that NPC what happens next? Usually in fiction the death of a significant NPC leads to some sort of major life change for one or more  major characters. What do you see the impact of this will be with the PCs and also the players?

Again, I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying don't just rely on the shock value to carry your story, and think things through.

[Ali the Helering]

4 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

But killing off Tasha did nothing. 

It encouraged the viewer to think that there might be something vaguely intelligent going on, rather than a banal re-tread.  I can't say that I ever took to the show, but Tasha's utterly meaningless  death took it a cut above many others. 

A meaningful death has something powerful to say within the story arc, whereas a meaningless one has the chance to remind us that we live in an uncaring and implicitly hostile (while not malicious) universe. 

Which is, I suppose, why I prefer Cosmic Horror as a sub-genre of Gothic, to Slasher Horror.     

[Lloyd Dupont]

10 hours ago, tobarstep said:

Also, when you said you had a GRRM moment, I assumed you meant that you had started an epic new campaign but never intended to finish it.

Haha 😅
Well.. not entirely away froom the room of possibilities.. with playing fortnightly with lots of interruption!
But I hope this will be my best home made campaign yet so far! With some kingdom building thrown-in!😄

7 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Are you sure this is going to have the effect you are expecting from your players? Is that the effect you really want?

To be honest I was just brainstorming. The end of my campaign is still indistinct, and I got multiple totally unrelated and remote endings in mind. Just contemplating the possibility, not quite what to make of it yet.

7 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

3) What is going to make this death significant to the PCs? Becuase if it's not significant then the players won't care and this will just be a dud. 

Well as I did notice a couple of times with my players already. They showed much stronger attachment to NPC and social structure than I expected. So I expected them to become vengeful.

Game wise the NPC I was specifically thinking about (though this realization applies to all), the main quest giver / raid leader at the start of the game. But I have hope that the PC might be able to develop their own quest interests.

[Atgxtg]

7 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

It encouraged the viewer to think that there might be something vaguely intelligent going on, rather than a banal re-tread

No it didn't. I was there. It just showed the viewers that they writers didn't know how to kill off a character very well. Remeber, this was after Wrath of Kahn, which had what is probably the most signficant character death in media.

7 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

  I can't say that I ever took to the show,

Practically no one at the time did. that's kind of the point. The lackluster death of Tasha didn't impress the audience with a meaningless death. It just was noted as another meaningless event in a mostly meaningless show. If it wasn't for Riker, Data, and Crusher I don't think the show would have made it.   Worf and Troi were useless (no fault to the actors), Welesy was annoying and made everyone else look useless (because the writers didn't know how to make him look smart without dumping down everyone else), La Forge was about as noticeable as the various navigators of the week from TOS pre-Checkov,. Yar was bascially another Worlf without the ridges, and Picard was the least convincing portrayal of a Frechnman ever to appear on US television. Peter Sellers played a more convincing Frenchman and he was doing a spoof. Why they didn't change Picard to British baffles me. 

And most of the scrips and characters were left overs from Phase II. The show had a very rocky start. Most Trek fans gave up on it, and Tasha's death by belligerent WD-40 mean nothing to the audience. 

If you want a meaningless death to resonate with the audience, you have to first make the character's life be meaningful. It's why we don't even remember the names of most of the red shirts who were killed in various episodes over the years. No one actually cares about a meaningless death to a meaningless character. Hence the brought Tasha back in a later episode to give her a meaningful death. They wouldn't have done that if the meaningless death had stuck.

 

7 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

 

but Tasha's utterly meaningless  death took it a cut above many others. 

Not according to anyone I every talked to about it. That includes the production staff I met at the TNG convention I went to that year. Tasha's death wan't event a blip on the radar, because no one cared about her. Getting rid of Dr. Crusher was what everyone noticed at the con. All the fans told the people from the show that they were wrong to do it. And next year we got Gates back.

Tasha just hadn't been around long enough to matter. Tasha's death just promoted a few Beverly Hillbillies jokes and didn't not to stop the of fans jumping ship.

Rding going to th klingon ship is season 2 is when 

7 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

A meaningful death has something powerful to say within the story arc, whereas a meaningless one has the chance to remind us that we live in an uncaring and implicitly hostile (while not malicious) universe. 

Which goes against the setting that Star Trek tried to create. 

Tasha death was meaningless because the writers failed to give the character meaning while she was alive. Tasha only became meaningful later because she had died. Most of that was because they retroactively had Data attach meaning to their one night stand.

7 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

Which is, I suppose, why I prefer Cosmic Horror as a sub-genre of Gothic, to Slasher Horror.     

Okay. But I think that is a rare take. Watching or reading about an "uncaring and implicitly hostile" universe might be entertaining, but it's not a fun place to live in. One of the biggest hurdles CoC has is that ultimately it doesn't matter what the PCs do. Once Cthulhu decides to get his lazy butt out of bed we're doomed, assuming something else doesn't get us first. 

[Atgxtg]

4 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

To be honest I was just brainstorming. The end of my campaign is still indistinct, and I got multiple totally unrelated and remote endings in mind. Just contemplating the possibility, not quite what to make of it yet.

I guessed as muc. And brainstoriming is a good thing. It's just that before do do anything radical you should think things through, and work out what happened after the  "wouldn't it be great if I did this thing!" stage.

4 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

Well as I did notice a couple of times with my players already. They showed much stronger attachment to NPC and social structure than I expected. So I expected them to become vengeful.

Yup. SO they chase down the being responsible and get justice and/or vengeance. Then what? In the real world that is where emptiness and mourning come in., five stages of grief, etc. How will you be able to run your players through that? Or how can you move them beyond that? 

It's like having the bad guys win at the end of a story. It's a neat twist ending, but what if you have to live there afterwards? 

4 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

Game wise the NPC I was specifically thinking about (though this realization applies to all), the main quest giver / raid leader at the start of the game. But I have hope that the PC might be able to develop their own quest interests.

But what if they can't or don't? You probably should work out a "Plan B" and maybe a "Plan C" in case you players don't act as you hope. In the campaign I mentioned before the GM was stuck once the major PC died...until I mentioned her twin sister, who then inherited the manor. But I think more like a GM that a player so I saw the potential problem of how the campaign was structured around one PC, especially since this was the second time the "lord of the manor" died and had to be replaced.  But most players don't GM. The GM did halve an alternative, and worked out a way to bring the original character back via "elfin magic" (as an elf, probably though a ritual involving milk and uncommonly good cookies), but he didn't need to.

So just have some trick up you sleeve if this doesn't go as you hope or the loss of the most popular NPC leaves a hole in your game. 

Personally I'd be hesitant to kill off a highly popular and successful NPC since getting one to work out  is a bit hit or miss. I've done it. But the campaign rarely improved for it. Although...Sir William did have the best death we ever saw in our Pendragon games.

 

[Ali the Helering]

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

I was there.

You were not alone.  As I said, it encouraged, not forced, or required.  I have known many upon whom it had that effect which means that, for them, it worked.  Not me.

I am put in mind of a comment in a book I once came across, that the Babylon 5 episode Grey 17 is missing is so bad it could be classed as the equal of an excellent Star Trek episode.  I have to agree with the comment in every way.  

[Atgxtg]

7 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

You were not alone.  As I said, it encouraged, not forced, or required.  I have known many upon whom it had that effect which means that, for them, it worked.  Not me

Well I haven't met one, let alone many. For everyone I met Tasha's death didn't have an impact until later, as the show started to improve and they writers started to use her death to give more depth to the remaining characters. Like when Data hald a hologram of her in the episode where they went to trial over if he counted as as life. 

I haven't seen anyone been impacted by the meaningless death of Lee Kelso either. I think Lee was the first character to die on screen in the series,and Lee was an engineer who could impress Scotty with his jury rigging! Be Lee wasn't around long enough to impress the audience. 

But I've seen shows that handled the meaningless death of supporting characters much better. The writers of M*A*S*H did this a million times better when they killed off Henry Blake, when McLean Stevenson wanted to leave the series. And then the producers killed off Henry to be petty for him walking out on them. 

Bust Tasha's death? Most the people I know who talked about it at the time, including other fans at conventions, wrote it off as a bad ending for a minor character, killed off by a bad antagonist, in a bad episode. A year later we were making Exxon Valdez jokes about it. Maybe they could have saved her if the replicator had been programmed to make kitty litter. 

It would have been better if they had killed her off in the penalty box in the previous Q episode. Same end result, better execution. Or in the Q episode before that. Or in the infamously bad episode with the poisoned glove. Tasha nearly got killed so many times in the first season that her actual death has most of it's meaning stripped away.

The show did a much better job of this when they killed off Lt. Aster off screen in the teaser of a later episode, and then showed the fallout with her son and Worf. 

I think  people who claim Tasha's death was impactful probably are doing so with the benefit of hindsight and what the series became. No one said sqaut aboutin in 1988. My roomate was in the bathroom when it happened and we he came out and asked what he missed the answer was "Not much, they killed off Yar." At the time most of us were waiting around for Picard to get killed off and be replaced by Riker, or for the show to be cancelled. The only meaningful death in the first season would have been Wesly's, since practically everyone hated the character- writers included (they used to bash the character at conventions and they were the ones responsible for writing him that way).

7 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

.

I am put in mind of a comment in a book I once came across, that the Babylon 5 episode Grey 17 is missing is so bad it could be classed as the equal of an excellent Star Trek episode.  I have to agree with the comment in every way.  

It seems that neither of you are that big of a Star Trek Fan.

I saw a similar comment in a revenue of an, apparently not to so good, episode of the Avengers by someone who wasn't fond of James Bond. Basically they stated that it was a bad epsiode but still better than any Bond film. I think it told more about the reviewer's tastes then that of the two franchises.

[Ali the Helering]

I am sorry that you are so embittered.  There is a world out there that is not entirely of your opinion and I have, indeed, met many of them.  I don't believe there is any purpose in continuing this conversation, so I shall sign off.