D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

Eric V said:

I mean, I know GMs used to be that way back in the day, but...if a bad roll or two is all it takes to wipe out months of investing in a character's story, actually engaging with the world, then what the hell are we doing?

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What you're doing is playing characters in a game where the in-fiction risks and dangers are both real and relevant, as opposed to one where the in-fiction dangers are paper tigers or bluffs. War vs sport, again.

Eric V said:

It's one thing if PC death happens because of player decision, but if I happen to roll a 1 on the check* (and then a 2 on the saving throw, I guess), my character dies, it means investing in the game was a waste of time.

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I just don't get this take.

Did you have fun playing the character up to that point?
Did you (and do you still) enjoy the greater story the party is generating as it goes along?
Did you (and do you still) enjoy the company of the people at the table with you?

If the answer to even just one of these questions is 'yes' then how can it possibly have been a waste of time?

Faolyn said:

In a typical fail-forward/narrative game, the GM isn't reluctantly acknowledging anything. If the PC hedges their bets and decides to find another way, great! The game will continue from there instead of from here.

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That's precisely the problem though; I want the player to force events to unfold in a desired way. If the game can always continue from some other there, then there was no point in picking a specific here as preferable.

Faolyn said:

But no, it doesn't undermine player decision making or cut any of them off. And keeping the game moving doesn't mean that the players automatically go from A to B to C to D to E. It means that if the players are stopped at B, they won't have to turn around and go home in order to hire someone who can do the job for them, or spend two and a half sessions getting through there. It means that something will happen--both things @Lanefan has said has happened in his games.

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I get this, but I'm saying it undervalues the player's choices; I want players to have the capability to make both good choices, which necessitates they also have the capability to make bad ones. If the quality of consequences they face exist independently of their choices, then the choices are necessarily less impactful.

Faolyn said:

...I don't know where the rockslide came from, though.

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I'm saying my ideal state is to be so constrained by my player's decisions that they must get the result they want, because the NPCs and situations I've introduced have been sufficiently manipulated by their decision making that I cannot change the outcome from what they've forced to happen.

Lanefan said:

What you're doing is playing characters in a game where the in-fiction risks and dangers are both real and relevant, as opposed to one where the in-fiction dangers are paper tigers or bluffs. War vs sport, again.

I just don't get this take.

Did you have fun playing the character up to that point?
Did you (and do you still) enjoy the greater story the party is generating as it goes along?
Did you (and do you still) enjoy the company of the people at the table with you?

If the answer to even just one of these questions is 'yes' then how can it possibly have been a waste of time?

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No, this is wrong. It's not that character death isn't on the table; just that it shouldn't happen because of one failed check climbing a cliff. That's super lame.

As for the rest...maybe? It's all quite separate from the sunk cost of investing in a character. Assuming I stayed in such a game, you can be sure my next toon would be mechanically based and any enjoyment of the game would come from the mechanics; not sinking effort into another character just for another lame death that can't be prevented.

Eric V said:

1) Sure, a series of them...like in combat. Of course, even then, players can decide to retreat; I can't decide to not fall.

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But you can decide not to climb in the first place, and bear whatever consequences that decision may carry.

Thomas Shey said:

Uhm, a D20 is emulating a 50th of a D1000, and the D1000 would only be allowing you to trigger a secondary roll if you wanted to represent the actual failure-by-trauma average for climbers. If you're willing to accept that much higher a chance, then I have to stop taking seriously your claim that you care about representation; you just care about a particularly bloody form of drama being on the table.

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I agree to your main point. Professional climbers have a much better survival rate than 1 in 1000 (I am pretty sure we do not have statistics on medieval adventurers forced to scale sheer cliffs with primitive equipment) My main point was that your D1000 caveat might unintentionally undermine your argument given 2 consecutive d20 rolls is not that far from emulating that. (Climb check for scaling the last leg of the journey. Nat 1. Ok you fall and take 1d6 damage from the thug of the security rope. Ok, roll athletics to see if you manage to swing back to the cliff face (this is of course an overhang) before the birds of prey takes an interest in who is dangling there. Another nat 1...)

TwoSix said:

Sure. And I think the narrative critique against that style of play (or why they don't prefer it), can be overly simplified into "The DM is so limited as a conveyer of a fictional space that why don't you just lean into what a group of humans is actually good at, which is being imaginative with each other and telling stories?"

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And my answer to that is, "Great! Sounds like you know what is fun for you. You should go do that, and let other people what's fun for them without implying that what you enjoy is right for everyone".

AnotherGuy said:

EDIT: Even @Lanefan, who posted that he tries to emulate GoT at the table in another thread, would have to admit that a one-off failed climb check in no way reflects the types of main character death occurring in Westeros.

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Also the characters would think twice before trying such a risky climb in the first place. Sure my friend might be dying at the top, but if I climb and fall (a very real risk) then instead of one of us dying, both of us die; so maybe it's better that I don't climb now, find another less-risky way to get up there later, then find and steal my friend's corpse (or a bit of it) and get him revived.

Result: both of us end up alive.

Micah Sweet said:

And my answer to that is, "Great! Sounds like you know what is fun for you. You should go do that, and let other people what's fun for them without implying that what you enjoy is right for everyone".

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I’ll do that, but 5e has added millions to the player base; obviously I can’t stop until I’m sure that every single one of them has been exposed to all the available modes of play first.

It’s really a moral imperative at this point.

AlViking said:

Multiple people have stated that if the players do not have full knowledge of the situation they can't possibly make an informed decision and it's bad GMing. I disagree, I want mystery and discovery when I play. Even when it comes back to bite me on the posterior.

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If we go by this thread, all GMing would be bad, and the bar for good GMing would have to be somewhere near Superman’s home planet. In my experience, players differ wildly in how much they want, or even need, to know about the story or game before them.

We can see clear evidence of this just by scanning social media. Spend a few minutes on the /r/LFG subreddit, and phrases like “character-driven,” “political mystery thriller,” “discovery,” and “roleplay-heavy” pop up as indicators of player desires. One such game description reads:

"When the adventurers awake in the catacombs below Northminster, they must unravel a mystery and escape the law! After frantic wagon chases, a wilderness journey, friendly hags, and a village fair, can they recover their memories of Holdenshire?"

“Unravel a mystery” and “recover their memories” clearly suggest some parts of the story are deliberately unknown. So it seems fair to say some players don’t want to know everything. Maybe, in those cases, it would be bad GMing to give them all the information upfront. Maybe bad GMing is ignoring the desires of your table, and not a science with which we can claim objective superiority.

Maybe everyone who doesn't GM just like me is just bad. Never thought of that before, though I admit my ego kinda likes it.

TwoSix said:

Sure. And not here, where everyone understands other modes of play and has assumedly already decided their preferences, but for a larger game audience, the question is "Do you love pretending to exist in a fictional world? Or do you just love making things up and telling a story? Or do you just like rolling dice and the camaraderie?"

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Would be a great question to ask in general. Accepting whatever answer you get is also a good idea.