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How challenging should encounters be?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6549758" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>No, it doesn't. Because playing a game is entirely a different experience than watching a movie. The later is passive; the former active. This is such a huge difference in the medium, that you can't expect that story telling mode of one to necessarily inform the other. The way stories are generated in a game compared to a movie is vastly more different than the way stories are created in movies or novels. Attempting to emulate how drama is created in the movies in a game is likely to be problematic. You'd be better off making comparisons to baseball if you must make analogies. But better yet is to not make analogies at all and speak on the thing itself.</p><p></p><p>It's pretty trivial to show that Gygaxian D&D - usually held up as the standard for DMs working to challenge players and DMs acting as antagonist to the player's interests - did not always or even usually result in PC death as a result of a failed encounter. Gygaxian D&D assumed adventures would play much as commando style hit and run raids, where PCs would retreat as soon as their momentum faltered and the odds turned against them. Success could be defined as simply not losing, and "running away and living to fight another day" was the expected strategy. It wasn't necessary or expected to 'win' every encounter, just to gradually wear down foes by attrition until victory was available (or conversely, to be worn down by attrition until inglorious defeat finally occurred). Any Dungeon foray you could walk away from carrying at least a coin was a good one. So given that, how does it really help the discussion to produce a generality like, "Losing an encounter does not need to result in character death. In many playstyles, it does not."</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Which, interestingly enough, isn't even verisimilitude to the Lovecraft stories. Instead, it's verisimilitude to a sort of received wisdom about how Lovecraftian stories should play out - not genera emulation but genera emulation emulation.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6549758, member: 4937"] No, it doesn't. Because playing a game is entirely a different experience than watching a movie. The later is passive; the former active. This is such a huge difference in the medium, that you can't expect that story telling mode of one to necessarily inform the other. The way stories are generated in a game compared to a movie is vastly more different than the way stories are created in movies or novels. Attempting to emulate how drama is created in the movies in a game is likely to be problematic. You'd be better off making comparisons to baseball if you must make analogies. But better yet is to not make analogies at all and speak on the thing itself. It's pretty trivial to show that Gygaxian D&D - usually held up as the standard for DMs working to challenge players and DMs acting as antagonist to the player's interests - did not always or even usually result in PC death as a result of a failed encounter. Gygaxian D&D assumed adventures would play much as commando style hit and run raids, where PCs would retreat as soon as their momentum faltered and the odds turned against them. Success could be defined as simply not losing, and "running away and living to fight another day" was the expected strategy. It wasn't necessary or expected to 'win' every encounter, just to gradually wear down foes by attrition until victory was available (or conversely, to be worn down by attrition until inglorious defeat finally occurred). Any Dungeon foray you could walk away from carrying at least a coin was a good one. So given that, how does it really help the discussion to produce a generality like, "Losing an encounter does not need to result in character death. In many playstyles, it does not." Which, interestingly enough, isn't even verisimilitude to the Lovecraft stories. Instead, it's verisimilitude to a sort of received wisdom about how Lovecraftian stories should play out - not genera emulation but genera emulation emulation. [/QUOTE]
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