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It's been a good year of reading for me. Somewhere over 180 books, like three DNFs. Mostly novels. Some really very good books, some really very not good ones even outside the DNFs. Found some writers to watch and some writers to avoid.

The metaphysics (so to speak) of my primary setting world seem as though even deific ranks would be a poor fit. I think the "plausible threat of death" just needs things that can plausibly kill the PCs to try to kill the PCs. It helps to have players who play their characters like people who've...

The only hiccup in the approach you outline is that the audience for a piece of pre-authored fiction probably needs to know if something isn't going to follow real-world physics--not even classical mechanics--before it turns out not to, especially if that ends up being to the protagonist's...

I don't have deities in my setting, for reasons. I drop PCs all the time, all the way through Tier Four, and I've killed at least one PC at high levels (she got better ...) without invoking that sort of thing to keep the PCs "in line." There were jokes throughout the one campaign about the PCs...

So if you had actually read my actual post, you would plausibly have figured out I mostly agree with you, that the players of a TRPG should have those sorts of expectations. That said, there are all sorts of good reasons one might use gamelike rules even if you have those--I'm sure you're clever...

I don't see what you saw in my post/s that indicated the players wouldn't contribute. No one has any stories pre-written, the story of the game emerges from playing the game.

Story--including expectations like plot armor--is best as an output, not an input.

Well, the first word of my post was "If," and I did at least imply that the medium should affect one's expectations. I'll say that explicitly: The medium (novel, movie, TRPG, whatever) should matter tor your expectations of it.

If the players see their characters as protagonists in a story, why wouldn't they expect their characters to have at least as much protection fro actual death (plot armor) as protagonists in a novel or movie or TV show? If you want to argue the players shouldn't see their characters thus, I'm...

I think this might be the first time I've seen anyone non-sarcastically say that Drizzt and Elminster were positive features of the Realms. :LOL: In the 5e games I DM, I've had good success with entities that think of adventurers as something like investments, because there are all sort of...

Y'know, there times I seriously don't know why y'all bother with us.

I expect you'd see people in this thread complaining obliquely about something that might eventually start to look like that sort of brigading. I stay out of the threads that's most likely to happen in, here, for game-preference reasons, but I haven't seen any reason to think it's happening.

In the 5e campaigns I've DMed, how the PCs have been and are treated is mostly a direct result of their behavior--in most cases, there's a certain amount of rushing in where those with wiser heads would fear to tread--and in the most recent one they were established locals with pasts and...

Yeah, I probably wasn't super-clear. While he left when his character died, it was more a matter of that was his opportunity than anything else.

I don't think I've done much 5e play wherein the PCs were nobodies, it's not a trope I find useful or enjoyable as DM or as player. This might be a difference in our core preferences. And while I know vaguely what wuxia is, I gotta admit I'm less clued-in about xianxia or (in this context)...

My understanding is that "fisking" is taking a post apart more granularly than is useful, destroying context to make rebuttal easier. I don't think I've been doing that (apologies if I have) and I know you haven't (thank you). I guess in my campaigns, things have tended to escalate such that...

Sometimes the random things that come up lead the PCs to interesting things, or otherwise result in interesting play/choices, so they happen in my games, but I'm not looking for some number of combats in any random day, and I'm not rolling every hour or anything, either: I roll for when the next...

I at least can mostly agree with this--I think random encounters can be worthwhile, but I don't set those at a difficulty likely to kill the PCs, and I don't use them to wear the PCs down. I have, a couple of times, set up gantlets for the PCs to run, which were set to wear them down--but they...

They drop. If someone heals them, they get back up again. If they die from failing death saves, the table needs to work out what happens next: When it happened in a Tier Four campaign (not the one that there now) someone else in the party attuned to the rod of resurrection the dead ranger/cleric...

I've found that I can establish that the low-level PCs are fragile quickly, and the players I'm DMing for tend to hold tightly to that for a long time. The fact I can manage effective challenges through Tier Four might help, here. As for "worldbuilding through PCs," I've been able to do that...