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Your scenario appears, to me, to be: A group of seasoned, skilled outdoor survivalists are travelling in the wilderness. They lose their map and, because the map is lost, are now out of options and their survival is going to come down to dumb luck or desperate hail marys. Can they not judge...

Yes, we discussed this to death a few thousand posts ago. No one's imaginary gameworld is an accurate and comprehensive simulation with anything resembling the fidelity of our day-to-day lives in the real world. Anything we discuss is about how we elicit a particular set of feelings, what things...

I'd be perfectly happy to see people providing perspectives on why they run and play their games the way they do, or even commenting that they don't understand the appeal of certain playstyles, without also feeling to need to try and prove their preferences are objectively better and should be...

On a slightly different point, this comment helped me identify more clearly the problem I have with fail forward in a more grounded game. Using a typical fail forward type of resolution system, if the PCs are picking a lock, the expected outcomes are likely to be: We get through the door and...

If I'm playing a game where wilderness exploration is taken that seriously and the characters don't have the necessary skills to survive but go wandering around anyway, then this is perfectly reasonable outcome. The players, knowing this, won't go wandering off into the wilderness without the...

If the group has been thrown in a pit from which there is no feasible means of escape and they have been left to die, "points of failure" are no longer a concern. It sounds to me like this is describing a campaign end state, not a problem to be overcome. Edit to add: I will agree that it is one...

I was pretty sure that's what you meant, I just wanted to head off reigniting a settled argument over a momentary lapse in wording.

Traditional, living world sandbox, as advocated for by the trad gaming crew in this thread, worries about and takes care to establish the former independent of the latter. With that clarification, everything else in your post seems to be clear and reasonable to me. One of the early points of...

If I had made a boo-boo and included a trap that can result in a TPK, in a game where a trap causing a TPK was not an acceptable outcome, I still wouldn't implement fail forward to fix it. I would instead say, "Hey, guys, I didn't think this trap through and it shouldn't have worked this way...

Personally, I generally just don't run games where single point of failure is a concept that makes sense on a campaign level. No one ever has to keep going "forward", so fail forward will never be necessary.

No, your reply was fine and clarified the situation perfectly. Entirely reasonable, as far as I'm concerned.

OK, fair enough. I have probably fixated on the thread title over the more nuance comment in the body of the OP. Apologies if I have misrepresented your position or engaged with my own reframing of the question over your own.

Because I'm not really sure what else you're trying to achieve with these comparisons. Your thesis appears to be that you, personally, don't feel that there is a good reason to play 1e over 2e (beyond "feels"). [Note that this is a perfectly reasonable position for you to hold, even if it's not...

Kind of. The thing is, every single game I play is going to be adapted to meet my needs. So the question is, which version has the core concepts most aligned with my preferences? In this case, the answer is 1e. The fact that I don't run 1e RAW doesn't affect a comparison to 2e, because I...

Yes. If the thief skills are just doing basic stuff that anyone could try, they're fairly useless. If thief skills allow you to do things no one else possible can, the dynamic changes completely. For example, if a thief is hiding in shadows, I treat them as being invisible to basically...

Sure. And a 4 tonne rigid truck is objectively slower than a Maclaren F1. But that has nothing to do with either being objectively better overall than the other.

Why does knowing that someone else enjoys something, that you don't enjoy, cause you frustration? It should be obvious that the reason to roll is to discover whether they succeed or fail. To discover if you succeed or fail. You're certainly welcome to do that in your own games, if it results...

My 9 year-old niece and 11 year-old nephew are solid examples of gritty, no-mercy, OSR success stories. My terrible and oppressive tyranny extends into the games I run for them, where there has been plenty of PC death and even a TPK. They love it. I've never seen a reason to go easy on them and...

I have a problem with them if I'm running a more grounded game, with the Living World precepts we've talked about in this thread. "Even if I fail, the story moves forward" is (to me) at odds with a world that doesn't care about the PCs. "If I fail, I've made no progress, and I might have to...

I have no problem with fail-forward as a concept. A Blades in the Dark heist would not be the same, mad rush into ever more precarious and desperate situations, without it. I do have a problem when it is presented as the only way failure should be handled, regardless what game or style you're...