A GMing telling the players about the gameworld is not like real life

[MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], I don't really know what your point is. I quoted the 13th Age rules to provide an example (as I understand them) of what [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] had in mind (as I understood him) in referring to a "terrible price". AbdulAlahzred agreed that I was providing such an example.

The fact that you interpret those passages differently from everyone else posting in this thread, including AbdulAlhazred who was a 13th Age playtester, is of no significance to my reason for posting them to explain to [MENTION=6688277]Sadras[/MENTION] what [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] had in mind.

You might consider, as a reason speaking against your interpretation, that (1) it makes the rule silly rather than sensible, and (2) produces a contradiction with the suggestion that "[t]he campaign-loss rule is key to making combat meaningful." And you might consider, as the basis for revising your interpretation, the following description of a "campaign loss": something that the party was trying to do fails in a way that going back and finishing off those enemies later won’t fix. This doesn't imply that the loss can, as such, be fixed in some other way; it's making the point that the loss has an element in addition to not beating the enemies, and hence that going back and subsequently beating the enemies who forced the initial retreat won't, per se, fix the loss.

As I've said, whether the loss can be fixed some other way is something for play to discover. 13th Age is not designed around an approach to play where the GM has already decided what can or can't be done in the game. (This can be seen, for instance, in the text and sidebar for its Resurrection spell.)

Maxperson said:

A toaster would have to be run over by a semi or something to be damaged beyond repair, and even then it could probably still be fixed. It just wouldn't be worth the effort or price to do so. The same applies to almost everything we build.

Had they meant that the failure was to be unfixable, they would not have limited that statement to the creatures. They would just have said that retreating causes an unfixable campaign loss. They didn't do that, because there are other means to fix the loss.

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This makes no sense at all, the failure can be fixable or not depending on the context.

pemerton said:

[MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], I don't really know what your point is. I quoted the 13th Age rules to provide an example (as I understand them) of what [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] had in mind (as I understood him) in referring to a "terrible price". AbdulAlahzred agreed that I was providing such an example.

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The point was crystal clear in my first response. If you can fix it another way through play, it's not a "terrible priice." It's not even a price at all. So we don't solve it by killing the monsters that we ran from. So what.

pemerton said:

I think "honouring the choice point" is a key notion. It's very contextual, too - I think it's unfair for a GM to hose the PCs when the players have pushed them to the point of being "wounded, broke and ragged" (to quote Luke Crane); but if the players are resting very liberally then I think it's fair game for the GM (i) to frame them into very hard situations, and (ii) to make a lot of plot weight be carried by success or failure in those situations.

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Well, the GM has, even in a fairly liberally story now sort of scene framed approach, the ability to effectively keep success out of the hands of the PCs forever. There needs to be some agreement or mechanism which thus 'creates success' to a degree. This, for me, is still somewhat of an area of exploration in that I would be happy if it was regulated. You can use SC mechanics in this way, but it could become a lot of accounting and whatnot if you take it too far (IE having something like an overarching SC that governs success/failure at the story arc and campaign levels).

Your question answers itself: if the players have their PCs retreat when they have to every time, then they will never succeed, will they?

As to "what's the challenge?", in this sort of RPGing the challenge has two dimensions: the immediate challenge of game play, which has a strong mechanical element; and the challenges of the fiction. Playing one's PCs until they are "wounded, broke and ragged" involves skill; and if the GM is pushing the fiction hard, will require hard decision in story terms also.

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One of the aspects of the 'boon' system in HoML has to do with this whole issue of the players holding back and trying to 'nibble the problem to death', which can also be basically a sort of '5 minute workday' kind of affair.

In HoML the GM awards boons as outcomes of character action, generally the players may do something like declare a quest, and at the end of it, when it is successful, they acquire the boon(s) associated with it. If they simply dawdle around taking long rests every other time they turn around, then they're never going to get there! The key point being, you go up a level when you acquire a major boon. Its perfectly feasible for the players to simply diddle around and dip their toes in, but they will remain small fry. This is really perfectly acceptable and they could enjoy some modest success over time and play nothing but heroic characters. Its not quite the intended mode of play for this game, but there is a sort of self-regulating aspect to the dynamics there. If the players are ambitious, then they WILL need to take risks.

This is actually pretty analogous to the 'level divider' rule in classic D&D where if you're level 1 you might get 10xp for an orc, but if you're level 5 you get 2xp for the same orc (and his treasure is relatively much less worthwhile). In AD&D you can never get to name level without plunging down into the deeper dungeon levels and risking it all, its just mathematically impossible.

Absolutely! In threads over the past several years I've expressed a related notion, "No failure offscreen."

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That is a good way of putting it, and it is really just a manifestation of the story teller's mantra "show, don't tell."

Maxperson said:

"Cannot be solved by just killing the creatures they ran from", means that they can solve it another way. The just cannot solve it by killing that one group. Had they meant that it cannot ever be solved if they run, they would have said that. There is no misinterpretation on my part. There may be another rule that says that it can't ever be solved, but if there is @pemerton won't share it.

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English is reasonably maleable, so I would say that what you are quoting there COULD mean that it can be solved another way, that is certainly left open as a possibility; however, the literal meaning of a sentence of the form "[you] cannot solve this by just doing X" simply states that X won't work, not that some other thing will. The 'just' implies that some MORE DIFFICULT OR COSTLY method may be feasible, but since that other method isn't spelled out, and its a general statement applicable to a class of situations, it isn't really guaranteed to be feasible in all cases.

Frankly, this whole discussion is bringing me back more and more to my previous statement, which is that it would be quite desirable to have some sort of mechanism to regulate the ebb and flow of opportunities for success. Something like an overarching SC tally, or a 'doom pool' or some sort of 'clock'. These are all practical possibilities, but I don't think there are many systems out there which have instituted things like that at the more 'strategic' campaign or story arc level.

The two which I know of that do come to mind are BitDW's 'stress' mechanism, which IIRC (I am not overly familiar with this game) eventually leads to PC death/retirement; and the sanity mechanic of CoC. CoC SAN loss is somewhat reversible, but practically speaking it is mostly a one-way street leading to Arkham Asylum in the end. Of course these are both notable as being systems in which there is no concept of victory, merely at best a staving off of ultimate loss.

AbdulAlhazred said:

Frankly, this whole discussion is bringing me back more and more to my previous statement, which is that it would be quite desirable to have some sort of mechanism to regulate the ebb and flow of opportunities for success. Something like an overarching SC tally, or a 'doom pool' or some sort of 'clock'. These are all practical possibilities, but I don't think there are many systems out there which have instituted things like that at the more 'strategic' campaign or story arc level.

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You could track failures and after three of them relating to a specific goal, that goal is unattainable. That doesn't have to mean PC death, but it can. Going back to the orcs and kids example...

For the first failure to beat the orcs and save the kids, after the party retreats the remaining orcs run into a slave caravan whose guards wipe them out. The masters then take the kids as slaves. The second failure to recover the kids from the slavers results in the kids being sold. The third failure to locate and recover the kids, means that the kids are gone. There are no more chances to succeed on this goal.

Maxperson said:

The point was crystal clear in my first response. If you can fix it another way through play, it's not a "terrible priice." It's not even a price at all. So we don't solve it by killing the monsters that we ran from. So what.

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Suppose you can fix it by giving up the life of one of the party members, permanently. Say the God of Death says "Sure, your life for theirs, I'll bring them back and you get to come with me." Is that terrible enough? It sure would be a perfectly valid kind of way to test a PC's beliefs to the breaking point, and perhaps beyond...

I look at it as its always a matter of escalation. If you want to push the situation in an escalating direction, to more cost, more danger, bigger sacrifice, then something can be accomplished. When, instead you want to ratchet down the pressure, when the water is too hot and you decide to get out, then you walk away and leave your wager on the table. Sure, you can come back later, but there's no guarantee that you can just sit back down at the table with a whole new hand and jump right back in again. Chances are you take your losses and go on to the next thing.

I mean, practically speaking, we don't want to LOOSE, we want to PLAY. RPGs are not about 'winning'. I don't really recall big wins as some fantastic thing. Sure, I can recall battles that were fought and won, or lost, but its the characters that remain. Even when I can barely remember any one thing some character did that I played 40 years ago, I can remember what motivated them, what they tried to do, why. All this talk of success and failure isn't really the point, it is just the medium through which story is driven and character built.

Maxperson said:

You could track failures and after three of them relating to a specific goal, that goal is unattainable. That doesn't have to mean PC death, but it can. Going back to the orcs and kids example...

For the first failure to beat the orcs and save the kids, after the party retreats the remaining orcs run into a slave caravan whose guards wipe them out. The masters then take the kids as slaves. The second failure to recover the kids from the slavers results in the kids being sold. The third failure to locate and recover the kids, means that the kids are gone. There are no more chances to succeed on this goal.

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Right, and I think that would be a pretty usable kind of a gauge, particularly in a scene framed game where the GM is basically going to present a new situation based on narrative, the goals of the particular game, and the players signaled interests. So if the children COULD still be saved (maybe we're at 2 failures) then clearly the next scene is going to describe some possibility of gaining a success, and even that might not be the end of the road, several more might be needed, and even final victory won't magically bring back whomever was eaten, its a bit lesser victory than it might have been. OTOH not taking that rest might have meant TPK, you never know...

Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic has a Doom Pool that extends over Scenes and resets at the beginning of each Act. What countws as an Act is flexible: the system is odd in its core presenation (MHRP) because it's obviously "story now" but assumes a pre-estalished story arc (an Event, in the terminology of the game, like Civil War or Fall of the Mutants).

In my Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy game I've relied on the internal logic of play to determine breaks between Acts. The first Act ended when one of the PCs escaped the dungeon with the dark elves' gold while the other PCs were still trapped in the bottom levels. The next Act began with those trapped PCs having made their way to the surface and trudged back to civilisation, while the other PC was once again traipsing north having spent down his bag of gold. The second Act evolved into an attempt to rescue villagers from reavers and giants, and when that had been achieved I decided that that Act was finished. The third Act began with the PCs heading up into the high places of the north to try and stop the Ragnarok. It's still ongoing, but will be the final Act of the campaign.

The idea that a GM would, or would noeed to, stipoulate that a particular goal is unattainable seems on its face a bit railroad-y. In the orcs-eating-children example, if the PCs are defeatd by the orcs but subsequently end up finding a Ring of Wishes, what (in the standard fiction of a typical D&D game) precludes them wishing that the children had never been captured and eaten? Or there is [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s example of a bargain with Death itself.

This is why I tend to think of the idea of an outcome or goal that is/isn't possible having no meaning outside the context of actual play.

AbdulAlhazred said:

Well, the GM has, even in a fairly liberally story now sort of scene framed approach, the ability to effectively keep success out of the hands of the PCs forever. There needs to be some agreement or mechanism which thus 'creates success' to a degree. This, for me, is still somewhat of an area of exploration in that I would be happy if it was regulated. You can use SC mechanics in this way, but it could become a lot of accounting and whatnot if you take it too far (IE having something like an overarching SC that governs success/failure at the story arc and campaign levels).

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So, it does not seem entirely unreasonable that you could measure the success of an "adventure" like a SC, but using the success or failure of Challenges, and the success of a campaign using the success or failure of "adventures", just sort of abstractly scaling up from one level to the next.

The question then being what does a failed adventure look like? How do you significantly change the fiction on the campaign scale without leading to a campaign level death spiral? Further, how does this affect the framing of scenes in a more player driven game style, and how does it affect the development of backstory in a more DM drive game style?