Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Maxperson, what you're saying seems confused. You quote AbdulAlhazred saying that the PCs might reach a bad point. Which is exactly what the 13th Age rules provide for: if the PCs retreat, and suffer a campaign loss, then the players can try to come up with new ways to tackle this and regain momentum and even victory. But they might fail. That they might fail doesn't entail that they will fail. Just as that they can fix things doesn't entail that they will fix things. How do we learn whether or not the lost is "unfixable"? By playing the game. In this sort of RPGing, that's the whole point of play - to find out what can or can't be done.
I'm not confused. I'm simply going by the rule you posted. How do you know via game play if things are unfixable? By getting to other failure points. Except that rule you posted says that if they run away from failure points, they can fix it another way. Where's the 13th Age rule that says that things eventually become unfixable?
Look at your own example of the orcs eating the children. Suppose the "terrible price" of retreat is that all the children get eaten. You now seem to be saying that you wouldn't feel any pressure from that. Yet eaerlier on in this thread you were putting that forward as one of your most memorable moments of dramatic pressure in play.
This is a False Equivalence. I know that in my game things are often unfixable if you fail. That's the point. In my game the pressure is real, because the failures are real. They don't just result in "fail, but that's okay, you can just fix it a different way." Often things in my game can be fixed another way, but they often can't.
Had I in my example stopped having the orcs eat the children just so that the PCs now have another way to fix things, say by infiltrating the orc village, it would be an example like those in the 13th Age rule you posted.
And seem also to betray a lack of actual experience with play that follows the techniques described in the 13th Age and BW rulebooks.
I can only go by the rules that you post.