Heart of a Hero, Mind of a Pigeon

[Libramarian]

I like Lego Skinner box D&D, where instead of birdseed you get Lego pieces, and as you accumulate more and more you can start to decide how much time you spend playing the game for more Lego and how much time you spend playing with your existing Lego.

 

[Challenger RPG]

Good article.

It reminds me of my first true 4E game. I hadn't bothered to buy the monster manual at that point (seeing as I owned the earlier ones) and I massacred the entire party in the first battle with a troll.

That said, all the other 4E games I played seemed to very much lean toward your Lego analogy. Also, it seems to be the overreaching trend. Partly because 1E characters just bloody died all the time.

We also did a throwback adventure in a 1E quest and even though everyone played great, a gelatinous cube wiped out half the party and an insanity room the other half.

***

While most of my 'serious' 3E and other games tend to have very long life expectancies (I played minecraft non-lethal mode to build a castle) the most fun adventures I can recall always seemed to involve (or seem to involve) ludicrous amounts of danger.

One of the most famous was Crellen Vort's Castle in which all characters died save one thief who lost an arm, scaled the roof, and eventually resurrected the others. That story tends to get told over and over again compared to the 'oh yeah, I won again' ones.

That said, dying all the time can really play havoc with a campaign. In a recent game one of the PCs died about 15 times straight and ended up a weird, disembodied skeleton thing.

So, I guess you could say I value both styles. I do think 4E went a bit too far on the 'I'm immune to everything' scale, but that could just be a personal taste.

***

I guess the main point I'd like to add is that the 'element' of danger can sometimes be just as good as the actual danger itself. It maintains the illusion and the conditioning factor you mentioned. A couple of great adventures had no danger, but seemed so incredibly dangerous to the players that they still recall them fondly. One player broke into a magic item store in a deserted town and looted everything. She was so scared there was nothing guarding the magic items the adventure immortalized itself.

Thanks for writing up the fine article, <!-- BEGIN TEMPLATE: dbtech_usertag_mention --> @Kamikaze Midget <!-- END TEMPLATE: dbtech_usertag_mention -->.

 

[Argyle King]

Interesting read, but I'm not sure if I agree with a lot of it when looking at rpgs in general. I believe some of what you say is possibly true when thinking primarily of D&D, but not generally true with other rpgs which are built around different ideals and different styles. It also heavily depends on the views of the people playing. If I play the game primarily as my character and less as a player, that certainly changes the conversation concerning winning or losing. My character most certainly does have motivations which can be described in terms of winning and losing; strictly speaking of myself as a player, that is not necessarily true.