D&D General "Hot Take": Fear is a bad motivator

[MichaelSomething]

I would be remiss if I didn't post this relevant video...

 

[Maxperson]

But, as @Xetheral stated - it may be too late to resolve - or at least problematic.

Lets say you fail to save the royal family when your characters are 5th level. You don't have the resources to bring them back until your characters are 13th level - many, many years later.

In that time, the game world has had a whole succession issue (either resolved peacefully, by war or by some other conflict). There's a new family on the throne. Bringing back the original royals isn't going to solve the problem, it's going to create a mess!

Yep. There may be other issues to work on for sure.

 

[Xetheral]

Someone ruled the country while they were gone. I guarantee it. People don't leave countries without leadership. You may have to remove those who stepped up if they won't step down, but that's a different problem. It may even be that the PCs stepped in to do it. Lots of ways to play it. Also, consequence does not equal failure. The failure was in letting the royal family die. The correction was in bringing them back. A consequence OF the failure was different leadership. The new leadership was not the failure, though.

Wasn't your original claim that without the risk of permanent character death, there would be no permanent consequences at all?

Isn't failure itself still meaningful if it has permanent consequences?

 

[Maxperson]

Wasn't your original claim that without the risk of permanent character death, there would be no permanent consequences at all?

Isn't failure itself still meaningful if it has permanent consequences?

If I said that, I spoke incorrectly. I said/meant failure. Consequences are unavoidable unless from 1st level on the party just retires and does nothing, and even then, depending on the game, it may have consequences.

 

[Older Beholder]

I’d agree that fear is a bad motivator, (or not a very fun one) I find that if players become too paranoid they lean towards inaction. I can’t set off the trap if I don’t say I’m walking down the corridor. Little role playing moments disappear as nobody wants to experiment or add a bit of detail in describing an action in case it goes wrong or is used against you.

When you’re made to fear losing your job you tend to do the bare minimum in order to not get fired. It doesn’t motivate anyone to do a great job.

 

[Lanefan]

Except that losing your artifacts or your beloved NPCs or whatever else, no matter how hurtful they are, doesn't mean losing your connection to the game. Death does.

Only for a short time, as in most cases before very long you'll either be revived or have a new PC on the hop.

And if you're playing more than one PC in the party, you don't even disconnect for that short time.

That's really the only fundamental difference between death and other permanent losses; with (irrevocable) character death, the player must invent an entirely new connection to the game.

This assumes - perhaps rightly in some cases - that one's connection to the game is only through one's PC. Keep in mind, though, that one's connection to the game can also come via connection to the ongoing story and-or party, and-or via connection with the friends you have at the table, and-or via simple tradition and-or inertia.

Having discussed it with my players, there's also a sense in which all the other things--the items, the NPCs, the city, etc.--are less "personal" than one's character. The other things that can be permanently lost are ours, collectively because we collaborate to develop them, or mine, because I'm the DM and I run them (and possibly created them). The Bard belongs to the Bard's player, and nobody else. I've contributed challenges and questions and opportunities, but fundamentally, that's the only thing that truly, unequivocally belongs to that player and nobody else.

In principle I completely agree with the parts I've bolded here. I firmly believe a PC does belong to its player - which is why in other threads I've railed against DMs who take PCs away from players and turn them into NPCs if, say, the PC becomes evil.

That said, when you-as-player take that PC out adventuring I see it that you're in effect gambling that you'll still have that possession afterwards. The game asks you to expose your possession to at least some degree of risk as the stakes or ante, if you will, for playing. This comes back to the luck element I referred to upthread (at least I think it was this thread...?).

And, even though the odds are significantly in your favour and can be made even more so by skill at play, sooner or later you're gonna lose that gamble. I see no problem with this

Being "pure luck" implies skill has no relevance, but you then say it does (it can reduce odds). Otherwise...I honestly have no idea how this is relevant, nor where I meaningfully disagree with you.

See above - maybe it clarifies a bit.

I do not understand why this is a "hard and fast" rule, whereas "races occur on racetracks" is not. Same goes for "computer programs (without procedural generation) are finite in scope."

Here's where I "question the reason", particularly with computer programs: given that with today's computer technology the programmers could easily turn the random number generators loose to create terrain for wherever a player might go, and then "remember" it afterwards why don't they?

So, you really couldn't give a (ahem) fig about respecting the spirit of the game? This honestly comes across as incredibly rude. Like, this sounds like straight-up "Stop Having Fun" Guy material. "Stop limiting yourself in ways the rules don't explicitly require! Isn't it so much more fun to push the limits to their breaking point?!?"

There's a commonly-referenced maxim in pro sports which I think applies here: "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying."

I don't understand how the "but" part is relevant.

Argument-ender, mostly.

Three years of DMing and ~20 years of playing have never shown a situation like this. If accusations of favoritism are flying, the game is already WAY dead, regardless of whether the DM adjudged a death rightly. It means the players no longer respect the DM. Again, whether rightfully or wrongly doesn't matter. The relationship is already broken. And it can only be restored by restoring that respect, which is vital for making the entire thing--including rules based on "what makes sense"--functional.

I see it not so much as the game's already broken, but as something - in this case, something very avoidable - that could break it.

I have not ever seen this happen, and with my game group, I can pretty much guarantee it wouldn't. I certainly have more sway than others, being the one who knows the cosmology best etc., but I am always willing to defer to a player that has an idea that sounds better, or to yield to the group--just as I would yield to them if they said, "Nope, sorry, all the campaign stuff you've made is boring, we wanna go set sail." I absolutely would not tolerate "loud" players shouting down everyone else; if someone behaved that way at my table, ever, they would get one warning. Failure to heed that warning would result in being removed from the game. Being respectful to your fellow players is mandatory.

Forthright communication requires a few things in order to be successful. First, a willingness to be open, honest and, sometimes, blunt. Second, it demands at least some thickness of skin so as not to take things personally. Without these, IME communication quickly becomes much less than forthright and open: behind-the-back talk, rumours, lobbying, all that BS that can quickly rip apart any group.

Add to that forthrightness a general streak of stubbornness among some of us (me included) and yes, arguments happen. This is where the DM sometimes needs to put the referee's hat on and lay down a final word; and the DM's word being the law is pretty much sacrosant here.

This has only once been an issue (for completely unrelated reasons; a player was pretty rudely failing to engage with the game, and it was weighing down the group), and we resolved it with a respectful, adult conversation in private.

Maybe I'm different; in that my usual stance is if someone's got something to say to me, I'd rather it be said in front of the whole crew.

Let me be clear here: the kind of departure I'm talking about is "we literally cannot find anything interesting about the millions of square miles of territory you've described, so we're going to head out to an area about which you've prepared absolutely nothing whatsoever, not even world-map-level prep."

Ah, OK then. That's a bit more serious than what I originally read as a simple departure form an adventure path to seek greener fields elsewhere in the (prepped or unprepped) setting.

This would be the Fellowship of the Ring heading, not toward Mount Doom, but as far due south of Gondor as possible--to areas where no map exists at all. If the players even remotely stayed within the region in question, they'd still be directly dealing with at least SOMETHING related to the stuff I've done.

Gotcha. Again, I read it as meaning smaller-scale departures.

I'm also not super happy with your implication that I've put them on rails here. I haven't. I have prepared a world, a fairly sizable one, which contains many things in it. The players are absolutely free to contribute more things (and have done so, thankfully!), to go exploring in unfilled parts of the map and I'll improvise stuff to find. (Well, sometimes there might be a big fat nothing, but big fat nothings take very little time to interact with, so the party will sooner rather than later reach something that isn't a big fat nothing.) The party has, in fact, just gone exploring before, to find what might be out there. I've made stuff up to fill it. I very intentionally leave most of the map blank so I have to fill it later, as they learn new things.

Same here to nearly all of this.

Again: I do. I just, y'know, would be really really disappointed if, after having articulated various factions, ally NPCs, enemy NPCs, lost civilizations, mysteries yet unsolved (and which I don't know the answer to yet), things in peril, etc., etc., the players just say, "Nope. Literally nothing here is even remotely interesting to us. We're sailing off into the sea. What do we find?" Because, again, that would mean that the cities, the people, the factions, the politics, the races, EVERYTHING I had crafted with the hope that it would interest them, was completely and utterly worthless in their eyes, and "sail off to a place we know nothing about, simply because we can" was in fact more interesting than every single piece of it.

To be devil's advocate for just a moment (as I really do hear what you're saying on this), maybe the players doing this is perhaps a signal that the setting - or at least this part of it - has in their eyes been overprepped, that they feel there's nothing to really explore here as it's all already been laid out? That they'd rather go where the map is blank?

Further, one could take a more pragmatic long-term view. OK, they've turned their noses up at all this now, but maybe once they've got the go-where-the-map-is-blank urges out of their systems they'll return to the prepped areas-stories-etc. and pick up on some of it. Failing that, all is still not lost: you've still got all that prep in the hopper, waiting for another campaign and-or another party in the same campaign to make use of it, whether with the same players, different players, or a mix. (I've had this happen: multiple parties in the same campaign/setting with the same players; one party happily bashes around in the prepped area while another - again, same players - looks at the blank part of the map and says "screw it, we're going that way".

I'd feel, and I think this is a pretty reasonable feeling, like I had so radically misunderstood my friends that I should be ashamed of myself. To truly strike out so badly that, out of the whole lot of them, not one person could think of something already present that was more interesting than sailing off into the total unknown? That's a pretty stunning rebuke.

I guess I don't see it so much as a rebuke as an opportunity. Yes it's more work for me that I didn't expect to have to do this soon, but hey, I've now got a chance to come up with something mostly-brand-new (and as it's just a different part of the same setting I don't have to do a rules review as the rules and system are already locked in for that setting, which takes out a load of work right there!).

Lanefan, this comes across as very condescending. Yes, I'm aware that spontaneity is important. It has played an extremely important role in my game. I have known very high-level ideas--less "plot" and more "the secret histories," so to speak--but intentionally do not prepare comprehensive notes so that I am forced to adapt and extemporize, so that there really is very, very little "planned." Unless you mean to tell me that I should be so radically anti-planning that I should literally invent every encounter spontaneously (which would take forever, by the way) and never even pause to think about what things might appear at a destination the party has chosen. But I doubt you want me to be...well, hostile to the very idea of planning.

Not at all! As both player and DM I'd rather things be at least somewhat planned than completely made up on the fly.

All I'm saying is that no matter how much planning you or I might do, sooner or later (probably sooner, IME!) the players are going to throw a serious curveball, and it's our job as DM to be able to deal with it.

Re: Dungeon World

It "supports" it in as much as it "supports" any cost, that is, by the application of the GM Agendas and Principles and the various GM Moves.

OK, I've seen those lists before.

Destroying a magic item could easily be "use up their resources," "turn their move back on them" (if the item has an associated move), "show a downside to their...equipment," "offer an opportunity, with or without cost," or "tell them the requirements or consequences and ask." Permanent destruction of a magic item would be appropriate for a hard move (the result of a miss aka fail on a die roll, or the players ignoring a threat caused by a soft move, or the players making a major error of judgment). I, personally, would reserve such destruction for only a relatively high-tension scenario; it would feel dumb and cheap to just destroy magic items out of the blue, but in a high-tension situation, this can add some real bite to the challenge.

Got it. DW doesn't have the same granular combat mechanics as D&D, right? I ask because combat - be it by fumble, spell damage, or whatever - is the most common means of magic item loss in my games; and sometimes due to sheer bad luck e.g. you fumbled your attack, the fumble roll shows you tried to break your weapon, and it then failed its save.

I can also promise you, without doubt, that at most exactly one player is more attached to the items than the character. And even in that case, I'm fairly certain the items are less important. A sword, even a fancy special sword, can be replaced. The investment of who a character is, and that they belong to that player specifically, cannot be replaced.

Tell that to the party I was running a few years back. They had a sword that allowed the wielder to teleport (at slight risk) with up to three other people, otherwise as per the spell. They got great use out of this thing until one day the character using said sword completely blew the roll and ended up appearing in solid rock: end of character, end of sword.

The character in question was* its player's favourite of several she has in the campaign, and even she was more put out over the loss of the sword than the character!

* - and still is; the party moved heaven and earth to get that damn sword back...and the character too, as a side effect. I seem to recall at least one full Wish being involved....

This is getting long, time is getting short, so I'll get to the rest a bit later.

 

[Lanefan]

OK, on to part II...

Low-grade anxiety specifically about the character is something that sours the fun of at least two of my players. Not having that specific type of anxiety gives them the peace of mind to actually engage with the game, and go on adventures, rather than becoming hypochondriac turtles. I honestly wish I were joking; my players are EXTREMELY skittish, even by my standards (and I tend to be a risk-averse player myself). Even with me explicitly saying that I won't kill off their characters unless it makes sense and we've come to an understanding, they're still very, very shy about taking risks. It's been getting a little better since the Song of Thorns fight, I suspect because that triumph made them realize what they could achieve....but even with that, they continue to exhibit an overwhelming abundance of caution.

Hmmm. Not quite sure what to suggest there as I don't know the specific people and-or their own particular contexts.

To discourage certain players from constantly putting their PCs at the back of the marching order, one thing I've tried to do where possible is spread the threats around a bit. Not all attacks come from ahead, for example; sometimes the safest place to be is in the lead when the attack comes from behind.

Another thing to look at is more definitively and clearly tying reward to in-game risk. Here's where individual xp (as opposed to group xp or milestone levelling) can really help. No risk taken, no xp earned. (and if the DW system fights you on this, maybe consider a different system?) If you use meta-bennies e.g. Inspiration, Fate points, etc., give those out to the risk-takers and make it clear how they were earned.

Or - and this might not work for everyone but it might for some - maybe run a one-off adventure with new characters, where you somehow set things up such that those who hang back are the ones most likely to die? It's tricky to do; a couple of not-the-best examples I've DMed:

Spoiler

In one scenario, the party enters what looks like an empty room except for a scrap of paper on the floor; as soon as anyone picks up the scrap of paper the hallway into the room collapses, insta-killing anyone who hasn't yet entered the space. (and then the party have to figure a way out, once they've dealt with the foes that gate in, as there's no exits).

In the other, the party enter a large room with a checkerboard floor made up of 3' squares. After a certain time (1 minute? 2 minutes? I forget now) something like ten of the black squares suddenly burst into flame, the door slams shut, and the ceiling starts dropping fast. The PCs have exactly one round to act before the ceiling reaches the floor. The way out? Jump into a fire (it's illusory, as is the patch of ceiling directly above it) and let the ceiling fall around you.

* - the first is in a published module; the second is in an adventure written by one of my players for me to DM with a different group at the time, I think it's a variant on a Grimtooth trap.

Another possible option is to run some obviously-gonzo or drunken one-offs where characters drop like flies and the whole point is to do the most ridiculous things you can; this to get your skittish players a bit more used to losing characters, if this is an issue. And even if it's not, gonzo drunken one-offs can be a blast anyway.

Given that we play over Discord, "asking" is mostly a matter of being polite.

I have thus far managed to avoid running games online - I shut it down instead except for running single-player adventures with my wife - and fully intend to keep doing so.

None of my current players would take character death as a personal attack. They would, however, be very sad, and be daunted by the task of creating a new character with a similar level of gravitas as the one they'd lost. Since we as a group have agreed that those experiences would sour an otherwise beloved experience, we choose to set that, and only that, aside. Other permanent losses, which would not induce quite the same pitch and intensity of sadness, and which do not have the cost of re-inventing one's investment in the game, are acceptable, so they remain.

I don't know your players, but were one of mine consistently getting that sad over losing characters I'd be a bit concerned from two directions: one, it's just a game so why take it so seriously; and two, what else is going on behind the scenes that's causing this?

Okay. So, why is it that you can do other things because you like and respect your friends, but you can't adhere to the spirit of a pleasant leisure-time activity because you like and respect your friends? This is very confusing to me.

I can like and respect someone quite well while at the same time we're engaging in some good ol' cut-and-thrust against each other at the gaming table.

 

[Lanefan]

Clearly the answer is narrow corridors with 10-ft deep pit traps filled with spikes covered in lethal contact poison. That will keep them in line and properly fearful of interacting with any feature or object except with the precautions of a bomb-defusion team. If your not making your PCs roll at least three save-or-die rolls per game, are you really playing D&D?

So you're calling my hyperbole bluff, are ye? That's fair...

There's a not-hyperbolic middle ground in there somewhere.

 

[Lanefan]

Every game has boundaries.

I mean, I once played (once being the operative word) with a guy who was obsessed with Dragonlance. So much so he asked to play a kender (red flag 1) in my homebrew. I relented. He came though a magic portal from Krynn. Once here, he complained how stupid things were that no one knew he was a kender and decided his goal was to find another portal so he and the other PCs could go to a "real campaign setting" while still expecting me to run the game, just on Krynn!

Question is, were any of the other players/PCs willing to accompany him over to Krynn even if he did find a gate?

If no, you're off the hook; in that either the Kender stays on your world or it roleplays itself out of the game (and maybe takes its player with it, who knows?). No further action needed on your part.

If yes, you might have bigger problems...

 

[Lanefan]

Yup. It leaves room for the dm or even other party members to decide not to move forward, though I've never seen them choose not to try to revive a character that the player wants revived.

It's rare, but it does happen now and then where a player wants a PC revived but the rest of the party won't do it (and0or are the direct cause of death in the first place!).

We use the 5e version, which at least keeps you humanoid. The point is to not violate the Ship of Theseus-type continuity of the character, while making it something the player will need to actually deal with, for some time.

I use the 1e version, and it's not at all guaranteed you'll carry forward any memories of/from your previous self.