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 wasnt
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 isnt too hard. The level of solicitousness that one sees
in modern GMs for a players 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.