Death and Law Enforcement

A driving fact in Clarence is that there are only a handful of replacement characters, and they are all very bad. In the First and Second runs the game wasn’t full, so the GMs actually wanted to kill some PCs who had gotten their “information” into the game, in order to cycle in other PCs. In at least one situation, a dead villain was given the man who should have been chasing him.

In other runs, however, the GMs need to “go slowly” to keep players from dying. Since virtually all deaths are at “GM discretion” this isn’t too hard. The level of solicitousness that one sees in modern GMs for a player’s emotional welfare in regards to losing a character was more or less absent in those days, and GMs had not yet learned the dead players are seldom happy. “On the fly” replacement characters created problems, and caused discontent.

Law Enforcement, it should be noted, is absent in Clarence. The sole exception is that if Dick Grey is ever played, while he has no sheet, he does have a Special Ability “Arrest” which can take a player out of the game for ten minutes automatically.

Obviously late in the game, this becomes a problem, so “disguise” abilities tended to proliferate. There are also some accounts of establishing a “neutral territory” where players would not be arrested if they did not start fights, etc.

This is a bit frustrating for the Detectives since they are intent on tracking down criminals. Of course at the end of the game, they may be allowed to “arrest” a defeated villain. For the most part the Detectives serve to help polarize the “good guys” and “villians,” and in some cases even cause sudden about faces.