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Amen to this. If they don't care, why are they at the table in the first place?!

So, 'drama' = 'angst'? Or at most 'romance'? Somebody go tell Shakespeare, he's got it all wrong! (To be sure, angst and romance have their place in drama - Hamlet and the comedies come to mind - but that's not the whole of it by a long shot.) You state these things as if they're laws of...

I'm well aware, thanks. I was appealing to an abstraction I knew he'd be used to. I personally find abstracting Supply much more natural than abstracting wounds.

By the same token, once you track "hit points", you might as well break everything down and track each individual wound, right? If you can swallow hp, I don't know why you can't swallow 'supply points'. They're no more weird an abstraction, in fact I think they're less weird.

I agree, there is some real dramatic potential there. Which is why if I were helping create that scenario, the elf prince would be an NPC! His death would have been planned from the start, or at the very least have been left open to inevitable chance. As a PC, that game would be entirely...

All that you say here is true, but I want to add a couple other vital elements: In a story-based game, the web of relationships between the characters (and key NPCs) is just as important as the character's individual story, and very difficult to replicate with a new character. Then, more...

Fine. S&V has an amount of Upkeep charged after each job. It goes up with better-quality ships, so as you improve your ship over time it gets more expensive. That Upkeep fee is taken out of the amount you earned on the job, and it is painful! If the job didn't pay enough (or your employer...

Totally! I often design my characters to be in a pressure cooker - they're in an unstable situation that simply cannot go on the way it is. I can't predict ahead of time how the situation will explode, I just know it will, and that it will be bound to be interesting! One thing I'm convinced...

For what it's worth, I've found your contributions to this thread much more comprehensible and reasonable than that of some others. There's at least one person here who has outright stated that nothing but death really matters.

This is the part I don't get. If you're not very attached to your character, why is the possibility of them dying exciting? Ho hum, big deal, I'll just make another one!

The fact you don't see any middle ground doesn't mean there isn't any. I've seen it done! Scum & Villainy, for example, abstracts away the details of ship maintenance while making it potentially quite challenging to keep the ship going. It's about like saying the only alternatives are...

This is it exactly! Introducing a new character to a story-based game is a big deal! It takes effort to make work. 'Alchemy' is exactly right - the results are unpredictable. But when you do succeed in turning lead into gold, it's really something!

...I don't encounter people like this. Largely because I play with people I already know. Can you really not conceive of anything between being sad and dying? Okay, I see what you mean by ripples now - you mean it doesn't affect the whole game world. Who cares? It affects my character's...

Why game with people who don't care? Life is too short. Better a smaller group that is engaged than a large one that isn't. For that matter, why are they gaming if they don't care? Who says those things make only a slight ripple in the plot? To me, those things ARE the plot! They're what I...

Also, in the sorts of campaign I play, there is no "larger story". The PCs are the main characters of the story. If they were all to die, it'd be a different campaign entirely. I suspect this is another major difference between us. In a book, if all the main characters die, the story is over...

Again, I can only conclude that we have different concepts of "meaningful". Because being killed by a lucky shot from goblin #4 doesn't seem meaningful to me at all, regardless of the larger campaign.

Okay, this is very helpful. What it boils down to is that we find different things exciting or interesting. Character death isn't interesting to me really at all, unless it's dramatically satisfying. Meaningless death is just frustrating - it isn't what I'm interested in. It does seem odd to me...

No, they really, really aren't. Not even a little bit. I've already addressed this? While I don't play D&D Fate-style, in principle it would be possible to do... In which case going to zero hp would mean you're unconscious and perhaps suffering some lingering wounds. I'm starting to question...

Okay, now I get you. (I wasn't at all clear what the 'this' was in your post, or who it was that was doing the optimizing!) Yep, it's an entirely different approach. As a Fate player, you kind of want bad things to happen to your character. And you and the GM share responsibility for the...

Sorry, what? Who is trying to optimize it what way? Are you criticizing my play without knowing anything about it? I agree that anyone seeking Compels they don't care about is missing the entire point of the game.