MichaelSomething
Legend
I would be remiss if I didn't post this relevant video...
Yep. There may be other issues to work on for sure.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!
Wasn't your original claim that without the risk of permanent character death, there would be no permanent consequences at all?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.
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.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?
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.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.
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.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.
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.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.
See above - maybe it clarifies a bit.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.
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?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."
There's a commonly-referenced maxim in pro sports which I think applies here: "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying."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?!?"
Argument-ender, mostly.I don't understand how the "but" part is relevant.
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.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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.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."
Gotcha. Again, I read it as meaning smaller-scale departures.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.
Same here to nearly all of this.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.
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?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.
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!).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.
Not at all! As both player and DM I'd rather things be at least somewhat planned than completely made up on the fly.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.
OK, I've seen those lists before.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.
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.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.
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.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.
Hmmm. Not quite sure what to suggest there as I don't know the specific people and-or their own particular contexts.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.
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.Given that we play over Discord, "asking" is mostly a matter of being polite.
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?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 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.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.
So you're calling my hyperbole bluff, are ye? That's fair...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?
Question is, were any of the other players/PCs willing to accompany him over to Krynn even if he did find a gate?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!
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!).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.
I use the 1e version, and it's not at all guaranteed you'll carry forward any memories of/from your previous self.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.