Bawylie
A very OK person
Meh. You prettymuch do know the protagonist will /survive/ in some sense. You don't know if he'll extricate himself from predicament, or if he'll miraculously survive the fall, or get rescued, or fall presumably to his death, only to show up later with some improable story ("From the lowest dungeon to the highest peak I fought with the Balrog of Morgoth... Until at last I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin upon the mountain side... ") that doesn't really adequately explained how he survived.
;P
In a cliffhanger, you just come back later ("same bat-time, same bat-channel!"), in a movie you can cut to a different scene, or show the character's efforts in agonizing detail. In an RPG, what are you going to do, get a /reeeeallly/ tall dice tower? Resolution mechanics are not overly time-consuming - heck, some RPGs go out of their way to make 'em fast.
I think that's what the point was, you put things in the way of the 'inevitable' resolution that, in turn, need to be dealt with, somehow, thus creating that suspense-filled 'pause' between the intent/need/danger and the resolution. And, yeah, it may add up to a 'cost' (or may seem like pointless temporizing).
I don’t think you KNOW they survive. I think you guess. And I think if the narrative is sufficiently suspenseful, you feel an amount of anxiety about the outcome. Otherwise you’re engaging the meta-narrative of a story intellectually instead of engaging what’s actually happening in this story. A sufficient cliffhanger SHOULD trigger your suspension of disbelief. If it can’t, and there’s no real tension, then it’s a squib. You might have seen more than your fair share of squibs. And ok, fair enough.
But in an RPG what are you gonna do? I agree that’s the real question here. However, I’m not convinced a market system is anywhere near the answer.